aux tracks and EZDrummer

[orvillej]

This is probably a dumb question, but if I can route my drums to individual aux tracks and then bus them to audio tracks (as I have done using the EZDrummer mixer routing), why couldn't I just send them to the audio tracks directly?

[clivin]

I could be wrong but EZDrummer is putting out midi data not audio so you need the aux to act as a "converter" sort of.
Although I'm generally a midiot so others may correct me :)

[nst7]

You can send them to audio tracks directly. Just create audio tracks and in the input button select the instrument outputs the same way you would with aux tracks.

The main purpose for this would be to record the drums as audio tracks, then deactivating your ez drummer instrument track to save on CPU power. Assuming that's what you're doing, you just record arm the audio tracks and record the drums into them, then deactivate the instrument track.

If your CPU is handling EZ drummer okay, then you can just use the aux tracks to apply plugins to the individual drums, etc.

[orvillej]

Thanks. So it seems the aux tracks would be used if I wanted to record drum audio after adding plug-in effects on the auxes. And if I just want to come from EZD as is, I can just route to audio tracks directly. (Just recapping your answer, nst7, for my own understanding.) I'll give it a try.

[nst7]

Actually I think you sort of reversed my answer. You can route to the aux tracks to apply individual processing and then stop there, if your computer is handling it okay. If your computer's starting to max out, then you would record from EZ drummer directly to audio tracks. Then you can apply processing to those audio tracks in the same way, and deactivate the EZ drummer track to save CPU.

You may want to do that anyway if when you're mixing you're at a high buffer setting, because somewhere in the Digi Manual it mentions that midi timing may be off a little at high buffer settings. For that reason, once you get the midi drum part how you want, record to audio tracks at as low a buffer as possible (you may have to deactivate other tracks temporarily to do this). Then when you're done with that, deactivate EZ drummer, set your buffer back up higher for your mixing, and apply processing how you like, including your newly recorded drum audio tracks.

[orvillej]

D'oh! Thanks for a rewrite of my recap :)