EZD3 – Saving Song parts

[phil kelly]

So I have had Superior drummer 2 for several years but struggle with its complexity. It does far more than what i need it for or what i can understand. also i want to add reverb in at this point and not in my DAW.

I am not a trained sound engineer etc and everything I have learned has been from starting with 4 track machines back in the 80s, until I got my first DAW about 5 years ago.

I also suffer with ADHD which makes some things people find easy to understand, harder for me, and it takes me much longer to grasp it. I find it easy to follow diagrams and videos than reading text.

I have watched Shootie School videos and other helpful videos on youtube plus I download a set of videos from Groove3 but cannot see too much on this topic or I just havent found it yet.

Anyway I changed to EZD3 recently and I am finding it so much easier than SD2. I use it with Presonus Studio One 5

I have so far mastered how to arrange a song in different parts in the bottom area just above the wording EZ DRUMMER 3. I have inserted an image (first image) to demonstrate this. I don’t use Song Creator at the moment as this method of arranging the song works for me. with my ADHD its better to take things slowly, one step at a time for me.

What I don’t follow is:

First Point:

I created some extra drum parts in song and then turned everything off for the night.

There was no prompt from EZD3 or Studio One 5 to save my work but the next time I opened it, the new parts I had created the night before towards the end of the song were missing. Thankfully it was the last few chorus’s at the end of the song so I could easily re-create them.

I then chanced upon the ”save” function under the File dropdown of EZD3 and did an experiment of making a change and then clicking ”Save” and closing everyting down.

i then re-opened Studio One & EZD3 and the new parts were there. Hooray, so far so good.

What i don’t follow is; is this the way to save song parts forever in the same way you might save a Word or Excel file or a song you have recorded in Studio One 5?

I noticed that when I go to Windows Explorer (MS Windows file manager application) or I think you call it the ”Finder” in Apple Mac, it shows a file (BB1 (2), like the one in the second image. I presume this is the song part file I had saved earlier? Also should it be saved to a specific folder? I would love to learn a bit more about this process.

Last point what is the ”Track” next to the song creator button. i know you can rename it and add tracks but are they saved anywhere?

Second Point:

I saw in another video that once the song part is complete, you simply drag it over to the DAW window into an instrument track.

I do know that you can route it into different channels in the DAW but at the moment I am happy to create the song part complete in EZD3, with the panning and levels set in the EZD3 mixer and have it as one track and one channel in my DAW.

However I would like to know if I have understood this part correctly. (i attach an image of this, 3rd image).

Then say at some point in the future, i decide i didn’t like the snare sound or want to add in a drum fill into my song, is it correct that so long as I save the song part file in my Toontrack folder, I can go back into Studio One, open up the song, open up EZD3, edit the drum part in EZD3 and then drag the new version back into the song.

Quite alot here and thank you for your patience and time and thank you for any help,  which i will really appreciate.

regards

Phil

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