After a long, agonizing period of experimentation, I have finally elected to post here. I have beee been attempting to lay down drum tracks (written with DKFH EZX in EZDrummer, then somewhat rewritten with Superior) in Digital Performer. I’ve always recorded my MIDI drums to audio like recording a live kit: mono kick, mono snare, mono hats, stereo toms, stereo overheads. My attempts to do so with EZDrummer/Superior and DP have been questionable, at best. As you know, in order to record a mono track from a stereo VI, you have to pan DP’s VI channel hard left or right, freeze the track, then bounce the frozen track to a mono audio file (or, if you’re running the plug in pre-gen mode, just bounce the track to a mono audio file). So far, this has met with horrific-sounding snares and hats, though my kicks seem fine. I figured it might have something to do with panning the ambience mics, so I tried hard panning all the associated ambience mics, as well as the output and send outs in Superior. Same results. My stereo tracks — the toms and overheads — seem okay, and the kick also doesn’t fare too badly. I’m also recording at 88.2 KHz 32-bit float, which may or may not be a factor. The individual mono tracks simply don’t sound as good as they did in the EZDrummer or Superior VI.
My question becomes: should I even bother splitting up the drums like this, or simply record everything but the kick in one stereo track? Is there a specific way to record mono drums that I’m not doing?
