SD2 mixing questions

[norrie]

Hey all

I use Sonar 8.5 Producer (soon to be X1) But this will still be a thread for any Daw protools etc….. SO……

I am interested to know how you all go about mixing your Superior drummer 2 / Metal foundry or NY addons

Sometimes I like to send everything out to Sonar and mix from scratch useing my own plugs or now my new and fav plug EZMIX!

Other times I will forinstance use Metal Foundry and a preset from the list ( if it has the sounds I am looking for) I can then just tweek it a little to get it to sound exactly how I want it.( The pre sets are awesome IMO but I dont always use them)

Ok so with all that said it gets me to this question for you all with any pre set and Superior drummer sent to any track in the DAW it will then be in the red and start cliping.

This could get in to a discusion about useing the ears and not looking at the level but I just see red cliping as a big NO NO and I am sure I am not the only one so I always try and stop that

I dont mind the track going in to the red by any meens but not actualy cliping right to the top even if it sounds fine.

So

What I do is make a drum Bus then send it to there and put for instance boost 11 on the bus and limit it just so it cant clip but not alter the sound.

I then mix everthing else up to that level on the other busses or master fader till it all blends

So what do you guys do if you are useing a preset ? What are every ones different ways 🙂

I would like to know if there is a better way of doing things or perhaps I am doing things wrong ? I guess there is no right or wrong in mixing aslong as its good in the end but each to there own….

I am interested to hear what you guys all do from start to finish if useing a preset 🙂

Thanks guys

Norrie

Windows 7 (64 bit ) Intel I7 930 12GB OCZ Gold Sonar 8.5 Producer VS700r VS700c Superior 2 / MF/NY EZ mix Roland TD-20

Topic

[throughthesegates]

Greetings,

I actually take each Mic and Route it to my host and Mix everything in my Host Program rather that in superior drummer mixer. ( Reason Being ) I am new to recording audio mixing and mastering so with doing this you get to play around with everything. I learned so much more in the process of doing it this way. Wanna hear one of my mixes

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/throughthesegates

[Anders]

ORIGINAL: norrie
Ok so with all that said it gets me to this question for you all with any pre set and Superior drummer sent to any track in the DAW it will then be in the red and start cliping.

Norrie,
You can always lower Superiors “master volyme control”, if the presets are overloading your drum bus.
Leaving a bit of headroom is a good thing to do!

/Anders

[norrie]

I think you missed the point………

What I was geting at was why make pre sets that will clip ? Isnt the whole point in a preset to be that it is actually preset to use out of the box so to speak ?

Ok I know most of us will always tweak presets and use them only as a starting point but haveing a starting point that that clips is well just Sh*t

Toontrack are going down and down and down in my book of go to plugs.

Steven Slate drums is fantastic especially when it comes to useing V drums straight out the box no problems ! SSD FTW !!!!

Windows 7 (64 bit ) Intel I7 930 12GB OCZ Gold Sonar 8.5 Producer VS700r VS700c Superior 2 / MF/NY EZ mix Roland TD-20

[norrie]

I should have added I love Ez Mix for quick mixes its fantastic but SD2 is just a big expensive let down.

Windows 7 (64 bit ) Intel I7 930 12GB OCZ Gold Sonar 8.5 Producer VS700r VS700c Superior 2 / MF/NY EZ mix Roland TD-20

[Nathan]

I can’t speak for the presets, but I don’t think SD is designed to be finished sounds out of the box. There is no EQ and dynamic processing performed on the samples, just the (highly configurable) mic outputs to route to your DAW to do your thing.

I think as a product it’s more aimed at engineers who want to perform their own processing on the sounds, just as they would with tracks from a real kit in a studio. I bought it over EZD for this reason, I dont want someone else to process these sounds, I know what I’m doing here from studio and live recordings and mixing.

I know that SD sounds come alive with decent compressors on them and the room mics, just as I’d expect well-recorded raw drum tracks to do.

I would agree with you that the idea of the presets would be to do much of this for you, and if the preset is designed to go with a particular library or kit within it, finding that the gain structure is wrong would be worrying. Maybe the preset doesn’t control the fader in the mixer; I don’t know as I don’t use them.

I certainly have no complaints about the sounds from SDX libraries, but they will need the expected compression and EQ to make them sparkle, they won’t be like SS out of the box (thank goodness).

>

SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.

[throughthesegates]

One thing I dont understand here,

Is why take the easy way out by using Presets? What exactly are you gonna learn in the process. If you do everything from scratch than thats when the learning process begins. You figure out what sound you want and you make it. Thats how you become a great engineer.

[norrie]

Yeah but a preset can be a helpful start up for a simple sound if required you can then tweak from there or start from scratch if you like I some times do both.

The point wasn’t about takeing a easy way out or anything along that line the point was why make a preset that when you load it it instantly clips on the master bus ?

Windows 7 (64 bit ) Intel I7 930 12GB OCZ Gold Sonar 8.5 Producer VS700r VS700c Superior 2 / MF/NY EZ mix Roland TD-20

[Rogue]

Norrie, I’m not sure I follow your line of thinking regarding presets, which we have gone to great length to make very modular and far more useful than a click-select happy/unhappy affair, but I’ll give a go as to why it is likely that some users out there will find that particular presets are ‘hot’, or as you like to call them ‘clipping’.

The overall volume of the sampler at any given moment is proportional to the number of sample voices that it pipes down its output(s), and the velocity of the MIDI events that your part triggers. That’s a very clean summary, though simplified to the extreme.

So this is going to be highly dependent on the MIDI you feed it, and the voice limit you have set (the preset does not overwrite this, or at least that’s the way we started implementing this around the time of Metal Foundry). It sure has no in-built intelligence that allows it to know that you are a hard hitter riding a loud crash at 220bpm 🙂

Anyway, the presets were made as real-world song mixing exercises in almost all cases i.e with specific MIDI parts to work with… sometimes those will be pretty airy, sometimes they will be in the realm of the ‘manic blastbeats’. So, without knowing how busy and dynamic the MIDI the preset maker used was, it is hard to qualify the gain structure as wrong.

That said, yes, I’m sure there are some presets that will be ‘hot’ no matter what. Sometimes we catch one that we feel we have to bring in line (Dirk’s recording preset was ‘fixed’ with a library update for example – as a late addition this wasn’t caught in the QA process from the get-go). This is in fact regularly pointed out to us in during the beta process, sometimes rightly so (though we take the time to investigate) and corrected.

There’s plenty of reasons why this could happen though, and why we often feel that’s fine as is, but the most important rule that goes at Toontrack is that we ask highly skilled engineers to produce presets for us and they have the full context they were designed for. I sure don’t feel it is appropriate to question that their work is anything but of the highest standard, especially when all I have to do to make it work for my own musical needs is to lower a master volume.

That said it is entirely your right to question their skills, or our quality assurance, but the above discussion hopefully will somewhat make you consider on what basis you do so.

Rogue Marechal - Toontrack
Configuration Manager

[Nathan]

I wonder if I’m in a class of 1 here, I would bring them down so that they were hiting my DAW channel at -12 to -18dBFSD. I haven’t tried any presets yet (tho curious now), am I right in presuming that these are delivering at above 6dB.

And I send to multiple DAW channels, in this case are they being delivered to a stero pair?

>

SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.

[VOLiTiAN]

If I could just step in, the justification of presets, who uses what and for what purpose is great an’ all, but no-one has actually mentioned that all this talk about peaking hasn’t taken into account that not even some of the highly priced pro tools setups come with DECENT and ACCURATE metering, every channel you’re trying to fault find should have a decent meter in there, it’s an absolute must, DAW meters are very inaccurate….

Steve slate drums are meant for drum replacement technology, they are designed as an overlay to an exisiting track to polish that up, it’s almost pointless by comparison to try and use SSD as SD2.0 has far more velocity layers and gives far more feedback to the player, we know this cos all our drums were done on V-drums through superior 🙂

P.s. it’s always been considered that mixing to master bus compression is self defeating as you’re mixing to a dynamics processor so changes end up being non-linear…

Regards

D.

www.myspace.com/VOLiTiAN www.soundclick.com/VOLiTiAN www.reverbnation.com/VOLiTiAN www.soundcloud.com/VOLiTiAN

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