Superior Drummer TRACKER Feature – Does it work with single audio file, or must each drum have its own track? Can I use non-drums?

[callahan09]

So if I do buy SD3.0 right now I won’t be able to buy any additional MICs for micing up individual drums, but I do have a crude mic I can use just to capture the overall kit. Would an audio file like that be useable with the Tracker feature to get my drums translated into MIDI? I figure they don’t need to be recorded well because I intend to use the SD3.0 sounds not the original drum audio recordings in my music. But all the demos I’ve seen show people importing multiple audio files, each one is a single drum, not a file containing the full drums recording all in one track.

And I was also curious to what degree it will work with non-drum percussive sounds, even something like slapping out a rhythm on my desktop or on an acoustic guitar body, or slapping my knees and chest and stomping my feet. If I were to record something like that all with one audio track (so just using one microphone, again), would the TRACKER be able to translate it meaningfully into something where it’s now in MIDI and I can use the SD3.0 drum sounds and turn my crudely produced beat into real sounding drums?

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[Adrian Dawson]

1/ Works very well in combined files. Kick, snare, toms and cymbals do a pretty good job with minimal tweaking. Hi hats often get ‘lost’ behind other drums. Add the missing ones manually.

2/ Yes. It will.

[polinopayro89]

SD3’s Tracker is a killer feature that turns close-mic’d drum audio files into sample-accurate triggered MIDI. It DOES NOT work in real time. In order to get your drum sounds from your DAW into Tracker (which resides in your DAW as a tab in SD3), you must first export the files first, and then either re-import them with the Add button, or drag them into Tracker from your desktop.

It’s important that your files start at the beginning of the session so they will align with the song when you import them to Tracker. So before you export or bounce the drum files, be sure to consolidate them so they start right from zero – this will keep your parts in sync with the rest of the session. You can almost think of Tracker as being a DAW within a DAW, in the sense that you can have them synced (via the Follow Host button at the bottom) or you can run it entirely independently. But when it comes time to drop the MIDI files you’ve created into your host DAW, if you didn’t line them up to begin with, you’ll have to re-align them.

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