Superior drummer advice

[RichS]

Hello all, I was wondering how most of you go about mixing drums, providing you use software as I do, whether it be Superior, Slate etc.

Do you send each drum individually to a track? Do you use the mixer in your software and send to a stereo track?

I'm not really sure what the best approach is.

Does anybody use presets like the Sneap one Superior offers?

Thanks in advance everyone.

 

[ZanetheVocalist]

I find superior's mixer to be clumsy at best. I always mixdown each instrument separately unprocessed and tweak it in Reaper. I don't like the built in mixdown function so bouncing within reaper is better for me. For example, I want only cymbals on one track. No snare bleed in overheads, etc. I'll mute all snare kick and tom MIDI, and render the cymbals. Overhead and ambiance will be mixed into one stereo track. Then I'll process from there with a HP filter, EQ, etc. For snare I'll mix the 2 close mics and overheads into one track, and the total ambiance (near, mid and far,) onto another. This simplifies things greatly as I don't have 2 close mics, overheads, and individual ambiance tracks to deal with at once. Toms are mixed into one track per tom, and I don't put much ambiance on them anyway so its pointless for me to divide them up. Kick is all mixed into one track. The only processing I use before rendering is the transient designer.

Btw, if you use the traditional method of mixing down via superior the FX won't be printed with the track. If you render it my way you will have the FX printed with the tracks. Render, print, mixdown, whatever your DAW calls it. I hate to confuse you but I got a feeling I already have lol.

 

[RichS]

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, it's a little confusing, but I think I see the direction you go with it.

I use Sonar and can use the multi output option to separate all the drums to their own track, then process each on it's own. I think that's the same kind of thing you are doing?