Superior Drummer 3 training?

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Chipotle

That seems less related to SD3 or EZDrummer or whatever software you are using, and more related to understanding how a drum part works. The mechanics of typing in a MIDI note on the beat you want is pretty simple. Maybe what you really want are drum lessons?

Could be. I’m going to listen to the drum parts of several songs in the neighborhood of what I want to do, and maybe find some analysis of those parts.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by Acousticado

p.s. I assume they do this as work for hire, and agree to take no ownership in your original song, despite what unique licks they may contribute...but I donÂ’t know.

yes, that's the way things work on Fiverr, AirGigs, etc. The people I've worked with have asked if I'd credit them in liner notes (if any), which makes sense, of course - you're basically hiring studio musicians. But other than that, you're paying for them to play and record and that's it. And the deal is all set out of front in a fairly templated way on the sites. I'm not sure what they'd do if you want them to basically write the entire song for you (and there are people offering that), but if they're just making up a part to add, that's what studio musicians always do, and that doesn't normally give them any ownership of the song they play on. Of course if you work directly with someone you know, a collaborator, then any deal is possible, up to you.

I have a friend who's doing this in an extreme way. He's a long time drummer I used to play with (decades ago) and a bad back has basically side-lined him. So now he's a songwriter. He does demos, mostly keys and vocal, and then has others do everything. I've done charts for him, since he doesn't write music. Then he hires everyone he needs to record, the players, singers, recording engineer, etc. He's basically the producer, everyone else gets hired, and all the recording is done remotely by people scattered all over the country (or world). He just contracts directly with them, finding people who he thinks will fit with each song. Not a cheap approach, from what I can tell, but the results are certainly top-notch.

[b1j]

All this sounds good. However, it hops right over the central part: how to collect and assemble these recorded tracks. All this time and I have not discovered how to do this. I have a notion that it involves something called stems, but that's the water's edge for me.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by b1j

All this sounds good. However, it hops right over the central part: how to collect and assemble these recorded tracks. All this time and I have not discovered how to do this. I have a notion that it involves something called stems, but that's the water's edge for me.

That's simple. No "stems" involved. Say you want me to add a guitar part to something you've recorded:

1) send me your track, making sure to send the entire timeline, so you know where things start. Doesn't have to be the final mix or anything, just whatever I need to hear to add my part.

2) I load your file into my DAW, and record my part on a new track

3) I export just my track, again making sure I export the whole timeline so it matches the start/end of yours, then send that to you

4) you import my track into your DAW and mix to taste.

It's really no different than if I came to your house and overdubbed a part, we just did it remotely by emailing files. I've done audio and even video recording this way many times.

[Doug Young]

BTW, if you want to try this, I'm glad to help. Just record something simple - say a couple of measures strumming a chord, and I'll overdub something and send it back so you see how it works.

[b1j]

Doug, now that’s food for thought. Here I was thinking that I had to send all the tracks from my song for the collaborator to add to. But this makes a lot of sense. I’m thinking about my brother. He can drag the .wav file of the entire song into his version of studio one without caring about seeing all the individual tracks. Of course!

Every once in a while, it must be a little startling to see how little I know about this stuff.

[Chipotle]

Originally Posted by b1j

All this sounds good. However, it hops right over the central part: how to collect and assemble these recorded tracks. All this time and I have not discovered how to do this. I have a notion that it involves something called stems, but that's the water's edge for me.

Like Doug says, it's way more simple than you're thinking. "Stem" is just the name for a single exported audio track. You can just email tracks to other musicians, they put them into their DAW, record their tracks, and send those back to, where you import them into your DAW along with your original tracks, and mix.

You can do exactly the same thing with a MIDI track instead of an audio track. The person recording will need to record the MIDI, but that is easily done in the DAW. They'll send you back a MIDI file (.mid, rather than .wav), you import it into your DAW along with your other tracks, and put your virtual instrument on the MIDI track to create the sounds. I recently did this with a piano track I needed... I had guitar & percussion; exported that, and sent it to a pianist with the piano score. He recorded the MIDI out of the piano and sent it back to me. I was able to take the MIDI, put a VI piano on the track, and then clean up timing and some wrong notes, and play it along with my guitar & percussion tracks.

Drums get a bit more complicated, since as you surmised, various hardware and software drums may not use the same note value for the same sound. But most VIs have some capability to re-map notes for exactly this reason. Worst case, you can edit the resulting MIDI file by hand and move notes where you need them. No need for anyone to be in the same room (or even the same state or country!).

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Chipotle

Like Doug says, it's way more simple than you're thinking. "Stem" is just the name for a single exported audio track. You can just email tracks to other musicians, they put them into their DAW, record their tracks, and send those back to, where you import them into your DAW along with your original tracks, and mix.

You can do exactly the same thing with a MIDI track instead of an audio track. The person recording will need to record the MIDI, but that is easily done in the DAW. They'll send you back a MIDI file (.mid, rather than .wav), you import it into your DAW along with your other tracks, and put your virtual instrument on the MIDI track to create the sounds. I recently did this with a piano track I needed... I had guitar & percussion; exported that, and sent it to a pianist with the piano score. He recorded the MIDI out of the piano and sent it back to me. I was able to take the MIDI, put a VI piano on the track, and then clean up timing and some wrong notes, and play it along with my guitar & percussion tracks.

Drums get a bit more complicated, since as you surmised, various hardware and software drums may not use the same note value for the same sound. But most VIs have some capability to re-map notes for exactly this reason. Worst case, you can edit the resulting MIDI file by hand and move notes where you need them. No need for anyone to be in the same room (or even the same state or country!).

This is all very encouraging.

A couple of questions come to mind.

About the sequence of steps. I found a YT video that showed how the e-drum player starts by choosing the correct Superior Drummer 3 preset for the drum kit model. That lets the drummer hear the SD3 sound sets while playing. My brother doesn’t have SD3, and I don’t plan to ask him to buy it just for this.

If he just plays into his Studio One, he’ll hear whatever sound sets he has on board, but will I be able to select the appropriate preset after the track has been recorded? Or will I need to set up each pad individually?

Second, I assume he can record into multiple Studio One tracks and send the all to me. If so, then he name the tracks and make it easier for me to edit and mix. (Not really a question.)

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by b1j

This is all very encouraging.

A couple of questions come to mind.

About the sequence of steps. I found a YT video that showed how the e-drum player starts by choosing the correct Superior Drummer 3 preset for the drum kit model. That lets the drummer hear the SD3 sound sets while playing. My brother doesn’t have SD3, and I don’t plan to ask him to buy it just for this.

If he just plays into his Studio One, he’ll hear whatever sound sets he has on board, but will I be able to select the appropriate preset after the track has been recorded? Or will I need to set up each pad individually?

Second, I assume he can record into multiple Studio One tracks and send the all to me. If so, then he name the tracks and make it easier for me to edit and mix. (Not really a question.)

The approach I outlined was exchanging wav files. So for some MIDI thing like a drum program, you'll want to render that to a wav file. The person on the other end won't be able to edit it. But whatever you do, once it's mixed down to a wav file, the recording is what it is. You can upload it to SoundCloud, or release it on Spotify, or email it to your brother - and it won't matter that your listeners don't have the sound libraries, or the drummer plugin. You've exported the sounds to a portable format: wav.

Now, if 2 people are using the same DAW, then you could actually share the DAW files with each other - assuming you can package things up so they're self-contained. I do this with Logic fairly often, with the "store as a package" option. It also helps to zip the project up. But when you do this, both parties have to have the same "extras". Like if I put a bunch of plugins I own on a project and share it with someone else, then those plugins aren't going to be there for them. Or in your case, the drummer module, or sound libraries, etc.

It's easiest to avoid all this by just working with audio mixes. This is just like when you took your project to your mastering engineer. He didn't need anything from StudioOne - he didn't even care what DAW you used. You just gave him a wav file that he could import, and he gave you back a wav file that you could play at home.

[Doug Young]

BTW, exchanging MIDI is another option if your working with virtual instruments. I don't know how EZ Drummer works. If it generates MIDI and can import MIDI back in, then maybe you just exchange those MIDI files. That works as a general thing - I could record a MIDI file and think it's a flute. I then send you that MIDI file, which is just a bunch of notes/velocities/durations, etc, and you could put a violin instrument on the imported MIDI track. But these drummers may be more complicated than that. Logic's Drummer can export MIDI, and someone else could certainly use some other drum sample library on that MIDI data - I've done that myself. But someone else, importing that MIDI data, wouldn't have access to all the nifty Logic Drummer controls to modify it. I assume EZDrummer is similar.

[ACOUSTICDEWD]

I've used EZ Drummer for years in a professional, daily, capacity composing music for TV. It's a metronome and idea generator where I will record a 90 minute practice/noodle session that is later chopped up into finished songs. The biggest challenge with that is getting latency down as low as possible. Overall, brilliant sample quality although some prefer Superior Drummer, which is more complex

For EZD3 you're best tutorial source is the YT channel 'Shootie School'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4XUujoRT4

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

Now, if 2 people are using the same DAW, then you could actually share the DAW files with each other - assuming you can package things up so they're self-contained. I do this with Logic fairly often, with the "store as a package" option. It also helps to zip the project up. But when you do this, both parties have to have the same "extras". Like if I put a bunch of plugins I own on a project and share it with someone else, then those plugins aren't going to be there for them. Or in your case, the drummer module, or sound libraries, etc.

So this is where stems come in?

My hope is that he tracks the drum part into a separate Studio One instrument track for each pad, and I later mix those parts through Superior Drummer 3. Wouldn’t I then be able to select the SD3 preset for his raw MIDI tracks once I have them in hand?

[Chipotle]

Originally Posted by b1j

If he just plays into his Studio One, he’ll hear whatever sound sets he has on board, but will I be able to select the appropriate preset after the track has been recorded? Or will I need to set up each pad individually?

There are two ways to go about this. Doug talked about .wav files, the audio. In this case, your drummer sends you the audio--whatever sounds are coming out of his drum setup. It might be all the drums on a stereo track, if that's all his e-drum kit has. Or it might be separate tracks ("stems") of the individual drums, if his kit has separate outputs for each sound and he knows how to record that.

Or the drummer can record the MIDI coming out of the e-kit. MIDI is just a bunch of notes, again as Doug pointed out. For example, here's a simple MIDI drum beat from one of my songs, on a track in the DAW (Reaper; the virtual drums are DrumMic'a in the Kontakt fx).



I edit the MIDI in a format sometimes called a "piano roll" for obvious reasons. Each line corresponds with the keyboard note at the left; as the song plays, it produces each note in time much like a player piano.



Those notes will produce different sounds on different virtual instruments. On my virtual drums, obviously, it's kick/snare/hh. If I put a virtual piano on that track, it would play a weird arpeggio of B, C# and F#. On another virtual drum program, it might play a different sounding kick, a different snare, and maybe a tom. But all I have to do it move the "tom" notes to whatever note corresponds to "hi hat" on my virtual drums, and it's all good.

You are correct that if you get a MIDI file, you can run the MIDI through SD3 and use the SD3 sounds for what the drummer played. With luck, the notes will map right to the drum sounds you want; if not, you may be able to find a preset mapping in the virtual drums, or just edit and move notes in the MIDI file so they trigger the sound you want.

[Doug Young]

I think the "stems" concept is beside the point here, I don't see how they are involved at all. I've not used EZ/Superior Drummer, so I don't know how that would work as far as sharing. But if all you're trying to do is have someone else create a MIDI track (or tracks) that you receive and play thru the virtual instrument of your choice, that seems like that should work. There are even lots of MIDI drum tracks out there that you can download and do this same thing with.

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

I think the "stems" concept is beside the point here, I don't see how they are involved at all. I've not used EZ/Superior Drummer, so I don't know how that would work as far as sharing. But if all you're trying to do is have someone else create a MIDI track (or tracks) that you receive and play thru the virtual instrument of your choice, that seems like that should work. There are even lots of MIDI drum tracks out there that you can download and do this same thing with.

Good. I’ve been wondering if I could apply the appropriate preset after the fact to already recorded MIDI tracks. It sounds like we might be able to make it work, then.

My wish list:

1) have my brother across the country play drums to my song, which is about 90% done.

2) have him send each pad’s signal to its own instrument track in Studio One. (Not sure about this; I guess this depends on his kit controller.)

3) receive separate instrument tracks for each pad in the e-drum set

4) tell SD3 to recognize the MIDI information with the preset for his brand and model of kit. (You say I can)

If I can clear those hurdles, it will be as if I had the drum kit here with me and recorded the drum parts myself.

He doesn’t have SD3 and doesn’t want to buy it
I don’t have an e-drum set and don’t want to buy one.
We both have Studio One.
He doesn’t want to mix individual drum parts.
I want to use SD3’s vaunted sound sets, and in the process get some experience with its features.