Make MIDI drums REAL - how I mix my drum tracks

If you're like me and don't have a beautiful room to track drums in, there is a chance you're using a drum plugin. I use EZdrummer 3, and it sounds great! But how do you make it sound just that much more real? In this video, I show what I do to bring the midi drums to life a little more!

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[ZachWirchak]

What tips and tricks do you use to mix sampled drums?

[NathanBurger-gv]

It's always a good idea to do this for songs anyway just in case. Who knows how long you will have the midi software or how long it will be supported by your operating system in the future. If you commit them to tracks you can save the stems on a hard drive and have them pretty much forever even if you don't use that particular midi drum software anymore.

[Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn]

I've been doing this with MT Power Drums. I can channel each element to a different track and work that way, but I prefer to export them as wav files and drop them back in. I could set the output of the midi track as the input of a blank track and hit record, but I just solo the drum track and export the mix in real time for each component. Time consuming, but I'm just sitting back doing something else in between hitting solo and export so it's not a hassle. It means I can add a little compression or saturation, high pass etc when exporting to save on CPU later. I put plugins on tracks and export them as a means of committing, but also saving lots of CPU over a whole mix. You can always go back a step or to the raw track if you really need to. Back to drums, I'll put effects on the snare on a duplicate mono track and export it as a stereo wav file rather than use a send as then, the DAW is just playing a wav file instead of running plugins. You want to leave some things until later so you can tweak them as you go, but the basic "set and forget" plugin chain might as well be out of the way. Good to see I wasn't the only one exporting midi this way!

[JGuitarCovers]

such a simple solution but i felt my brain explode when u hit solo and render on each piece of the kit, thanks man!

[roee]

Thats the very best way to control midi drums for sure. Great video 👏🏼

[jeremyganguly]

What do you think about playing the full drum mix on monitors and then recording that with a room mic and layering that onto the mix as well? Would it add to the realism?

[jaxonrox]

Thx for the tip. Is there also a way to do this but to keep each track in midi? Let's say you have the original midi track and now you just want to use how it's written but you wanna assign different sample from your DAW to each of the drum. Meaning you use the original program (drum plug-in) to write the parts but then you use the DAW drum samples for the actual sounds (instead of just mixing sounds that the plug-in created)..? Thanks a lot.

[JumpiiRock]

hi! Quick question..The real time export is only because you're using outboard gear right?