MIDI Drums - Multiple vs single tracks

you get the most flexibility doing the same thing with your soft synths although the session drummers does allow you to change the mix through the synth itself. nothing is really changed excpet a lot more synths that can be awesome

Multiple trascks =  One MIDI track and 10 to 24 audio tracks. So each drum is on its own track. This way you can control teach drums volume and add effects to any drum you want without effecting the rest of the drums.

Just use the insert soft synth function and slect multiple mono or stereo outs. I use multiple stereo outs and change the track interleave to mono
Cj

CJaysMusic


Multiple trascks =  One MIDI track and 10 to 24 audio tracks. So each drum is on its own track. This way you can control teach drums volume and add effects to any drum you want without effecting the rest of the drums. 

Excellent advice form CJ as usual. In my opinion thats the way to go.

experiment

that's the best way to go

you can answer your own questions

you may find some roads lead to Rome 

and  some roads are merely a path to  some back alley in Sydney

but you will KNOW

Tripecac


So the consensus is have each drum sound on its own track?

Do you recommend simple instrument tracks or separate midi and synth audio?

Let's say you have 3 drum sounds: kick, snare, and hi-hat.  How many MIDI and SYNTH AUDIO tracks do you end up with, assuming you want to use the same drum kit patch for each?

A lot will depend on the VSTi you are using for your drums. My advice - stay away from the simple instrument track and insert the VSTi with all audio outputs. This will produce a single midi track and a number of audio tracks. Depending on the software you may have a output for bass drum, top of snare, bottom of snare, overheads, toms, room ambiance etc.
 
There is some good advice about setting up EZDrummer here, much of it can be adapted to apply to other drum VSTi's
 
http://www.gatortraks.com/forum/index.php?topic=26.0
 
 
 

I am now using Kontakt 4 for drums (and other sounds).  It lets me use up to 16 midi channels per instance of Kontakt.

I use Abbey Road 60s Drums, which sounds great.  Right now I have 5 midi tracks going to one instance of Abbey Road 60s Drums (within Kontakt).  All of those tracks use the same midi channel, so have the same volume and pan.  I'd like them to have separate volume and pan, so am wondering if that means I need multiple instances of Abbey Road 60s drums, which uses tons more memory. 

Is there any way around that?

Or do people not usually muck around with volume and pan of individual drums?  Would that be considered "unnatural" in terms of emulating real performance?

yep all these guys are telling you the way to go. i know in Kontakt itself there is the mixer, and so a lot of stuff you can do there.
one thing to bear in mind is that you need to make sure each audio out from Kontakt is sent to its own audio track; the default is that all channels go to out 1 + 2, effectively making it a stereo synth. at the bottom of the mixer in K4 there's a button says 'config' - click on that and set each channel to a different audio out - they come in stereo pairs - so i set kick to 1+2, snare to 3+4 etc there may be too many drums to give each one its own unique audio out, so i tend to group hi-hat/crash and ride/splash, you could group toms as well. then save this kit as a multi so it'll reload with the audio outs already set.
within sonar, as said above, a lot of us then send parts of the kit to their own buss; actually i send everything except kick, but i use steven slate which are already well-processed; abbey road may be different.
HTH.

Personally I have each percussion instrument on its own MIDI track (visible in track view, for tracking/editing) with separate audio outputs from the soft synth (visible on console view, for mixing). However I use SD3 with its six outputs, not Kontakt, 

Sorry, forgot to tell you, I break my midi tracks to
1-Kick
2-Snare/sidestick
3-Toms-all
4-Hats & Cymbals
Each track is assigned to Channel 10. Then the audio is only stereo out from Battery or whatever drums you use because Midi is conrolling mix and the different texture of sounds thru velocity. This simplifys my audio drum mixing.

I definitely prefer to split my drums into separate MIDI tracks, for easy editing.

I like the fact that Kontakt lets us send multiple MIDI tracks to a single instance of a drum kit (e.g., Abbey Road 60s drums).  The challenge at this point is figuring out how to then separate the drum kit's outputs (snare, kick, etc.) into separate audio tracks so that I can mix them via Sonar rather then the drum kit's mixer.

Of course, this has me wondering: is splitting a drum kit into independent audio outputs realistic?  In real life, the snare and kick are recorded together, right?  A mic that hears the snare will hear the kick, and vice versa, and so if you play your snare "too loud", you can't easily fix that in the mix; you really should have hit the snare more lightly in the first place.  In terms of Sonar editing, that means adjusting the MIDI velocity rather than volume, which is what Sidroe was saying.

So, the "realistic" thing to do is leave the drum kit as a single stereo output, and fiddle with MIDI velocities and perhaps virtual mic positioning (which Kontakt lets you do).  The "flexible" thing to do is somehow assign each drum sound to a separate audio output. though I haven't figured out how to do this yet.

If you have multiple midi and audio tracks associated with a single drum kit soft synth (like Abbey Road within Kontakt), how do you organize those in your project?  Do you have your midi tracks grouped together, or each midi track next to its associated audio track?

Glad my suggestion seemed to make sense. I need to add with Battery I can add fx on whatever drum I choose individually inside Battery.. This may not be the case with your particular drum program. You may still need to break the audio into separate tracks to add ,say, delay on just the snare.
I can do that in the Battery as opposed to creating an audio track and then adding fx. This just seems quicker for me. When I save the kit, it automaticly loads everything next time I need that kit sound. As I said, this may not be the case with a different program.

CJaysMusic


Multiple trascks =  One MIDI track and 10 to 24 audio tracks. So each drum is on its own track. This way you can control teach drums volume and add effects to any drum you want without effecting the rest of the drums.

Just use the insert soft synth function and slect multiple mono or stereo outs. I use multiple stereo outs and change the track interleave to mono
Cj

This is EXACTLY what I do.

I like to have individual drum sounds on separate MIDI tracks, routed to separate audio tracks, then on to a 'drum master bus'.

I find it gives the best overall flexibility; simplified editing of the source material (ie. MIDI notes) and easy mixing of the drum sounds.

Stripping MIDI out from a single track to multiple tracks based on MIDI note is a bit tricky in Sonar but can be done.