I am always glad to help out. I don't profess to know everything about Cakewalk but I have learned much from years of making my share of mistakes. As I said before, a lot of advice I give works for me but the process I use may not be for you. I am always picking up great tidbits from users right here in this forum. The guys in here are some of the most knowledgeable around and, thankfully, the most helpful. My hats off to them ALL!!!!

Sidroe
I am always glad to help out. I don't profess to know everything about Cakewalk but I have learned much from years of making my share of mistakes. As I said before, a lot of advice I give works for me but the process I use may not be for you. I am always picking up great tidbits from users right here in this forum. The guys in here are some of the most knowledgeable around and, thankfully, the most helpful. My hats off to them ALL!!!!

Thanks again Sidroe, Hey man one more question if you don't mind. Say I wanted to route the SD2 channels to the daw to mix them there instead of the plugin after all. How should I set SD2's channel levels in relation to the daw's corresponding channel levels they'd be getting routed to? Like, I can set all 14 Avatar channels in SD2 to 0 with the corresponding daw channels at 0 to mix from there, but that doesn't seem right. Or should I just get a good optimum level in SD2 and then route them at that point to daw channels that are set to 0 to be fine tuned from there in the daw?

I like to do as much within the instrument as possible (EQ, compression, setting levels) so that when I freeze the drums there'll be less subsequent overhead in the project. Get a good balance in SD2's mixer first, with the DAW channels zeroed. After freezing, you can use the track gain controls to further fine-tune levels. Freezing Superior saves gobs of memory, and even when it's not the most memory-hungry instrument in a given project, it still takes the longest to load.

I, too, leave the DAW sliders zeroed and do all my mixing in Superior. No muss, no fuss, as they use to say. If I know that the project calls for separated stems, I try to keep any peaks between -6 and -15. I'm use to cutting tracks around -15 from the old adat days. -15 on the adat meter was always showing 0 on my old Soundtracs Topaz mixer. Yeah, I'm old but I ain't cranky.