These days Logic Pro makes it easy to mix drums with both Drum Kit Designer and Drum Machine Designer. You can mix each instrument as a single Drummer track. Or you can fine-tune each individual drum exactly how you’d like thanks to Track Stacks and Producer kits.
But what if you prefer a 3rd party drum plugin like EZDrummer or Battery for your drum tracks?
Both plugins offer the ability to mix each drum from within the plugin interface. But what if you’d rather mix each drum inside Logic’s Mixer instead? Or heaven forbid, try to export each drum as its own audio file!
It’s certainly not as obvious, but Logic offers some simple ways to mix and export each drum from your 3rd party drum plugins.
I myself have never been a fan of producing or mixing from within a plugin. Even when it comes to Logic’s own Ultrabeat and its own internal step sequencer.
For some reason programming and mixing within a plugin makes me feel claustrophobic and disconnected from the bigger picture of my Logic Projects.
This is why I’m thankful Logic can expand these instruments across track lanes and channel strips.
For exporting you can simply expand a MIDI performance using the Separate by Note Pitch function. Which takes a single MIDI region and places each note on its own track lane. Making it super easy to export those tracks individually.
But if you’d like to process each drum individually, you’ll need to use Multi-Output Instruments.
In today’s video I’ll show you how to make the most out of your 3rd party drum plugins. And also how to navigate the small details of mixing and exporting each drum track.
Great video. If only there was a standard for midi drum assignments. LPX Drummer and Superior Drummer use C1 as Kick and D1 as snare. However, Native Instruments and Maschine use C1 for Kick and C#1 for Snare. So sometimes you need to shift some of these midi notes to another key on the keyboard. If anyone knows an easier work around for this Im listening.
Still, the Drummer regions work easily with EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer kits. I often write drum parts with Drummer, and then use Superior Drummer as the kit using Drummer midi. Once youre in Superior Drummer, you can utilize its mixer and still stay on one stereo channel if you want. This can sometimes help with track management. Ive even used a Logic compressor on the stereo track of the drums as parallel drum compression using the mix knob. There are so many ways to do things these days.
Hi Chris,
Your channel is the best for Logic Pro users. Clear explanations and really great interesting ways to use Logic. My economy is weak atm so I cannot contribute atm.
All the best,
Michael