Questions & Answers

How to I create EZDrummer Stems in Studio One 4

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asked Jul 21, 2018 in Studio One 4 by ianroegels (140 points)
I am having the world's worst time creating stems from EZ Drummer in Studio One 4.  It used to be that I enabled all the channels within EZ Drummer, then send them to a bus, and then create audio tracks that record from those individual busses.  I get to the point where I can create the bus, but when I go to my audio tracks there's no option to route audio from specific busses.  What am I doing wrong?

1 Answer

+1 vote
answered Jul 23, 2018 by kevinrendleman (1,910 points)
The easiest way is to Select the MIDI part you're working on in the arrange window, right-click and I believe it's under Event > Transform Instrument to Audio.  This brings up a dialog box that will give you options such as "bounce all outputs", which is what you'd want to have enabled.  When you transform, your MIDI will be turned into audio, and I believe that MIDI data is stored "under" the audio, so if you ever want to transform back to MIDI to edit programming, you can select a transform to midi or revert option (not sure exactly which since I'm not at S1 right now)

If you select to bounce the instrument with the effects, it will render the insert FX, volume, pan, and automation to the bounced output.  That's fantastic if you're happy with the sound of the drums/inserts FX, confident in the processing and want to bounce your finished drums.  However if you're like me and like to bounce directly to audio and work with other plugins rather than mixing internally in EZ/Superior, You can uncheck that box, and it will ignore FX, volume, pan and automation (I believe I'm correct on this) and take any inserts you had on your multi-outs and apply them to the rendered audio track version of that, with the same fader setting and everything.

PRO TIP:  If you're working in a session with any large latency or oversampled plugins, do yourself a favor and either disable those plugins, or hit the Master Insert FX switch next to the M&S buttons above the transport bar in the arrange window.  You're bounces will go from 2x realtime to about 20-50x depending on your machine.  When you finish the transform process, turn those plugins back on and you're back in action!  If you're using S1 V4, I like to keep a copy of another blank song open where I can just flip to it, quickly import the song data from the other track that I need, and bounce with 0 other plugins running.  You can copy and paste files from your POOL into another session, just make sure they start at the same time!  I prefer using a separate song, because I've had some flaky behavior with the activate/deactivate all inserts thing.  The biggest problem I've found (maybe it was a quirk) is that if you have bypassed an entire FX chain in the mixer, it deactivates the active ones, and reactivates the bypassed FX Chain.  I don't know if that was an intentional thing for A/Bing plugin chains or something, but it's very frustrating, because a lot of times I hide older/scratch tracks, mute them and deactivate all inserts, and it still seems to activate some of those tracks.  Also, it bypasses all the sends for your tracks, which is a pain in the *** if you like to put sends on every channel and only keep some of them activated.  it seems that bypassing all plugins, and then activating all plugins, overwrites the previous state of activation for that plugin.  Since I came from protools, and forget that the nice big blue button isnt just bypass, but actually "inactivating" I tend to hit the activate button rather than bypass when I'm ditching plugins I might want to keep around for later A/B.  Jeeezzzzz.. That got long.

-Kevin
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