in this Cakewalk tutorial we're looking at how to use EZDrummer 2 in cakewalk properly now sure
you could just add it to an instrument track and have all of those drums come out of one track but
there is a better way to do it and in this video we're looking at how i'm zane welcome to audio
tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creative beast if you
aren't sure what EZdrummer 2 is it's basically a drum plugin that makes it very easy to add
professional sounding drums to your tracks and it's fairly affordable for what you get with it
now i'm going to have a full kind of review of that plu-in and be sure to subscribe in
case you want to check that out if you aren't subscribed already now let's look at setting
up EZDrummer 2 in Cakewalk alright so i'm starting with a new project and
a new project on your computer should look something like this if you don't have this
sidebar open it probably looks something like this so you could just click this arrow here
and expand this area and then what we're going to do is click on this piano looking icon right here
and type in EZdrummer and it should just there it is pops up there and we want to drag
it over into this area then let go and now this has created an instrument track with EZdrummer
on it so if we click here we'll be able to see the easy drummer interface and for this i'm just going
to use whatever the default drum kit is with easy drummer so if you look and we play this
all of our drums are coming out of just this one track which can be useful if you just want to
throw in a quick drum beat to play along to or something like that but if you're recording
and you want to get a decent drum sound you're going to want these drums to come out of their
own track so you can put different effects onto each drum and overheads and that sort of thing
that's what we're looking at now so you can close down this sidebar because it's kind
of in the way now just click those arrows and you can even close down the pro channel strip
over there and it should look something like this now if you're using a different kit or even
different preset than this default one you want to make sure you go in here because it's likely going
to be slightly different in this area which is what we're going to get to in this next part but
before we get there we want to go up to insert and then we want to go to stereo bus click that
looks like nothing happened but something did happen let's go up to views console view
and you can see we have this bus d and that's the stereo bus that we just created so if
you double click in there we can rename that i'm just going to call it drum buss
all right so now that that's created we can close down our console view
and now we want to count how many channels there are in our mixer here in the EZDdrummer plugin
so there's one two three four five 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 12 channels in there so let's go up to
insert and now we want to go to multiple tracks and in track count we want to put in 12.
main destination is going to be that drum bus that we just created so be sure to change that and then
down here in the midi section we want to change that to zero because we don't need any midi tracks
now click ok and you can see it's created all of these tracks for us here
so now we got to go through this one by one with each of these channels but at least our outputs
are all set and we don't have to worry about that on each channel now one thing to note before we
get into this next step is you'll see some of these channels are mono they just have the one
vu meter strip here and some are stereo so we want to pay attention to this while we're setting up
the inputs for all of these tracks because there's stereo inputs and mono inputs so be sure when you
do one you look to see if it's mono or stereo so first we have our kick so let's name this track
kick and then we want to expand it a bit by clicking these arrows and right here where it says
none let's click that go to EZDrummer and then here we see on this side it says easy one and
there's three options so for a mono track you want easy one the one l or whatever track you're doing
you want the left of that so the l stands for left let's click on that now when we play the drums
so the kick drum now comes out of there and what i'm going to do just quickly is i'm going
to bring up this console view and i want to go to my main EZdrummer track that's this one
here i'm going to bring the volume all the way down because we don't want any volume coming out
of that we just want volume coming out of these other tracks here i'll close down console again
and we'll move on to the next drum which is our snare now one thing to note i didn't
have to change the output here because it's already set to one they're all set to one
but if i wanted to i could have set the output to some other channel but i'm just going to leave it
at one for the kick and then we're going to go to snare now so let's name this one to snare and then
we're going to set the input to easy drummer 2 3l so that's 2 and now when we go here play the snare
and you can see there's a little bit of bleed going into the kick drum just like if you were
to mic up an actual drum kit you would get that bleed as well so if we mute that
you can hear that bleed coming through the kick drum mic and same thing you can hear the kick
drum coming through the snare mic that is fine we're just going to move along here so we've
got next one is hi-hat now i usually skip over hi-hat and do it after this next one
i like to keep my drums together so i'm going to put toms as the actual next one here toms
so tom's is going to be three and we're going to change the input to EZDrummer
and you'll notice that toms is a stereo
output so we're going to change this to 3 but stereo so that's the s at the end for stereo
and let's just make sure it works
and there are our toms on that channel and just go through and do the same thing for all of those
all right so we have all of this set up and again like i said earlier depending on what drum kit you
have this could change so you can't use this as a template for all of the kits in EZDrummer
but now that you know how to do this it's pretty easy to set up and what i recommend doing is maybe
saving this as a project but also saving it as a template so you can easily load it up next time
say i wanted to load up my EZDrummer to modern basic kit and i want it all set up i could just go
into my templates and load that as a template and it's going to be all set up so i don't have to do
this every time for that kit so whatever kit you use most often be sure to save this as a template
and as a project just in case that's sort of like a backup thing if something were to happen to the
template you would at least have that project as well all right so now that we have this all set up
where do we bring our midis for this so you can just drag your midi whatever one you want we'll
drag this one onto that main EZDrummer track right here so i'll put that there we'll play it
back you can see the EZDrummer has no volume coming out of it so we're not hearing anything
out of that main track all we're hearing is these separate tracks going to our drum bus over here
so you put your midi on that main EZDrummer track and build your song that way
and now you can easily go in to kick and add any effects you want just to the kick drum
so we'll go to audio effects and i know one that i always use on the kick is the dbx 160.
so you put that on there
let's go to one of these presets for now and kick drum
and you can hear now i have full control over this kit i can make this kick more punchy i can
make the snare however i want and any of these tracks however i want and then i have a drum buss
at the end where i can glue it all together maybe with a bus compressor and some eq or whatever i
want to put on that drum buss now if you want to check out even more cakewalk tutorials click the
video on the screen right now or click the one under it to see what youtube recommends if you
like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon