Hey guys, Eric Tarr here for theproudiofiles.com.
This is the first of a three-part series on creating a drum mix using FXpansion’s BFD3
and iZotope’s Alloy 2. In this video I will be focusing on getting BFD3 split out for
multitrack mixing. Let me go ahead and show you the session that I’m working with. For
now, I’ll close out of Alloy 2, and I’ll come back to this in the next video.
To begin with, I have BFD3 inserted on an instrument track in Pro Tools. If I switch
over to the editor window, you can see I already have a MIDI performance on this track. These
MIDI notes will trigger the different instruments in BFD. To speed up the process, I already
have kit pieces loaded in BFD.
For this kit, I’ve mixed and matched drums and cymbals from many different BFD libraries.
I’ve been a long time user of BFD, going back to BFD1 and BFD2. One of my favorite
aspects of the software is that it’s really easy to mix and match drums and cymbals from
different libraries. Here I have the acrylic kick drum from BFD1.
[kick drum]
The Haynes snare from the Signature Snares pack.
[snare drum]
Sabian Hi-Hats from BFD2.
[hi-hats]
DW toms from BFD3
[toms]
A Zildjian crash from the Gen16 library
[crash cymbal]
Another crash from BFD2
[crash cymbal]
And a ride from BFD3.
[ride cymbal]
All in all, these are some great sounding drum samples. These samples were recorded
at multiple velocity levels and with multiple microphones just like a real drum session.
I’m going to be taking advantage of the multiple microphones to mix the MIDI drum
performance just like a regular multitrack drum session.
Taking a look at the mixer inside of BFD3, you can see where the different instruments
and microphones show up. You can create a drum mix right inside of BFD3 by using the faders
for each instrument. Additionally, you could make use of the built in effects inside of
the mixer. But for the sake of this demonstration, I’m going to show you how to split out the
signals for multitrack mixing inside of Pro Tools, where I can use iZotope’s Alloy 2
for all the effects processing.
Let’s take a look at the mixer. Here at the bottom of every channel you can see where
the output of each channel is routed. It says master. This means that all microphones are
routed out to the instrument track where BFD3 is inserted. I want to change that so I can
process each microphone separately. What I’m going to do is go in on each track and assign
the output to a different place from BFD3.
As an example, here is the kick drum in microphone. If I want to record the audio just from this
microphone I can create an audio track in Pro Tools and then make the input of this
audio track one of the outputs from BFD3. Now when I play the kick drum, just this microphone
shows up on this audio track. I can repeat this for all the other microphones in my session.
After this has been completed, I can record actual audio for each microphone based on
the MIDI drum performance. The result is a multitrack drum recording as if I had recorded
the drums with a bunch of microphones.
[recording multitrack BFD3 MIDI drums in Pro Tools]
Here I’ve printed the multitrack drum recording with one channel for each track. In my next
video I’m going to demonstrate some basic effects processing on the audio of the various
tracks by using iZotope’s Alloy 2. Take care guys.