Record your project from beginning to end, stop and save recorded items.
Ugh! Sorry! Now I’ve noticed that for the first method (recording SD3’s output) I skipped an important step: Before recording the audio output tracks, apart from arming the tracks for recording,YOU NEED TO SET THE OUTPUT TRACKS TO “RECORD OUTPUT” (Normally, Stereo). Procedure: right-click on the “arm track for recording” button for each output track, choose “Record Output” and then “Stereo” Check the attached file. (There are other options, but “Stereo” works for me – you’re free to try the other options if you feel like it).
Oh, and about freezing / rendering tracks… Instead of recording the files, you can also choose “Render/Freeze Tracks>Freeze Track to stereo (Render pre-fader… etc). First, make sure you have set the output tracks to “Record output” (as explained above). Now you can click on the last output track in your Master Track Panel header and then Ctrl+Shift+Click on the first output track. All of your SD3’s output tracks will be selected in Reaper’s Master Track Panel. Now right-click on the first track and choose “Render/Freeze Tracks>Freeze Track to stereo (Render pre-fader… etc). It’s quicker than recording the output by using Reaper’s main “Record” button. The quality of the frozen items seems to be that of your project (I’ve tried doing it myself and, when rendering, my output files are 48000 Hz (My sample rate) and the bit/sample quality is 32 (float). I guess that can be adjusted somethere either in your preferences or in your project settings if you want a different bitrate, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.
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Thanked by: WarBeerOK, fellow Reaper user. Let me tell you how to render channels separately.
First of all, when you start Superior Drummer 3 (Screen01 attached) you’ll be asked within Reaper if you’d like to create separate outputs for the instruments (If you choose “No”, only a stereo output channel will be used – and that one will be the very same track Superior Drummer 3. If you choose “Yes”(my screen capture says “Sí”, because my system language is Spanish)., 16 audio stereo tracks will be created and automatically numbered. (You can see that in screen02 attached).
Choose your preferred SDX library & preset for your project. (We have one The Rock Foundry SDX preset selected). Notice on the left of the Master Track Panel in Reaper how the stereo audio tracks have been created and numbered accordingly to the 16 stereo outputs Superior Drummer 3 allows by default. (I’ve forgotten to do so when taking my screen captures, but you can open the “route” window in your Reaper’s “Superior Drummer 3” track and disable the “master track output” tick box, because your output will be sent to the individual track channels. You can set the monitoring for those tracks to “Auto” or “On” if you enable recording for them.
Now let’s move to the “Mixer” tab within Superior Drummer 3. Channels with a blue line on top are your drum kit set mics (each SDK has different mics, and some may be deactivated and you’d need to activate them). Note that mics outputs are sent to buses named “Kick”, “Snare”, “Toms”, “Overheads (OH)”… That’s how you know that all of your Kick mics are sent to the Kick bus (yellow on top), the Snare mics are sent to the Snare bus (Yellow on top), etc… You can set the level for each mic to “shape up” the sound you’d like to hear from your kick bus, snare bus, tom bus, etc.
NOW you can set the output of your buses to the output stereo pairs. Since the red channels are already assigned to an output (but not of all them are used), Take a note of what the output does. In our example, the first output channel is just an FX send/return channel which uses a compressor. You can mute all the rest, because they are empty and unused. – NEXT, you assign every Yellow-on-top bus to the remaining output pairs. Within Reaper, you can now rename all your output channels with the appropriate name of the bus/output it will be receiving (o1/02 will be the red “Compressor” output, 03/04 will be the “Kick” bus, “05/06” will be the “Snare” bus, etc…)
Finally, to render each channel, you can simple arm each stereo output pair for recording (leave your SD3 track disarmed for recording, but make sure there’s MIDI content to be recorded), and hit “Record” in Reaper. (Mute any other instrument channels and tracks in Reaper while performing this operation, so that your CPU is not overused). You can set your recording quality in your project settings (under “File>Project Settings”). Record your project from beginning to end, stop and save recorded items. Disarm now your SD3 audio output tracks from recording. Now you should see audio content in every track. The audio from the different buses & outputs in SD3 has been recorded separately. Since the audio has already been recorded, you can mute your Superior Drummer 3 instrument track, and untick the instrument name in the box. That way, your CPU will stop using part of its power to generate audio from SD3, since the audio has already been “rendered/recorded”, and you can make use of that freed power for other instruments, adding FX buses in Reaper, etc.
If you wish to create now a Drum bus within Reaper, re-route all of your Drum audio tracks you have just recorded to a new track. Disable the “Master Output” for all those Drum audio tracks and leave only the Drum Bus Track sent to the Master Output. You can also duplicate that Drum Bus, add a 100% wet FX to that bus (i.e. a compressor, a reverb) and re-adjust the level of the sends for that track (opening the “route” section and moving the receive sliders). Then, you can mix the pure sound of your Drum Bus with the second Bus (if you use a compressor in this second Bus, you’ll be achieving what’s called “New York Compression”, which takes both the energy of compressed drums and the dynamics of the original drums. Mix to taste (and/or automate) the level of each bus. You can also re-route both buses into a third bus if you please, to set the overall volume of both drum buses at once.
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Thanked by: WarBeer