Route Ambience for Individual Drums to Separate Outputs

BFD3 General Discussion
1

Hey all; I’m new to BFD and this forum is super helpful. Thanks for all of your posts.

I am looking to route drums to individual outputs, along with teach drum’s ambience, each stereo pair.

So;
Kick goes to 1-2 along with it’s ambience
Snare goes to 3-4 along with it’s ambience

Is this possible? If so, how?

Thanks!

2

Pretty sure that’s not possible.

It’s not something you could ever do in a studio and although it might be possible I can’t see how it could be done without recording each kit piece individually with a selection of ambient mics.
That could make the kit size about 20 times their current size. :thinking:

You could always add it as a feature request here but I can’t see how they could do it,

Steve

3

It actually is possible, but you have to do the routing in two places.

So… for any kitpiece…

  1. Add a bunch of AUX’s to the mixer - name them appropriately (kickOH, kickAMB3, etc.)
  2. Open the drum inspector (tech/model panel) and find the ambient channels list.
  3. The AUX’s you added will appear in the menus next to each ambient microphone. Changing this will re-route the signal to the AUX.
  4. Then in the mixer, you can do the same thing for the direct microphones, by changing their routing at the bottom of the mixer channel - change it to the AUX.
  5. Now… if you want to change the final PLUGIN OUTPUT for this AUX channel, you can change it in the menu at the bottom of the channel.

This won’t really sound like a drumkit in the room once you start processing everything. As Steve said, this is kinda impossible in the real world. But samples allow you this flexibility.

4 Likes
4

Thanks for this info, I am experimenting now and this seems like it will work.

For context; I am producer, mixing engineer, programmer. I love the flexibility of BFD and appreciate having access to leakage, ambience mics, etc. However, coming from the studio side I’m interested in the drums sounding as final mix processed as possible when they get to my DAW individual tracks.

For me a snare stem from BFD should sound like the entirety of the snare sound (OH, leakage, ambience mics), same with Kick, toms, etc. I’m not so interested the individual outs sounding like an actual drum kit mic’d up. It would be very typical to take a snare sample from the kit and layer it, or even entirely replace the close mic’d snare track with the sample, and that sample would not simply be the close mic but the stereo mix of all mics.

Being able to send the leakage to the direct mic and the ambience mics to a separate aux seems to do the trick.

Using BFD like this give me the best of both worlds; sounding like a processed kit but still able to edit the nuance of the performance.

Thanks again for your help with this!