Before you start mixing a song one of the best things you can do is commit your virtual instruments as audio. When it comes to drum samplers with multiple outputs things can get tricky because there are multiple options. In this video I explain my preferred method of handling this: freezing the instrument as a multichannel file.
TLDR;
1 – Select Virtual Instrument Track
2 – Run action “Track: Freeze to multichannel (render pre-fader, save/remove items and online FX)” from action list or track menu.
3 – Frozen MIDI items will converted to a multi-channel WAV file and locked.
4 – If you need to go back to the original MIDI or change instrument settings, run the Unfreeze action from track menu.
I am using Steven Slate Drums 4 for the demonstration but the same thing can be applied to EZDrummer, BFD, or any other Virtual instrument with multiple outputs.
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Comments
2 responses to “How to Freeze Multichannel Drum Samplers”
you sir , are a top notch fellow for sharing this – a life saver of a tip . many thanks .
For years I’ve been doing “Render track to mono/stereo stem and mute original” – separately for every single EZD2 output track. This way I got a Wave stem file for each drum part but I also had to delete all the original output tracks or hide them in the TCP/MCP. When midway into mixing a song I wanted to change a tom fill, I had to unmute EZD2 and edit the MIDI, then I had to delete my Tom, Overhead, Room stems, create new multiple output, delete everything but Tom, Overhead, Room output, render these three to stems, then delete the three outputs again. Freezing single tracks was even a worse option since I had to keep the MIDI track available all the time in order to unfreeze. Plus, any further FX and routing would be deleted on unfreezing. I never thought that multichannel freeze was the solution, since I was always thinking that I would just get one single WAV out of it without any possibility to work on single instruments. Glad I found this video after almost 5 years of total frustration. Thanks!