I am a drummer doing e-session services, which means that I often have to bounce drumstracks, 12-16 tracks, and sometimes more takes, which means a lot of bouncing.
I can either solo each track, and export, or I can use the batch export feature, which works great.
The only problem is, that I use groups, and bus processing when I mix drums. I have 2-3 mics on both snare and kick. All snare mics goes into a snare bus, all kick mics into a kick bus, which goes with all the toms, OHs, AMBs and so on, into a drum bus. And I do add plugins on all these busses. But if I use the batch export feature, it seems to me that I only get the processing from the plugins on the specific track, not the processing from the plugins on the busses. And then I end up with a completely different sound. And I want to bounce the exact sound of my mix as it is.
So if I want that, and I have done any bus processing, I have to bounce each track by itself, using the solo button. Is there any other way to do it?
You can batch export the individual channels plus the busses at once if you like.
Or even better: the single drum channels in one go with the mono button ticked in the export window, then the busses, mono unticked. Otherwise you’ll have all channels in stereo.
But if I use the batch export feature, it seems to me that I only get the processing from the plugins on the specific track, not the processing from the plugins on the busses.
To deliver a pre-mixed drumset including your processing only busses make sense anyway.
If let’s say your final kick sound consists of 3 mics > kick bus > parallel compression bus > reverb (or whatever) > final drum bus with more processing on it and you want to bounce all the processing to a file just containing kicks, there’s no way around - you have to solo the kick (snare/toms/ohs etc.) and export one at a time.
Depending on what plugins you use, those exports might not match with an export of the final drum bus. Compressors and stuff will react differently when just fed with i.e. a single kick or the complete set.
I know what you mean, it can be a good idea to have the busses by themselves if it we parallel compression tracks and reverbs. I do use a parallel compression tracks some times, and for that it works fine. But most of it is just EQ or a little saturation. Adding a bit of top end to the drum bus works better for me than adding it to all the individual tracks, and a few low mid cuts works great that way too. I know compressors will, as you say, react differently to single tracks, instead of all the tracks playing at once, as will gates, so I tend to avoid that. But being able to do a little bus EQ’ing would be great. But it seems that I will have to do the solo single track export thing then.
This is the same problem they have with creating 4 track version of songs for guitar hero and the like… The game makers need the final mix to sound like the real song (i.e. a stereo mastered track), but it’s got to be made of 4 stems so they can knock the players out individually, and it’s still got to sound good! Well, they do actually apply some minimal stereo mastering during the game apparently, but the problem still means it’s a compromise…
Maybe the only way to do it properly is to tell the client what drum buss effects to use, then they can (re)mix the stems if they need to. Then you wouldn’t need to export each instrument solo’d through the drum buss (which as said by MarQs wouldn’t sound the same when mixed together).
Having said that, if you duplicated the final drum buss group, 1 for each stem, and then used Sends to feed those dup’d groups, then you have individual channels which you could batch export… You might even be able to link those channels in the new mixer so that you can edit the stereo buss and it’d update the dup’s.