I’m using NI Kontakt for drums, however when I mixdown the mp3 only contains the recorded tracks (guitars, etc) - I’ve double checked the “Stereo Out” is chosen in the audio, but I’m not sure if the kontakt tracks are not being routed correctly. Any idea what I might look into next?
If you solo the Drum Track(s) do you see audio on the Stereo Out’s Meter during normal playback?
Misrouting could be an issue. Perhaps you could post a screen grab of the Routing. And also another pic of your Export dialog Window’s settings.
Do you use Control Room or not?
When you say “recorded tracks” do you mean only Audio Tracks or do you have other Virtual Instruments that are producing sound.
Please be as specific as you can since mind reading at a distance is often error prone.
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Thank you so much for the help and apologies I didn’t supply all the necessary information in advance, although I’ve been using cubase for many years I never had this issue and I’m relatively new to audio routing.
The instrument/guitar tracks are audio tracks. The only VST is the drums (NI Kontakt) which is what is not coming through the stereo out. Muting stereo out indeed is not muting the drum sound.
I’m not sure exactly how to provide you further information, if you tell me exactly what you need?
I’ll attach the mixdown dialog in any case:
I think I understand what’s going on. Could you grab a picture of the mixconsole?
You need to select all those outputs (KickSum, KickTrigger etc. etc.) and set their output to the Stereo Out. I don’t know how all these physical outputs were created. Usually, outputs from a virtual instruments show their return channels in the mixconsole, but they are routed to the stereo out by default.
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I was hoping you would grab the screen in the big mixconsole window (F3). You will see there is a Routing rack up towards the top. You should be able to change the output there.
I still can’t understand how you got so many outputs! How many outputs does your sound interface have?
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Alright! Click on one of the closed Routing tabs and let’s see what we get.
Have you changed the fader cap colors to be red yourself?
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This is what we want to look at.
Also can you show us in Audio Connections what’s on both the Output and Group/FX tabs.
Because the default for red is Output Channels.
It’s starting to look like you don’t have any routing setup at all and instead are sending everything to different Audio Outputs on your Audio Interface. What type of Interface are you using?
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Apologies for the late reply. I’m not at home to be able to take the screenshots but I wanted to confirm I did change the snare colors to red and also linked them. I was trying to add a reverb plugin + eq. I may have also created a group track. I’m very naive in this part, so I was probably going about it in a trial and error approach. I will update this thread in a few hours!
Also, do be mindful I was following a youtube video to setup kontakt + the ggd drumkit library pack I purchased. The video wasn’t very clear in parts and despite my best attempt, I couldn’t follow it through. I did notice the author had left a template in the comments, I downloaded it and made it my default template, where I am experiencing this issue. I have a faint recollection that it didn’t work out of the box and I ended up poking and prodding until the drums were finally working with the midi I had imported.
No problem @gagomes. The thing is, this template doesn’t seem to work out for you. If I were you, I’d save a new version of the project, so that I would keep exactly what I have done so far, and then open the freshly saved project and pull its guts out. Go through the interface’s outputs (F4), see what’s wrong with Kontakt and GGD’s multiple outputs (that are another thing), and then see how to form groups for separate kit pieces (rack1, 2, 3, 4 to a RackAll group for example) that all end up in Stereo Out, where the rest of the mix is.
Ok, this is where all the outputs come from.
Can you please take a screenshot of the Mixdown window? I want to see if we can take a shortcut for this project.
Edit: Nevermind, saw one in the very first post. Unfortunately, we can’t take the shortcut. If you had Pro, you could select all these outputs to be included in the final mixdown, despite it being unorthodox workflow. But now we have to do it the long way.
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- SAVE project under a different name! Keep the old project safe, and load the newly saved experimental version.
- Check your project for a “VST Instruments” folder in your track list.
- Open that, and locate a GGD folder. (or Kontakt, I don’t know what name it uses.)
- Open that, and if all is ok you will see GGD’s outputs as tracks.
- Select them all.
- On the left, there should be an Output field. Alt-Shift-Click there, and Alt-Shift-Click on Stereo Out, so that all outputs are set to Stereo Out.
- Get rid of all the outputs except for Stereo Out in the Audio Connections window (F4)
That should be it. After that, in your mixconsole, in the left visibility zone, Shift-click the second [V], where it says VST Instruments. This should change your mixconsole to show only your VSTs. It will show all those GGD channels, where you can tweak and mix and insert effects, or send to groups etc etc., but their Output would be Stereo Out and would finally be exported with the rest of the mix.
If you hit a wall somewhere, just give a shout.
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Yeah. Some videos can cause more harm than good.
Cubase is a very deep environment with potentially lots of complexity - so it can be a challenge to learn, especially when starting. One way to deal with this is to break down what you are doing into multiple steps which are simpler. In this case instead of trying to get your drum library up & running with each drum having its own Channel in Cubase, start off with getting the library running just as a Stereo Track and once that’s functioning then work on getting multiple outputs going.
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Another way to do this is to take Kontakt off the track and add it back on. It will default to having just one stereo output track. But that’s no good if you genuinely want every drum and cymbal to have its own channel!
My way of working (using Superior Drummer) is to start with everything going to a single stereo output, and to add additional outputs only if I need specific treatment for a particular drum - usually the kick or snare. That way I don’t clutter up the project.
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I’m the exact opposite using BFD. My Template uses separate outputs for overheads, Kick, Snare, Toms, etc. And all of these get routed to a Group Channel that acts as a drum sub-mix. I keep all of this (and only this) in Mixconsole 3 as a dedicated drum mixer. The only part of this that would normally be visible in MixConsole 1 is the drum sub-mix.
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Interesting!