REAPER Tutorial: Multi-Out Drum Tutorial

One of the hardest parts of a home studio to "get right" is the drums (unless you happen to really be a drummer). In a world of free and/or cheap tools it is hard to find a good virtual drum kit that gives you the options needed to get a solid drum sound and have the ability to mix the drums off into separate channels.

With most free drum VST instruments, if you want to be able to treat each drum separately (i.e. if you wanted to do something like add some extra reverb to ONLY the bass drum), you would be forced to use multiple instances of a standard drum VST, and program each drum sound as a separate instrument. This causes 2 problems: it increases your processing overhead by running 8 or more versions of the same VST (eating your CPU power like candy), and it is really hard to lock in your drum pattern when you're dealing with so many separate MIDI tracks feeding the sound of your drums. Notice I said "most free drum VST instruments"?

GTG Drum Sampler I
GTG makes some absolutely wonderful drum sampler VSTs (and some pretty good synths, too). Most of them feature a stereo out, but the GTG_DrumSampler I features a total of 9 outputs; 1 main output and 8 individual outputs for each piece of the drum kit. The UI has a nice picture of a Drum Kit, and the drums vibrate when they are played, which is a frill, but it's a nice touch.
Configure Your Outputs
First we want to configure the track itself for the drums. Since we know GTG Drum Sampler I has a total of 9 outputs (8 for individual drums), we will need to reconfigure our track for 8 channels. On the track where you want the drums, click on the "io" button on the left of the track panel. This will open the routing window for that track. There is a field in the top left labeled "Track Channels". This usually defaults to 2. Change that to 8.


Configure the Drums
Now that we've expanded the channels that this track will control, let's go to the UI of the DrumSampler I. In the top right of the window, there is a button labeled "9 Outputs". Click this to get the routing matrix for the drum kit. You will get REAPER's attempt to do what you want, which is a stair-step appearance, and completely useless as it is. It is useless because as is you will ONLY hear the bass drum. Here is where the labels take some getting used to. If you just want to hear all the drums together, you need to fill in the boxes for outputs 2 through 9 across the top row (Channel 1). This will play all the sounds through the left channel.

For our purposes, we want all the drums isolated. So instead, let's make the routings in this order: 2->Channel 1; 3->Channel 2; 4->Channel 3;etc. Your routing diagram should look like the one shown here:

This configuration means that the first drum (bass drum) will be output on channel 1, the second instrument (snare drum) will be output on channel 2, and so forth. To see a complete list of the outputs, click on the INFO text in the to middle of the Drum Sampler interface, and it will change to a drum assignment listing. With the way it interfaces with REAPER, these numbers are 1 below the way the output is numbered in REAPER. (BD = 1 actually comes out on output 2, according to REAPER's routing).

Make the Targets
Now we need to make the target tracks for all the drums to go to. We will need 8, and you should probably name them according to the drum to avoid confusion later on. In order, they are: Bass Drum, Snare Drum, HiHat, Tom High, Tom Mid, Tom Low, Cymbal Crash, Cymbal Ride. These new tracks will be IN ADDITION to the track that you have the drum kit installed on.

Lock The Feeds
Now that we have the channels isolated, and somewhere to send them to, we need to enable the sends. Go back to your original Drum pattern track, and click the "io" button again. The first thing we want to do is disconnect this track from the master. We do this because we only care about the drums coming through the individual channels, not from this pattern directly. Disconnect this by removing the check mark from the "Master/Parent Send" option in the top left of the window.

Now click on the drop-down "Add New Send", and select the track you named "Bass Drum". This will create a new block in the window about the send to the track named "Bass Drum". Below the sliders are a couple of drop-downs labeled "1/2 => 1/2". These are channel numbers, and it defaults to paired sends. "1/2=> 1/2" means "send channels 1 and 2 from this track to tracks 1 and 2 on the track I'm sending it to". In our case, we know that the Bass Drum is on Channel 1, since that's what we set up on the Output Routing in the VST. So change the FIRST "1/2" to "1". We will leave the target as "1/2", because that will put the drum as a stereo track in the target track. That's all we need to configure this send.

Now go back to the drop-down "Add New Send", and select the next track, "Snare Drum". Go to the new section it created, and change the send to "2=>1/2" so we send channel 2 to the Snare Drum track. Repeat this process for each of the drums.

Try It Out
That's it! Now insert a new "Empty MIDI Item" on your original drum track, and build a drum pattern. As it plays, you will notice that the mixer controls will show that the levels are coming from the individual drums as they are hit. Build a pattern with all the drums, and play it in a loop. Now you can start playing with adjusting the levels on each drum individually, as well as adding "fx" to individual drums (like the reverb on the bass drum example).

This is a fairly simple example, but by using simple track sends, you can also simulate mic bleed between drums (by adding a send between the drum tracks, with very low volume), among other ideas.

Other Notes
I should also mention that this wonderful drum kit comes with a pretty decent single kit of drum sounds. As far as a standard drum kit, they drum samples that come pre-loaded are pretty solid and will work great for quick drums without the need to sift through samples to build a kit. If you don't like the sounds, you can still load your own through the interface.

Also, the one drawback to using this drum VST is that you are limited to an 8 piece traditional setup. So if you want a double-bass kit, heavy cymbals, extra toms, etc., then you'll need to either use multiple instances of this VST with alternate drums, or upgrade to more serious software. But for simple drum tracks, it's still a great place to start.