miroslav
Cosmic Cowboy
I route each drum to it's own aux track in Pro Tools, using the I/Os in SD and Pro Tools; the 3 kick mics to one aux track, the 3 snare mics to one aux track, then my toms group to one stereo aux track, the high hat to it's own aux track, the OHs to a stereo aux track, then whatever room I'm using to a stereo aux track (or track(s) if I'm using more than one room) Now they're always right in front of me on my ProTools mix screen, and I can use my plugins (Waves, Slate, etc.) on those individual tracks as I please. (If I want to just mess with, say, the kick "in" mic, I'll just do that in SD) Then, I route each of those aux tracks to a stereo bus to process the kit as a whole if needed. I usually just tap it (1 or 2 db's of GR) to glue the kit together some. Then I throw on tape saturation (Slate VTM), console emulations (Slate VCC)... Reverb I send to from the individual tracks.
Then I'll make another stereo aux for my parallel bus, and use sends from the individual drum tracks.
When all this is done, soloing just the SD instrument track brings silence, since they are all routed out.
Once you're ready to commit and bounce, you could one by one record them to an audio track. Time consuming sort of, but you'd be able to keep the MIDI file afterwards and just make it inactive. For example, if I was ready to commit, say I would start with the kick drum- I'd make a new Audio track, set it's "input" to an available bus, say bus 10, then route the kick track's "output" also to bus 10. Solo them both and hit record. Do this with each element of the kit, and you would have all you drum tracks as audio, but you would still have your SD MIDI track. If you need to edit, say, just a few snare hits, make the SD track active again, make your edit, then just re-bounce the snare track.
Hey...if it works for you (and obviously it does, your stuff sounds good), then it's the way to go...but TBH, that's a lot of work!
My approach with sampled drum tracks is the same as when I record live drums in the studio...and I'll select my drums, cymbals, and give the sampled drum kit whatever tweaks it needs, same as I would do with a live kit setup...but once that's set, I dump them out of the VSTi/MIDI state into pure audio tracks, and I don't go back to tweaking the kit at the VSTi/MIDI level. Same way I can't go back to tweak a live recorded kit once the tracks are done...unless I want to start over and re-record.
Oh...I'll save the VSTi/MIDI setup as a separate project folder, purely as an absolute safety net...I mean if a REALLY have to go back to the VSTi/MIDI setup...but so far, I have never done that, mainly because I just don't want to get into that endless tweaking mode at that level.
I can still do a lot of tweaking to the drum audio tracks, same as I would to live recorded drum tracks...and that's more than enough tweaking for me.