Need help with exploding midi, and converting to wav.

[jonshea]

Hello reaper forum! Thank you for being an amazing resource for all of us aspiring engineers! So the title pretty much says it all but here's what I'm running into. My drummer sent me some midi drums. It's all in one midi item. So I right clicked this midi item, went item processing and exploded midi item by pitch. Now ive got separate tracks for every drum piece, great right. So I did some editing to those tracks to clean up timing and whatnot, and now I want to convert all of those new midi tracks to wav, so I can start processing them with effects. Problem is, when I render/freeze these tracks the wav files have no audio at all, presumably because the original track that I exploded is where the signal is coming from. If I render the original stem as mono or stereo, I get one big wav file with all of the drums meaning I can't put individual effects on the pieces. What am I missing?

[mschnell]

There are lots of great tutorial videos for Reaper.

-Michael

[jonshea]

Yes there are, I cant seem to find anything about this though. Lots of tutorials on rendering midi, but none of them are exploded out like the track I'm working with.

[jonshea]

I have figured out what I was doing wrong, if anyone else encounters this problem here is what I figured out:

The main track with the original midi drums had superior drummer VST in the FX window, so the midi was producing sound on that track. The exploded tracks had no VST attached, so when I tried to render I just got a blank audio file. My solution was to copy my superior drummer VST session into all of the exploded tracks, then the render to mono option produced wav files

[DarkStar]

I would do it this way:
-- create a new track with a drum VSTi on it,
-- load up / configure a drum kit, as desired,
-- Send all your separate "MIDI tracks" to that VSTi track.

Now, all the audio output will be on the VSTi track with all the drums playing. What you need to do is split up the audio in Reaper AND within the drum VSTi

-- open the FX window for the VSTi track and select the VSTi,
-- click [Options} and select "Build multichannel routing for output ...",
-- this will create several tracks for the audio output and route channels from the VSTi track to them,
-- name those "audio" tracks suitably,
-- add / configure FX as desired to those tracks,
-- now, within the drum VSTi, route the output of each drum kit piece to the desired output channel (Kick to 1, Snare to 2, Hi-Hats to 3, Toms to 4, Cymbals to 5 etc ).

[jonshea]

Oh interesting, I haven't done much routing from within a VST before, I suppose this allows you to have only one instance of the VST running instead of clogging up my ram. Very helpful! Thank you!

[hopi]

Originally Posted by jonshea

Oh interesting, I haven't done much routing from within a VST before, I suppose this allows you to have only one instance of the VST running instead of clogging up my ram. Very helpful! Thank you!

yes that is the general idea... you have your many midi tracks sending to the VSTi that actually produces sound...
With some VSTi's there are ways to route the audio out to separtate tracks to record the wav's... but
you could also do it an easy way...
Mute all other tracks that are not the Drum VSTi
Mute all but one of the midi tracks, say the Kick
do a render and set the render dialog to add that wav as a new track in the project
Now mute all but one of the remaining midi track, say the snare

repeat this until you have all the drum wav's you desire
then mute the drum vsti and work with the wav files

EDIT: actually you "could" do it another way [there are several]
you could, once you have your separated midi tracks, put another instance of the drum VSTi on each of those midi tracks [you can just drag and drop copies of it from the drum VSTi FX button]
and then just freeze each one
you'll get the wav right there
And you can unfreeze any one to further edit the midi data and then re-feeze it until you are happy
so then Mute your original drum VSTi and play with the wav's

[Tarvas Auroch]

Old thread... still might be relevant for some.

What I do is to:

1) explode the MIDI track as you do and once I have all the separate MIDI tracks, I delete the original MIDI item (or move it to another track, in case I need to go back for some changes)

2) now the same track (which has already the VST inserted) becomes a folder that is automatically routed to its children tracks.

3) I simply solo one child track and render/freeze the parent track, once it is finished, I move the new frozen/rendered clip to a new track and repeat the process with all the other tracks.