Hey everyone! I’ve been playing with setting up Battery 4 to output to individual audio tracks in Live 10. I’m a bit confused about the mono vs stereo outs. Why does Battery have so many mono outs and so few stereo outs? What do you suggest as far as setting this up?
Hey @pushandstart check your Battery Engine settings… You should be able to specify how many mono channels you want (if you want any…) See pics attached… Hope that helps!!
@pushandstart There is an easy answer for that. It seems like VST instruments can only have 32 output channels at the moment. This means that you can only have 16 stereo pairs (which are 2 channels each). The reason why you can have more mono outputs is simply because a mono output it is only a single channel. I personally have set it to “Custom” and I am using 4 stereo and 24 mono channels. But really the truth of the matter is that you might as well use 16 stereo outs because a mono sound is still going to be mono even if it’s on a stereo channel. The biggest pro to using mono channels is simply that you can use more independent outputs but lets be real when was the last time you really needed more than 16 channels for your drums & percussion? If the answer is “All the time” you might as well just open another instance of Battery and have 32 stereo outputs in total. Let me tell you an important thing at the end here: If you have older projects that rocked a different output configuration you might run into the trouble that you have to do the whole routing again (At least this is what I noticed in Cubase…maybe Ableton is different) because it seems like the output settings are a global setting that don’t get saved with the project and if the channel configuration isn’t exactly the same you might end up with some crazy routing when you try to open an older project that had a different configuration (at least that is what happened to me). Good luck
hey push and start, I’ll throw my two cents in here because I’ve been through the drum output routing journey even from when we used to throw beats on mpc’s and mv8800’s or 909’s. it was practical then to multi-out hardware to digital because it was the only way we could post process drum outs. today though, unless you’re still using hardware, it’s much more efficient both on cpu and time, to just create your drum loops in a vst, like battery, machine, addictive drums, etc., and then bounce to audio files and process on audio tracks. it also eliminates the midi sync problem inherent in large projects, and is much less confusing in the overall scheme of things. think simplicity, and a huge distinction between seasoned producers and newbies, or amateurs, is the ability to commit. being able to commit sounds to audio files is crucial to overcoming the amateur hurdle.