How do you record an external Midi Instrument + Software instrument track down to a combined Audio track ?

Question

I have two piano sounds I'm trying to blend into one. One is an external MIDI module set up as an external instrument within Logic and the other is a software plugin instrument (Ivory II). I'm trying to record the blended pianos into a single audio track so I can ditch the midi track and more so the CPU intense software Instrument track (it's killing my setup....). For the life of me I can't figure out how to assign both these entities as inputs and get them to record simultaneosuly onto an audio track.
My setup is a Presonus Studiolive 16.4.2 with the following assignments:
The external MIDI module's audio output is routed stereo directly into channel strips 9 and 10. By default the firewire output of this channel strip is returned to firewire outputs 9-10 on the studiolive, but this really doesn't matter since recorded audio is being monitored thru the main output buss assigned to channels 17 and 18.
My software plugin (Ivory II) is routed to output channels 17 and 18 which is the default setting for routing the output to the master buss for the Presonus.
On my audio track that's setup in Logic I can assign the inputs to 9 and 10 and I get the external midi module's output to record, but I cannot find any way to get the software instruments output into this mix because there is no input assignment for this.
Is there any way to combine these two entities and assign them to record onto a single audio track or am I missing something here? If there's no simple way to do this, can somebody offer any tip or ideas on how to accomplish the same thing here. I really need to ditch the software plugin. My setup only seems to be able to handle one plug in at a time on the software instrument side. Not sure why that is because my setup is not that old and the memory on my MBP is maxed out at 4GB....but that's another topic of discussion
Any suggenstions would be much appreciated...

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply....
I actually tried freezing the software instrument track and that had little if no effect on CPU. I then read in the book or somewhere that the freeze function really only works on effect plugins. Don't know if that's true in all cases, but that seems to be what's happening.  Still would like to combine these tracks and I'm guessing I'm going to have to get creative with bussing or subgroups to make this happen. Unfortunately I think the fact that my Presonus board has hardmapped output routings for all the inputs makes that difficult, but haven't actually tried yet. I'm thinking if I can reroute the midi modules audio output input into the Presonus to a subgroup and then route the software instrument plug in to the same subgroup that I can then mix/capture this and hopefully route the audio's input to the subgroup to pick up the mix.
Does this make sense to anybody reading this?
We'll see and I'll post the results if it works....
thanks...b