Help with best way to program drums to a non-click recording

[Kellog]

My client recorded acoustic guitar and vocals in one pass. Multiple songs, one after another all in same sequence- so no correct tempos being used. No click (Cuz he can't play to it).
Then we added stand up bass. Now I'm programming in a drum kit part in EZ Drummer and man are the subtle timing shifts hard to get a pleasing groove to!
Is this where people use beat detection to make some kind of tempo map? I would love to be able to use the EZ Drummer loops for convincing fills etc. Will loops work with a tempo map that isn't the same BPM all of the time? I'm lost as to what the possibilities are here.
I haven't explored beat detection, so if that's my answer please tell me and I'll hit the manual.
Any other techniques I should know about, or is it just "do your best to play with them, with as low a latency as possible, and move stuff around til it grooves"? That has been time consuming so far!
Thanks in advance!!!

[David Polich]

Brother, I feel your pain. Based on my experience, there is no other way
to do this except "play along" to what he played. Forget loops or pre-recorded phrases - you will just have to "be" the drummer here.

If you're a "fingers" drummer, like I am, this shouldn't be that difficult,
but I don't know your level of drum programming. For me, it helps that I
started out as a drummer, many decades ago, so I still think like one.

My advice is to pretend it's just a sloppy band - like a beginning garage
band. Don't bother with trying to establish a steady groove. Speed up and
slow down along with his "tempo"...follow his lead. No other way.

Unless - you do what I sometimes have done...use his guitar and lead vocals
as demos and then reprogram the "real" tracks from the ground up...use either some acoustic or electric guitar VI's to recreate the guitar tracks..
then hire a session guitarist to re-track them from your references...and then finally have him come in and just cut his vocals again.

[Dan Worley]

As a starting point, watch this: http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... 27&t=46235

He did a great job.

[Buzzy]

I'm not anywhere near my DP setup for a couple days here, but just to get you started check out Adjust Beats in the manual. This will let you manually adjust where the beat lines should fall according to the recorded material, thereby creating tempo changes to fit the sequence to the soundbite. Check it out, I think it's what you're looking for.

[Prime Mover]

Ditto on the adjust beats advice. It's really not that hard or painstaking to do for a short song, and you'll be glad you did, it'll make your life a lot easier.

PS: don't let any musician tell you they can't play to a click. If they "can't" then they're not ready to record and they're just going to waste your time and their money. It's not hard to learn to play to a clikc, it's more likely that they "don't wanna!" and for childish reasons (especially folk musicians). Now sometimes a good musician will have a really good reason for not recording to a click, but you'll know it when you're dealing with someone of that caliber. And even then, they should be able to it without a problem, but chose not to. If someone can demonstrate that they can play a track to a click very proficiantly, only then are they in a position to decide not to use it.

Unless you will lose their business outright, tell them that they must be able to play to a click/metronome, even if they chose to turn it off for the real recording. Or you could just be a jerk and let them eat up studio hours, and demand the same precision as if they'd played it to a click, "One more take..."

[Kellog]

Thanks for the replies. SCORE on the Adjust Beats! Haven't tried it yet tonight but it looks like what I was looking for. Gonna explore it tomorrow.

Here's an old article from SOS mag that describes it as well.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr06/a ... h_0406.htm

It will be interesting to see if drum loops will work with an 'adjusted tempo'. Hope so.
Thanks again everyone

[toodamnhip]

Heres what I do:
I tap tempo along with the track using “record beats”
Make sure the audio is locked so it won’t move when changing the tempo map.
Then I use to “adjust beats’ to fix anything that isn;t quit on.
Also, if you set record beat to start recording beat on the 1st new hit, you can punch rougher areas of the tempo map.
After this you can find grooves in Toon track or EZ drummer , or make your own. If you use something like EZ drummer, you can import the MIDI into DP and adjust as needed.
You can also play along. There is no ONE answer to this but hard ass work man!
There is another option that I recently used which was really cool.

Ok, get this, once you have an accurate tempo map into DP based off of the tap tempo you do “copy sequence tempo to sound bite”

No your audio has your tap tempo embedded in it right?
Ok, now create an alternate tempo map at ONE tempo, (the nearest bpm to the general bpm of the original audio.)
The use the command “adjust soundbites to sequence tempo” and your audio will now be in time to a better degree or perfectly depending.
Now I know this is a touchy thing to do, sometimes it works, sometimes it sucks. It would also help if DP would finally modify it’s tempo stretch algorithms so that it wouldn’t detroy audio is was tempo adjusting.

But there are some choices and tools for you...
Good luck.

[Phil O]

It will be interesting to see if drum loops will work with an 'adjusted tempo'. Hope so.
Thanks again everyone

If they're MIDI, yes, they'll work fine. I tend to write short one or two measure (looped) figures with DP's drum editor and play through Model 12 rather than use a simple click. I've used this technique with tempo maps, and it works fine. For me, the "make a click by tapping a stick" combined with Find Beats gives better results than record beats. See Dan's link.

Phil

[mikehalloran]

Can you find a beat from the bass part that you added? Then, two parts will be playing together.