Recommendation / opinion on drum track quantize

[DPINCGK]

Hello I checked a couple other posts in this thread but I would like to ask for a recommendation and I thank you sincerely in advance...

Recently recorded a rhythm section, drummer was playing a low cost electronic kit where I could only get a stereo mix output for the kick, snare and hat and even so he only had 1 channel working so it's MONO.

I used DP for recording, and the group was playing against the metronome so the audio recorded should be mostly correct to the sequence tempo. But the drummer was sloppy in some parts and I would like to fix perhaps 30% of his Kick/Snare/Hat performance. Much of it is kick/snare only.

Can anyone recommend the fastest way to split the drum notes on the mono track to regions by transients in one operation? (or alternatively a tutorial on this topic?). I would like to quantize some, maybe not all of these drum hits perhaps with or without time stretching depending on how the time stretching sounds.

Thanks in advance!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

With that much error, I'd either get the drummer in to track it again, or dump the track and replace it. At some point the question becomes: "is it worth the time an effort to 'save' a crappy performance?" My personal feeling is that, while there are obviously ways to fix all this thru a series of actions, would it be more time efficient (not to mention artistically satisfying) to just replace the track.

Also, don't work with bad musicians...

[DPINCGK]

Thank you, normally that would be an option but not in this particular case for a variety of reasons. Basically all I'm looking to do is to find a very quick way to split the entire track up into drum hits. If I can get there, that will accomplish my need for the moment.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Ok. Plan B.

Sample the simple rhythm (assuming he/she got it right at least once) then just playback and repeat the sample as needed. No?

[HCMarkus]

No MIDI output on that e.kit? If so, so sad.

Capture MIDI and the live sound simultaneously, replace the kit parts with VI Drums and use the live sound as reference for levels and tones.

[CharlzS]

Haven’t ever had the opportunity or need to try this on recorded drums yet, but maybe look at the pitch segments in the waveform editor. If it looks like the drums and hats are well represented, paste the pitch info to a MIDI track. Tighten the MIDI up and use a VI to replace the entire drum part. Not sure how well the pitch analysis works with drums.

[stubbsonic]

I don't think there's an easy way. Some of those spectral editors have some tricks up their sleeve. Spectralayers, maybe? But seems a pity to spend 40 hours on a 4 minute drum track.

Perhaps just leave it in mono, define little regions and slide things around in time until it feels tighter. You can do all the crossfades en masse, at the end, just select all, then make a short equal power xfade between two regions and they'll all go at once. Then go through and tweak any that don'd good.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I suggest another strategy. Let the MoFo live with his bad performance.

[DPINCGK]

Thanks guys - I found the solution. There's another DAW that has the feature I need. Issue corrected, already done with 3 tracks only 1 more to go!!!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Care to share this amazing DAW and the miraculous feature?

[bjornln]

Hi,


There is a moth webinar that shows pretty much what you need. In (about) four different ways... The webinar was called "DP webinar pristine audio time-stretching". You will find a link here:
https://motu.com/en-us/products/softwar ... pril-2020/


Best,
/B

[DPINCGK]

Thanks bjornin. I will have a look at that.

Since I was in a rush I got some help from a friend who is a longtime Logic user. I happen to have Logic Pro X so he walked me through a few steps.

These steps involved creating a new Logic Pro X file at the same tempo, time signature, sample rate and then dragging the problematic drum track into a new audio track in Logic Pro X. Double clicking on the header of the audio region in the source track opens a region viewer tab underneath (don't know formal name of this view).

In this viewer where you can enter Transient Editing Mode via a popdown menu under the "File" section of the region viewer (two sections, "Track" and "File"). I found the transient detection to be mostly satisfactory for what I needed. In the Track section of the viewer you can Command+Click on the region and there's an popup menu function to "Slice At Transient Markers". This slices the audio file up into little regions on your track that you can then take and move, or quantize.

From there the path I chose was to drag only the problematic drum hits that were way off the mark down to an empty track underneath the source track. As I said it wasn't all hits, just some - it turned out to be more like 10% of the performance - and some fills that needed the attention. 4 short songs. It went pretty quick. Once I had those moved I quantized what I needed to, applied a fade in a couple places and re-rendered the track.

I'm almost 100% certain there is a similar way to do this equivalent process automatically in Digital Performer. I seem to remember even MachFive 3 had a beat slicer (I had forgotten that term and it did not occur to me to search for it).

Thanks for your help that's all I needed to accomplish.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I don’t use it but there’s a DP feature to delete silences between modulations of audio. It’s adjustable so that would slice up all but the tightest rhythms. Don’t hire that drummer again. Lol