alligning MIDI to soundbite beats

[AriWinters]

Hey all,
I have a performance by my drummer that i really like. There is a great human feel to it, and I don't want to move the beats anywhere... however, the quality of the kick drum is pretty crappy (recording was done at another studio), and I was hoping to sweeten it up a bit with some sampled stuff. I was wondering if there is a way to allign the MIDI notes to the beats in the soundbite. I used the MIDI trigger to created the MIDI, but all of the notes are off by a little... am I missing a parameter in the trigger, or are there certain settings that I should be using? I had the trigger set to be most accurate. Let me know If there is something I am missing. Thanks.
-Ari

[ganapatimusic]

If you mean the MIDI notes that result from trigger are a little off then it could be an overall delay for trigger to process, and/or a delay for the MIDI sounds you are triggering to respond to DP's MIDI note on. Either of which might be ameliorated by shifting the MIDI track (duplicating the take first is a good idea). But in addition to delay MIDI has "slop"- inconsistancy in how late each note is. So it is possible that in addition to shifting to get the MIDI notes closer, some would have to be hand edited. Look for the peak in the audio waveform and drag the corresponding MIDI note there. It may take a little nudging to find where the relationship between the visible peak of the audio waveform and the sound of the MIDI note is satisfactory to you. Then try shifting and hand editing to get all the notes like that. If you are using VI's for the triggered drum sounds the buffer size may affect the delay between DP's MIDI note on message and when you hear the sound- the smaller the buffer the smaller the delay generally.

An alternative is to use adjust beats to align each beat to the peak trasnient of the audio waveform then quantize the notes.

Another alternative would be to record/bounce to disk the MIDI and then hand align the audio recording of the MIDI triggered sounds to visually align with the waveforms of the original performances.
And there are drum replacement programs- but how their responsiveness compares to trigger would have to be addressed by someone else.

Good luck

[XYZ]

Drumagog comes highly recommended.