A question about Quantization

[metaldrmmer83]

To Andy or anyone else that understands this process,
I understand Andy quantizes his drums tracks before he begins mixing. How exactly do you or anyone else who uses this technique go about quantizing? Any help is appreciated.

 

[pharrell]

Yo

Put all your drums into a group on your edit window and if you have protools do the tab to transient technique across all the tracks then move the most prominent hit (snare or kick) onto your grid and crossfade. Repeat until your eyes bleed!!!

Make sure that you chop your drums as a whole not just the kick or the snare otherwise you will begin to get phasing issues

Hope this helps

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Is this something you can do in PTLE?

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Well, f@*#ing A! I can't believe how easy that is. Why haven't I been doing this since day 1?

 

[Ermz]

Yo

Put all your drums into a group on your edit window and if you have protools do the tab to transient technique across all the tracks then move the most prominent hit (snare or kick) onto your grid and crossfade. Repeat until your eyes bleed!!!

Make sure that you chop your drums as a whole not just the kick or the snare otherwise you will begin to get phasing issues

Hope this helps

It sounds like that would be a fairly lengthy process during long double-kick parts.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

It sounds like that would be a fairly lengthy process during long double-kick parts.

Not necessarily because you don't have to do it kick by kick--as long as a section itself is on time (say 3 seconds worth), you can just stretch it to fit. If the kicks are off then that's something you'd deal with later anyway. I think, at least.

Damn, my drummer is going to sound like raymond herrera now.

 

[pharrell]

Also FYI:

If you have PTLE 6.7 that comes with Beat detective but digidesign are cheeky monkeys and only allow you to chop up a stereo file! HOWEVER the way I use it is to manually chop all your drums yourself using the tab - trans then cntrl E and then use beat detective to sort all your crossfades. Another issue is that protools dosen't like lots of fades in a session so once your happy with your drums consolidate them down to a new file

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Also FYI:

If you have PTLE 6.7 that comes with Beat detective but digidesign are cheeky monkeys and only allow you to chop up a stereo file! HOWEVER the way I use it is to manually chop all your drums yourself using the tab - trans then cntrl E and then use beat detective to sort all your crossfades. Another issue is that protools dosen't like lots of fades in a session so once your happy with your drums consolidate them down to a new file

Cool thanks. I've been using Time Compression Expansion. I guess it has a crossfade built in or something because I'm getting no nasty pops thus far.

My drummer is going to shit in his pants when he hears what I'm doing. I'm taking an old song that we recorded for the hell of it a while back but he was way off time so we didn't do anything with it. We are now though!!!!hahahaha

BTW my eyes are beginning to bleed already!!!!!

 

[Andy Sneap]

Actually thats the tricky way of doing it, beat detective is the way. On LE, you can only do two tracks at a time, so the work around is to record your drums to a stereo track and use beat detective to separate regions on this. Set it so you have the cut 10 ms before each hit ,conform , fill and crossfade (5ms). then use your broken up stereo file to tab along your drum tracks and chop em up accordingly. Pain in the arse with LE, easy in full version (you don't have to bother with this work around). I'll do a separate group for kicks and kit with no kicks for fast double kick parts.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

I don't believe I have Beat Detective on PTLE 5.3. Tricky or not, this thing is fricken rad.

 

[Andy Sneap]

I've not used this method in LE much, cant remember how you snap to grid once you've cut your drum tracks up , i got things in the wrong order above. Do a search on the digi forum, its in the LE section as a work around.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

thanks for the advice...will do...by the way if you want any advice from me the only thing I can offer is think twice about public transportation in your neck of the woods.

 

[Andy Sneap]

I don't do public transport, thanks all the same.

 

[Benny H]

This all makes me think.. you might aswell just program the drums?

Am I way off?

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

You would think that, but you can't get the natural feel for the hits on a drum machine, no matter how well you program it. More important, even with the quantizing, the human hits will still be just a tad off, keeping it from being too robotic.

 

[Benny H]

Understood.

Speaking of time consuming things of this nature.. I've gone through a few songs that weren't recorded to clicks, and adjusted the grid/tempo at, at least every bar, so as to line it up and program midi along side them. For eg. Machine Head - Blood Of The Zodiac, that took forever.. mind you I was programming an exact drum track. haha then the peeps I did it for said it was too fast or slow in spots.. yet it played next to the fucking song. Admittedly it did sound somewhat weird because the tempo changes I was trying to copy where were very subtle and human, great drumming.

I've done this for some Meshuggah songs also. It's given me the opinion that if you have a good/gifted drummer, their feel should be trusted to guide the song.. or at least given a chance. The 2 songs that come to mind are Machine Head - BotZ.. the tempo 'swells' and 'contracts' (for some reason these words seem right). And Meshuggah - Sane, the lull in the song slows down quite a bit. Both songs are perfection to me, but technically they are not.

 

[~BURNY~]

Quantizing audio is an alien from outer space thing to me. How do you deal with sustained sounds such as cymbals? Do you quantize overhead tracks aswell?

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

DEGENERATE -- yeah you should check out "down to none" on that cd, listen to how much faster the last verse is than the first two. Kills me every time. I hope they did that on purpose.

BURNY -- Yes, quantize overheads, everything. That's why pharrel said to group everything so you don't have to shift click when editing.

 

[~BURNY~]

Wow.

 

[Ermz]

So would there be a way to translate this process to Cubase?