Drum Editing

[austinhue]

Hey guys, just wondering what everybody uses for editing/replacing live drums.

Personally I comp in Logic Pro and quantize using Logic's Flex Time (all at the same time), then bounce and use Drumagog to detect and replace hits on the kick, snare, and tom tracks (no triggers - just mics in strategic locations). Then I keep the overhead/hi hat/etc mics and work from there.

If anybody's found anything that works better than Flex Time and Drumagog (for someone who does not own triggers and isn't planning on dropping a couple hundred dollars on a set anytime soon), let's hear your solution!

 

[jimwilbourne]

I just upgraded from my 2006 mac last month to a new one. I just started working with flextime. I'm pretty impressed. I love it for drums & guitars.
I never used protools. Perhaps their version of it may offer different possiblities.

Joey mentioned in an interview that he tried pt9 for a while and misses elastic audio.

I'm actually curious to know what he thought about his protools experience vs. his cubase use in more detail.

 

[AllanD]

I'm pretty sure most people here do slip editing. Personally I use aptrigga for my drum sampling, but I do know that Trigger and Drumagog are both very popular.

 

[timislegend]

whatever's clever.

 

[austinhue]

I only have experience with Beat Detective, haven't tried Elastic yet. I like Flex way more for guitars, and especially drums (it's super easy to edit-lock tracks into groups in Logic too, which helps for multitrack drum editing). I don't really like it for vocals, Logic has some difficulty detecting the right transients sometimes. This is also a problem for bass.

Also, I've been running into a problem recently where Logic will draw solid white "transient markers" all over my track and won't let me overwrite them. This can cause a graphical bug where the edits I make actually affect the transient one to the left, and on one occasion it actually caused audible flams in the overheads - though they appeared to be synced with the drums and all the tracks were locked together.

I like Drumagog better than Trigger, but it's hella expensive. I noticed that aptrigga is only 54 dollars - what's the catch? Let's say I have a drum roll I want to replace. Will it let me use "soft" hits as ghost notes without having to create a whole new track? Also, I like the way Drumagog will randomly select a different hit of the same velocity for each trigger. Can aptrigga do this?

And yeah, tim, that makes sense... I've just only had real experience with Drumagog and Flex, I wanted to see if there was anybody out there who'd already done a whole metal album with one method or another. Beats demo versions, I think =]

 

[AllanD]

In Aptrigga you can only load 9 samples at a time max. What I do to work around that is just copy/paste the snare track with all the effects, cut out everything except for softer rolls/fills and then use another instance of aptrigga to load softer hits. Yes, aptrigga has either a dynamic mode, where it chooses a hit based on how hard you hit, or a random mode, where it just randomly chooses a sample. What I do is use random mode for all the hard hits, then dynamic mode on the second snare track with only soft hits/rolls.

 

[tempe]

Well I've tried absolutely everything lol, slip editing, elastic audio, Beat Detective, flex time.

Slip Editing: The best and most transparent, unfortunately I'm in Pro Tools and really couldn't be bothered transferring entire sessions out just to drum edit

Beat Detective: Amazing, absolutely amazing for simple stuff. If you've got say 16 bars of a two step and the drum is any good, usually beat detective will nail it first shot. Anything complex or really fast though... forget about it.

Tab To Transient / Quantize / Edit Smooth hybrid: This is what I'm doing at the moment you basically group your drums in PT, use tab to transient to find the hits and cut by hand, and move each hit to the grid while you go either with the auto quantize or just moving by hand. Then select your edits and use BD to fix the gaps and cross fade, its basically the same as Beat Detective, but Beat Detective proof if that makes sense.

Elastic Audio: Haven't spent as much time with this one, love it on guitars bass and vocals, drums was ooook. Didn't like what it was doing to the cymbals.

Flex Time: Same deal as elastic audio but I spent around a year on it, auto quantize is pretty lame due to its transient detection but if you treat it like slip editing and create your own transient markers its fantastic.

Bottom line, all get the job done and its personal preference!

 

[Vinny]

How do you guys avoid phase issues with, say, a drum track, snare track, and overhead tracks with editing? Obviously you'd want to minimize the most amount of bleed as possible, but how would get around phase problems like editing a snare and kick track separately, or an overhead track and kick track separately since you obviously still will have atleast some bleed (assume we're not triggering). Because obviously, not all of the hits are going to be out of time at the same spot. I'd imagine room mics to be terrible too for editing, since you can't go and dissect a snare hit while you are hitting a cymbal at the same time.
Or is it just absolutely minimal to where you don't worry about it at all?

 

[jimwilbourne]

How do you guys avoid phase issues with, say, a drum track, snare track, and overhead tracks with editing? Obviously you'd want to minimize the most amount of bleed as possible, but how would get around phase problems like editing a snare and kick track separately, or an overhead track and kick track separately since you obviously still will have atleast some bleed (assume we're not triggering). Because obviously, not all of the hits are going to be out of time at the same spot. I'd imagine room mics to be terrible too for editing, since you can't go and dissect a snare hit while you are hitting a cymbal at the same time.
Or is it just absolutely minimal to where you don't worry about it at all?

Well. When you slip edit, it's important to group your drum tracks together so you're aren't actually editing them seperately.
You can get away with not editing the kick with the group however if there isn't much kick bleed and if you HP your overheads.

 

[JamesNorman]

I love flexi time, its wicked

 

[setyouranchor]

I love flexi time, its wicked

+1

SO easy to use

 

[Seth Munson]

Elastic audio is a hell of alot easier but if you get those stretched artifacts in there the whole drum track is botched IMO
Why I stick to tab to transient, cut, tab, cut, tab, cut and then at the endof the section smooth with auto crossfade and then repeat throughout the song section by section

 

[austinhue]

Elastic audio is a hell of alot easier but if you get those stretched artifacts in there the whole drum track is botched IMO
Why I stick to tab to transient, cut, tab, cut, tab, cut and then at the endof the section smooth with auto crossfade and then repeat throughout the song section by section

Is this in PT or Logic? Becuase I know you can do this in Logic, but I've never had much more luck than just turning on Flex and letting it detect transients.

 

[Seth Munson]

I'm talking about "Bro Tools"

 

[gabriel g.]

Well I've tried absolutely everything lol, slip editing, elastic audio, Beat Detective, flex time.

Slip Editing: The best and most transparent, unfortunately I'm in Pro Tools and really couldn't be bothered transferring entire sessions out just to drum edit

Beat Detective: Amazing, absolutely amazing for simple stuff. If you've got say 16 bars of a two step and the drum is any good, usually beat detective will nail it first shot. Anything complex or really fast though... forget about it.

Tab To Transient / Quantize / Edit Smooth hybrid: This is what I'm doing at the moment you basically group your drums in PT, use tab to transient to find the hits and cut by hand, and move each hit to the grid while you go either with the auto quantize or just moving by hand. Then select your edits and use BD to fix the gaps and cross fade, its basically the same as Beat Detective, but Beat Detective proof if that makes sense.

Elastic Audio: Haven't spent as much time with this one, love it on guitars bass and vocals, drums was ooook. Didn't like what it was doing to the cymbals.

Flex Time: Same deal as elastic audio but I spent around a year on it, auto quantize is pretty lame due to its transient detection but if you treat it like slip editing and create your own transient markers its fantastic.

Bottom line, all get the job done and its personal preference!

flex tim in slice mode, is basicly slip-editing but with less things to do.
The auto thing works only with good drummers and straight beats.
I mostly do the slip-edit thing with it and thats just wonderfull !!!

 

[gabriel g.]

How do you guys avoid phase issues with, say, a drum track, snare track, and overhead tracks with editing? Obviously you'd want to minimize the most amount of bleed as possible, but how would get around phase problems like editing a snare and kick track separately, or an overhead track and kick track separately since you obviously still will have atleast some bleed (assume we're not triggering). Because obviously, not all of the hits are going to be out of time at the same spot. I'd imagine room mics to be terrible too for editing, since you can't go and dissect a snare hit while you are hitting a cymbal at the same time.
Or is it just absolutely minimal to where you don't worry about it at all?

never edit drum tracks seperatly. If the drummer sucks with the kick (most drummers do) dont let him/her play the hard stuff only the standard stuff.

If he realy NEEDS to fuck up the double-bass lines give him a trigger-kick which doesnt bleed into the other mics.

Bleed is a good thing with drums. It gives the drums the real sound and you also cant go nutz with eqs because the "bleeding" instruments will sound terrible.

 

[Vinny]

Wow, ok thanks alot guys! Never really thought about that!

 

[austinhue]

Dang guys I'm going to buy this apTrigga shiz. It looks like the only differences between this and Drumagog are that Drumagog has a more cluttered GUI, takes up more processing power, and gives you the ability to multisample 30 thousand different hits of the same velocity (which makes your tracks sound like your drummer is blindfolded and has Parkinson's).

 

[Seth Munson]

Dang guys I'm going to buy this apTrigga shiz. It looks like the only differences between this and Drumagog are that Drumagog has a more cluttered GUI, takes up more processing power, and gives you the ability to multisample 30 thousand different hits of the same velocity (which makes your tracks sound like your drummer is blindfolded and has Parkinson's).

Did you even consider Trigger?

 

[setyouranchor]

Did you even consider Trigger?

Get Trigger.