Drum quantizing killin' me

[mickrich]

I am working on an album for a DM band.
Quantizing the drums is proving hard work.
In logic I am having to group the kit minus kicks then using the snare trigger as "q reference" put the kit to the grid.
The fast double kicks are not quite tight enough to include in the group.
Worse still is that the kicks have lots of triplet timing (one-and-a-two-and..)
How do you guys normally deal with this sort of thing.
The quickest way I have found is to put kick one as q reference and quantize the triplets to 24 grid then move any of the kick 2s that are off.
I spent 9 hours yesterday and got 4 songs done. I will be doing the other 5 later this week.
If anyone can recommend a better approach then I would love to hear it before the session.
Thanks
Michael

 

[Ermz]

I'm not sure what these 'q references' are but if a drummer has been particularly hopeless I will just edit the kick and the rest of the kit individually of each other for the entire song/project. This tends to make things a lot easier and speedier, provided you've sufficiently damped the kicks in the room mics and OHs.

 

[greyskull]

i miss his little face

 

[freddrik]

This is how I do it Logic 9, works great

Make a group including all of the drum tracks
Activate the group and select kick,snare and toms as Q-ref
Go into Flex mode and select Slicing in the inspector of any of the Q-ref tracks
When transient detection is done, right click a region and select Split at transients

Then you can quantize more straightforward parts using the audio quantize from the event list and manually grid fills and more complex parts.

 

[Let it burn...]

pro tools with tap to transient and audio region quantize =

 

[burst]

+1 to freddrik, Flex mode rules! Very fast and easy

 

[AdamWathan]

Logic sucks for multitrack editing in my experience, compared to Beat Detective at least... Not as flexible whatsoever. You can do it but it's tricky and doesn't sound as good at least with flex. I would manually do it all in Logic instead of flex time. Slicing mode causes dropouts between hits constantly, I have no idea how it's actually filling gaps or crossfading but it's useless. Machinated on the forum uses Logic for drum editing and he still does it all by hand.

 

[Force666]

If you can edit a full length in 2 days.....That's pretty good. IMO.

 

[ruckus328]

Dude, I just spent all day Sat (8+ hours) on ONE song...lol And the drummer is tight. It's just that from start to finish there's nothing simple going on. Blast Beats, Double Kicks, Crazy Rolls, Triplets, Quadruplets, Quintuplets, Sextuplets, you name it. I use Elastic Audio in Pro Tools and do each hit, one by one, by hand. For that type of music the computer's only going to be able to do so much. For the complex shit it's all gotta be done manually. I usually do the kick independantly of everything else, and high pass is out of the Overheads and Room Mics. I'm doing Slate on the Kick anyways, so haven't had any issues with phasing or artifacts. If you nailed 4 songs in a day, you're doing pretty good in my opinion.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

4 songs in one day is excellent.

 

[C_F_H_13]

Considering how you're editing I'd say 4 songs in a day is pretty awesome man.

In a normal 12 hour day I get 8-12 songs done depending on complexity, but that's with beat detective and a shitload of experience. I couldn't imagine doing that in logic so I'm in awe!

 

[mickrich]

Thanks to everyone for replying.
Flex in logic is pretty good.
The problem is where double kicks don't land exactly on the snares.
I have to quantize the kit minus kicks then the kicks separately.
"q reference" is telling logic that you want to use that track as a quantize reference for the group.
So 4 songs in a day is fairly normal then.
I feel much better now
Michael