How do edit drums? With Beat Detective?

[StudioSamurai]

Hey guys,

last week I was tracking drums for a thrash project and I sat down yesterday to start comping. The drummer was slow to get into things but by the end of the sessions he was hitting hard and starting to be at one with the click, although I've found myself using 6-7 different takes a song to get a complete track and I'm still not entirely happy with the consistency all over (especially in verses/choruses, the fills are pretty much all there), so I've turned to trusty old beat detective.

Now my question to you all is kinda non specific, I just thought I'd see how some of you guys would approach the task of editing reasonably technical drum parts that have been played to not quite the standard the music demands. Don't get me wrong, I'm not quite in turd polishing territory yet, but I figured the advice from here could be really useful (especially as I'm using single track beat detective). How much do you rely on beat detective for extensive edits or do you guys prefer to get stuck in and edit manually?

So far I'm bouncing the kick and the snare to a new track and triggering beat detective from that, but I find that alot of the time beat detective screws things up, ie; sticks all the transients in the wrong places :zombie: and I don't particularly want to spend my whole Christmas editing drums

Thanks in advance! I've learned so much from searching the forums already

 

[StudioSamurai]

Also, how much do you guys like to edit everything to complete perfection? do you prefer to retain 'human' feel over absolute prescision?

 

[AEL89]

loads of threads/posts about this and even more videos on Youtube so I'd check them out first, some are really good. I learnt BD by just using it a lot though...

 

[darthjujuu]

i'd suggest just getting your hands dirty and doing some tab to transient and snipping. then use region conform (don't forget to capture selection everytime) and edit smoothing (fill gaps and crossfade, try 5ms). multi-track work around: as long as your snips are right on the transient, you can group all the drums and use alt+0 quantize audio regions and it works similarly to region conform. the downside here is you can't use the trigger pad feature. quantizing audio regions just snaps the beginning of the region to the grid. the edit smoothing should work just the same, however.

if you're doing anything with fast insane-o double bass, you may want to edit that independently of the rest of the kit (as in not grouped.) edit percussive single hits with the kit, but with a slew of fast 16ths or 16th triplets just edit them on the kick track. or, if you plan on sampling the kick entirely, just convert it to MIDI.

 

[greyskull]

do you have the music production toolkit for multitrack bd?
ill pull out how i do it. BY SEARCHING

you gotta be careful and follow some simple guidelines really..

Always select in grid mode, and always from the beginning off the bar.
Do not make a selection over a tempo change, that'll throw it out.

The best way ive found is to do it in sections of the beat, and do fills separately.
then it can be a case of trial and error with the different quantize settings and making sure you have no false triggers.

The best way to stop this is (well this is how i do it anyway. no idea how to use collection mode, still after all this time. terrible!).


Ah-hem

Have two edit groups. One for all the drums, and one for just the kick snare and toms.
When making a selection, use the shell edit group (i normally call it drum bd or just bd)

Select using drum bd. Then open up beat detective. (apple+8)
Seperate (i use 5-10 ms region pad)
Then turn on the all drums edit track select down.. using the shorcut, which off the top of my head is ; in key command focus.

Then switch to the conform tab on the beat detective window
work out what setting you'll need - its normally 1/4 or 1/8 for simple beats, and generally 1/16 for fills, but beware triplets!!
then hit conform..

Listen back (yes WITH the annoying gaps) and check that it all sounds good.
If not either undo and try a different quantize setting, or failing that check for false triggers and try again.

If it REALLY wont work, sometimes shifting the region manually earlier or later so its generally close to the grid can help too.

Then once you've done this through the whole song (Yes AGAIN!) duplicate the playlist as a backup.
Then open up beat detective again (apple+8)
Go to the edit smoothing tab
Choose Fill and crossfade and a time around 5-10 ms (sorry you gotta experiment)
Then choose fade.

Then while it does that Depending on the speed of your computer you should have enough time to Put the kettle on and have a cigarette (absolutely mandatory)

Now listen through the whole song again to make sure the fades havent caused any glitches by crossfadding in the wrong place..
Fix any dodgy fades..

When this is done...
Save as 'drum edit done'
highlight the drum regions from the end to the begining - the easiest way is to click the last one and press shift+enter
Then consolidate the regions ( Alt+shift+3)


you can stop there, but i would also do the following to keep the session size down, and to help Pro tools run smoothly....

Save the song as 'drum edited' or something
Then delete any unused playlists (you have these backed up in an earlier session)
Go to the region list on the right and click select unused after a heavy Bd session this can take a while, so dont panic if you get a beach ball of doom.
When you can see loads highlighted, click clear in the region list. then choose clear NOT delete

After this do a save session copy as and choose a path for the new cleared out session
Select copy all audio files and tick dont copy fade files

Voila nice tidy Tight drums, and a nice tidy session.

Hope that helps you all
__________________

 

[darthjujuu]

disregard my advice, what greyskull said.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

Adding to Greyskull's excellent post

Then delete any unused playlists (you have these backed up in an earlier session)
Go to the region list on the right and click select unused after a heavy Bd session this can take a while, so dont panic if you get a beach ball of doom.
When you can see loads highlighted, click clear in the region list. then choose clear NOT delete

Command+shift+U (select unused)
Command+Shift+B (clear selected regions)
Enter

 

[Raptor7]

Hi
Lets presume a song has multiple tempo changes in it = Is there a way I can import Cubase tempo track into PT? So far I only did it very very VERY manually, tempo by tempo, bar by bar.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

simple way is to export a MIDI file from cubase
drag it into your PT session and in the box that comes up select markers and tempo

 

[Raptor7]

oh, much appreciated man, thank you.