How do you edit drums??

[patdcp]

hi!

i´m curious how you guys treat the drums concerning editing.
thing is:i just recorded the drums for some tech-deathmetal band with 6 minute long songs.i still record in some rehearsal rooms of bad quality etc.,and the tone isn´t that good,so i replace snare and kick and toms with drumagog,and cut OH + HH,and place everything right in time

since this is really pain in the ass,and costs me DAYS for some songs,i´m wondering how you guys are doing it.everything manual or some "automation"?!?

i´m working with cubase sx (so,no beat detective!)

please help me,my fingers are stiff and bleeding!

thanks,pat

 

[Deaf Ear]

http://www.nuendo.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=7&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

I think this is pretty useful.

 

[greyskull]

mwhahahahahahahahaahaha

 

[BassTard]

Melodyne's got some new functions that should be more powerfull than beat detective - I never used it this way, but maybe you want to get the demo-version and give it a try.

 

[26]

What I would like to know is how do you think a perfectly cutted drum has to look (and sound) like (not in terms of quantizing it, but to "clean" it).
I tried this "detect silence" method, but found the (for example) outcoming kick drum hits, horrible sounding (I tried to eliminate a little bit of snare in the kick track). I have to admit that I never cut a real drum before (ezd user) and find myself cutting every hit by hand (which is uke.

For know I only did the kick and the toms.
Is it perhaps possible to "use" bleeding in some case?

 

[AStacy2]

I don't think there is a fast and easy way to edit drums, get use to it. =D It's like anything it takes practice to do it fast. But I'll tell you one thing for sure, after you edit an album that was tracked like shit...you'll pay A LOT more attention when you engineer drums the next time.

 

[26]

Thank you, you are definetely right, but I don´t look for an easy way in the first place. I`m willing to go in every microcosm that`s needed.
I do have very well recorded drum tracks (not recorded by me) to work with, but since it´s my first time cutting drums, I have no result to compare to. So I think every comment, on what is needed to receive a well cut drum would be a great help.

 

[colonel kurtz]

Is it perhaps possible to "use" bleeding in some case?

totally possible. i've run into instances where i was chopping out the bleed into some tom tracks, only to notice that the drums were much fuller and had better depth with the bleed still in there

also, when it comes to editing, only edit the stuff that NEEDS it! it gets very tempting to cut up every little bit of every little track...but in many instances, it's just not necessary. kick back and listen to the drums for the entire song a few times, taking notes as you go along - "kick offtime @ 1:26", or "shitty tom fill @ 3:48" - chances are that if something doesn't stick out enough that you're going to hear it and make a note, it doesn't need to be edited.

 

[AStacy2]

If you already have very well recorded drum tracks than bleed shouldnt be that big of an issue in the first place. Detect Silence is hard to get right and your crossfades/gate have to be right on for it to work. If your doing a metal track and you're having issues with the kick drum then just sample it. You're used to hearing this anyways. Have you tried something like Drumagog or APTrigga?


What I usually do nowadays (not because I think it sounds better, but because of workflow issues) is sample kick/snare/toms and only have to really edit hh/ride/OH. I'm not saying this is the best way, or that it even sounds close to as good as natural drums recorded well but if you don't have a lot of time and need to get stuff done, it works. For OH, I don't even worry about the bleed that much and the HH/Ride I just manually edit.

 

[RKelly]

With tom tracks, a lot of times gating the tracks works just as well as editing them especially if you use a gate with look ahead and will save you tooooons of time. If you have good bleed (ie in phase) than just have it reduce the volume as a downward expander rather than cutting it off completely. It'll sound a lot more natural and will require less reverb sometimes.

 

[derfbonker]

colonel kurtz has it right when he said only edit the parts that need it, I feel like this preserves alot of the feel of the performance. I only edit double bass stuff usually, or the occasional stray hit. One thing I have found very useful is the time warp feature in cubase 4. I use this to scoot snre hits in the overheads, in lie the the quantized samples.

 

[26]

Thank you very much, this helped a lot. I have not tried samples yet, as I try to keep it natural (it`s well played too). The feel for what needs to be cut seems to be the most important thing for me, so combined with your advices I hopefully manage to develop one.

The day it sounds right for me, I post them for some comments (and for going back to work the next day)

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

Editing drums is a bitch.

 

[2012]

Beat Detective spanks that bitch.

 

[derfbonker]

If you want to use samples, and preserve the feel. Drumagog has a dynamic tracking feature, that plays different samples at different volumes in relation to how the drums were originally played. Its usually pretty convincing, although I have to admit that I usually have it turned off. You can also record your own samples of the kit, and use those to maintain the oriiginal sound.

 

[C_F_H_13]

Melodyne's got some new functions that should be more powerfull than beat detective - I never used it this way, but maybe you want to get the demo-version and give it a try.

Problem with Melodyne, is it uses time comp/expansion algorithms so it's not really the best bet for drums, although you are right..for vocals/bass/guitars/melodic instruments.....it kills BD.

 

[CJWall]

If you want to use samples, and preserve the feel. Drumagog has a dynamic tracking feature, that plays different samples at different volumes in relation to how the drums were originally played. Its usually pretty convincing, although I have to admit that I usually have it turned off. You can also record your own samples of the kit, and use those to maintain the oriiginal sound.

Dynamic tracking is cool depending on what style of music you're doing.

I usually find myself turning to samples when I want something more consistent, in which case I'll either turn dynamic tracking off or use Aptrigga and avoid the headaches of automating Drumagog to trigger properly

 

[derfbonker]

Dynamic tracking doesn't always work for metal, when you are trying to make the drum tracks sound like the were played by an 800 pound gorilla, but if you want to preserve some of the feel like 26 was saying it works pretty good IMO. I have never heard of Aptrigga, I googled it and it looks pretty cool. Is it better than drumagog or just different?

 

[CJWall]

Dynamic tracking doesn't always work for metal, when you are trying to make the drum tracks sound like the were played by an 800 pound gorilla, but if you want to preserve some of the feel like 26 was saying it works pretty good IMO. I have never heard of Aptrigga, I googled it and it looks pretty cool. Is it better than drumagog or just different?

Right on man, Drumagog rocks when replacing more pop/rock snares in the instances that you want to retain some of the original feel/dynamic.

Hmmm, Aptrigga is better IMO, but it lacks some of the features that Drumagog has.

More importantly though, it triggers much more tightly and accurately than Drumagog, at least for me.

With Drumagog a find myself screwing around for wayyy to long trying to get kicks and especially toms to trigger correctly.

It takes me half the time in Aptrigga and it uses way less CPU.

Check out the demo bro. It's cheap too!!

 

[Ice Man]

One thing to realize that took me a few cluttered playbacks to understand is that when you cut something, like a tom hit or anything else, you must cut EVERYTHING at the same time. I don't know about you, but I don't have a completely dead room to track in, so hits show up in every mic track. If you start moving single tracks around and not all mic tracks pertaining to that edit, you'll start to hear misaligning hits and phase issues.

I use SX, too, and have been trying to be more efficient in my editing. Honestly, the thing holding me back is not editing single tracks, but applying the edits to all the tracks. That's the only time consuming thing.

The technique I use is:

Calculate the hit points of each drum track. The easiest way to do this is cut the songs into sections (verse, chorus, etc.) that way you have a better resolution to see where the hit points are landing instead of hunting through the entire song. Then I use Hitpoints > Divide events a hitpoints. This makes all your slices. Only thing after that, is I need a macro program to apply the different cuts to everything at once, which I'm in the process of figuring out. Without it, you're stuck highlighting all the tracks and doing a lot of N/Alt-X.

After that, highlight all your hits per section, drag a little from the right to cut some length so each hit has some space, then press Q, then X. That quantizes and cross fades. When you pull a little off the hits, the crossfades are a lot less prone to crossfading over a hit, they tend to land in the silence.

Hope this helps.