Important drum editing quantization tip for those of you using Reaper...

[EmilioArteaga]

AStacy2, what's happening there is that Reaper, during quantization, will sometimes extend (both ways) the item from it's Snap Conform marker. That means that if you have a kick hit that has a snare right before it and the quantization messes up, the kick may be quantized but it's region could have been extended before it making a random, misplaced snare hit. I have that problem a lot, but i've found that if you take a few extra minutes to make some preliminary grid-alignments, those mistakes are generally left behind. To any and all, I'm currently working on streamlining this process. Once I get it down, I'm gonna make a video using some faster, metal-based music to prove it works well.

Cheers!

 

[KillFrenzy]

I used to have different issues while editing drums, but nothing that could not be solved with some workarounds.
Normally the dinamic split function splits some hits a little late, so when you quantize, some transients remain in the former audio part. Don't know if I could make myself clear.
It's very anoying.

 

[AStacy2]

Hmm, cool, well I'm going to post some screen shots of what I'm doing up here to see if I'm doing anything wrong because this is pretty annoying. On this track, the snare was just mic'd with a dDrum pro trigger by the way. By the way, I just updated tonight to 3.16 I think it is.

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper1.jpg

In this first picture, basically it's after I've sliced up the snare with tab to transient at the highest sensitivity and aligned all the hits to the grid.

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper2.jpg

In this second picture, it's me about to quantize drums the first time.

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper3.jpg

In this third picture, it's after the first quantization took place.

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper4.jpg

In this fourth picture, I'm about to quantize for the second time.

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper5.jpg

In this fifth picture, it's after the second quantization. And I pulled down the original snare track so that you can see something went way wrong.

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper6.jpg

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper7.jpg

http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/waitstom2/Reaper8.jpg

These last three pictures are some of my options settings, maybe I have something wrong in there I'm not sure. Also, there are a few pictures of places where the quantization is right on which confuses me even further.

Any tips to get this working? Thanks.

 

[AStacy2]

Well, I think I got it working on the snare track. When I quantized, I just changed the quantization level to 16th notes and everything seemed fine.

This process still seems a little buggy to me though. I think I'd rather just edit all the timing by hand and have Reaper do my fades for me and not have it quantize anything so that I know its not messing anything up. Is there any way to do that?

Also, is there a way when you're splitting your track to not have to select that particular track every time? I mean, I could be saving like 15 minutes on slicing alone if I didn't have to do that lol.

I'm gonna go edit the toms and kick and see if its working on them too.

 

[AdamWathan]

Yeah you obviously have to have it quantizing to the right note value, 1/4 notes isn't going to work if you have 16th note snare hits. You can't batch fade without quantizing unfortunately, not as far as I know.

 

[EmilioArteaga]

Yeah you obviously have to have it quantizing to the right note value, 1/4 notes isn't going to work if you have 16th note snare hits. You can't batch fade without quantizing unfortunately, not as far as I know.

yeah, I think that's what went wrong. Since this thread has been made, I've been doing SO well with quantizing. The only thing is, how in the heck can you move say a snare on top of a kick without losing one of the two?

 

[AStacy2]

Yeah you obviously have to have it quantizing to the right note value, 1/4 notes isn't going to work if you have 16th note snare hits. You can't batch fade without quantizing unfortunately, not as far as I know.

Yeah, didn't know that, lol. Luckily, the drummer was really pretty solid and this is pretty easy metal like old school thrash-ish stuff so it's not that complicated. Before you moved to PT and were doing this, what happens when you have triplets and stuff mixed in and quantize? Reaper mess it all up? Just curious.

 

[AStacy2]

yeah, I think that's what went wrong. Since this thread has been made, I've been doing SO well with quantizing. The only thing is, how in the heck can you move say a snare on top of a kick without losing one of the two?

I think for a lot of the people quantizing drums here, kicks are getting quantized seperately from the rest of the drum tracks. Basically cymbal and room and spot mics are hi-passed to try and get the kick bleed out of them.