most time efficient way to quantize drums?

ForefrontStudio

ForefrontStudio

Micah Amstutz
Jan 1, 2009
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NE Ohio
I'm tired of spending anywhere from 2-6 hours on every song editing drums manually in cubase. what is the fastest way out there of doing this? protools elastic time? I haven't had much experience with a lot of different DAWs. isn't there something out there that is pretty much just a one click, sit and wait, process? I am on the market for a new computer, and I'm trying to be open to the idea of a new DAW at the same time, even though I now know my way around Cubase pretty well.
 
search for the video lasse once posted. it is an instruction to use quantize drums (IN CUBASE!!!) in minutes.

if your good and it's average drumming and not so complicated you can quantize drums with this method for a whole song in may be 5 minutes... word.
 
Beat detective. Fastest and best sounding way. Contact my studio manger via the web link
 
5 min ? We're not using the same cubase heheeh if you drummer is good enough to play really really near the correct beat, then it is possible to edit the thing in 20 min. If not, one can really expect to spend 1+ hours to correct everything cubendo does wrong.

Btw, logic quantizing/flex time is great. Thing i did in Nuendo in 2 hours, I do in Logic with a LOT more flexibility in AT LEAST half the time and without all the stress.
 
i wish i wasnt too laszy to make a video of the way i edit drums in pro tools.

I have a keyboard with programmable macros on it, so i have cut, undo, redo, tab forward, tab back, and quantize each assigned to 1 button press. I make all cuts for the song, then quantize all the cuts, then make all crossfades for the song at 1 time using "fill in gap and crossfade" via beat detective. Then listen through the overheads for any noticeable artifacts. Make corrections(stretching with TCE if necessary), then just consolidate, clear regions, and move to the next song. I can do rock songs in about an hour, and tech metal songs in about 3 hours.
 
Personally, from my experience, stretching sounds better than cut/crossfading. Or at least Sonar's algorithm sounds better to me, especially when it comes to hihats (not quantizing hihats but artifacts on hihats from quantizing snare/kick). But it takes a lot longer, however long to quantize the song (altho this is very easy to do), and then can take 5-10 mins to render each track, which can add up to about an hour on longer/more complex songs.
 
Morgan C said:
Personally, from my experience, stretching sounds better than cut/crossfading. Or at least Sonar's algorithm sounds better to me, especially when it comes to hihats (not quantizing hihats but artifacts on hihats from quantizing snare/kick). But it takes a lot longer, however long to quantize the song (altho this is very easy to do), and then can take 5-10 mins to render each track, which can add up to about an hour on longer/more complex songs.
Click to expand...



alot of it has to do with how tightly the drummer could play to the click track. The farther from the grid the playing, the more weird stuff i have to edit out after making crossfades. If i remember tomorrow, i'll post a clip of just overheads so you guys can see what they sound like with the type of editing i do.
Basically i only time stretch the parts that sound weird with just a cut/crossfade. I have Waves Time Shifter set as my TCE plugin via preferences, and it sounds great with overheads/cymbals
 
brianhood said:
alot of it has to do with how tightly the drummer could play to the click track. The farther from the grid the playing, the more weird stuff i have to edit out after making crossfades. If i remember tomorrow, i'll post a clip of just overheads so you guys can see what they sound like with the type of editing i do.
Basically i only time stretch the parts that sound weird with just a cut/crossfade. I have Waves Time Shifter set as my TCE plugin via preferences, and it sounds great with overheads/cymbals
Click to expand...

Actually, better..

Do you want to send me the raw files (just needs to be like 20 secs), then we can do a shootout of BD vs 'Elastic Audio' (I'm not using ProTools but its the same method), see if people can tell the difference, and if so, which they prefer? Also post how long it took to do the editing for that much, even if its only a few minutes.
 
In that video, he says he hits "something and "I"". What is it? He does it to split all the drum tracks after selecting the guide tracks. It's mac though so I'm wanting to know what the mac shortcut is, or just what it's called so I can find it!
 
It usually takes me about 10 minutes to edit a nicely played performance. It's 5 minutes for the rough edition and + 5 to check everything. Sometimes it takes longer if there's any critical point, but it doesn't happen all the time.
Oh, and I use Reaper
 
I really don't see the point of editing everything by hand, really unless you're just fine-tuning stuff. I'm a beat detective genius, and I was watching my friend edit drums in cubase sometime back - and it really blew me away.

Morgan C: Nice avatar.
 
Maamar Huq said:
I'm a beat detective genius, and I was watching my friend edit drums in cubase sometime back - and it really blew me away.
Click to expand...

i tried figuring out beat detective, and all the concepts make perfect sense (after already executing virtually identical procedures in reaper, in a more clumsy step-oriented procedure) and i just could never get it to produce results that worked, at all. following youtube tutorials and everything. this obviously means i'm just failing, but i just don't see how skill is involved! am i retarded? maybe it's because the only things i tried it on were drums that weren't recorded to a click, but i later tempo mapped manually instead.

then i listen to joey (sturgis) recordings, and obviously joey is the type of dude who has no qualms going monk-status with his editing to get everything flawless but that doesn't explaing how in nuendo he can edit every single thing he does with such transient aligned madness genius.

the only methods i've employed with great success for editing drums is converting things to MIDI and then quantizing/hand editing from there. halp, plz.
 
darthjujuu said:
then i listen to joey (sturgis) recordings, and obviously joey is the type of dude who has no qualms going monk-status with his editing to get everything flawless but that doesn't explaing how in nuendo he can edit every single thing he does with such transient aligned madness genius.

the only methods i've employed with great success for editing drums is converting things to MIDI and then quantizing/hand editing from there. halp, plz.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure joey converts to midi. I know he's done several different things, but I always thought he converted drums to midi. I know some of his recordings have miced overheads...
 
Alright lets kill two DAW's in one thread. How do I quick quantize drums in Logic so they aren't snapped rigidly to the grid? I mean creating a 16th note shuffle is an easy quick quantize, but for and thing above 16th note triplets I don't know. It's also nice to hear the drums playing slightly ahead or behind the beat for variation/groove. I think the transform tool has the answers here, does anyone have any literature on the transform function?
 
joey always use raw overhead/room noise and those are hard-quantized along with the samples, be they MIDI or not. i'm guessing he just tediously goes through and does the ol' snip n slip on the raw tracks.
 
darthjujuu said:
joey always use raw overhead/room noise and those are hard-quantized along with the samples, be they MIDI or not. i'm guessing he just tediously goes through and does the ol' snip n slip on the raw tracks.
Click to expand...

yeah if im working with live drums, i just cut and slip every single hit

i dont have much advice except that a computer doesnt care if the drummer sucks, its going to quantize it based on the rules and limitations you plug in

with doing it by hand, you know, "yep, he's about to hit the kick before the crash, im gonna have to handle this." for example...

the computer does not give a shit, therefore it will be dealt with by me and my brain, which i trust a lot more than the computer for handling this situation
 
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