New Beat Detective Method

[Studdy]

I know that the beat detective / slip edit / whatever has been gone over a thousand times on here. I just think this has some value for people. I'm in protools 10 so I can multitrack beat detective if i want, but i find this better. These ideas can always be applied to any DAW.

1. Determine what drum hits you want to quantize to. In most metal projects that I don't want super robotic I use the kick and snare. Feel free to use the tom hits as well.

2. If im rolling most of the lows out of the overheads i tend to do the kick separately from the rest of the kit.

3. This is the key. I want to now make a "guide track". This will be made up of the hits i want to quantize to. In this example i will do the kick and snare together.

4. The next step has nothing to do with sound/tone. Apply a transient designer on the kick drum, and one on the snare. All we are doing here is exaggerating the transient so that beat detective will find them easier. Also try to keep the level between the kick and snare close. You can also put a gate first if trying to keep ghost notes and small hits out.

5. Bounce/Record/Print the kick and snare to a new track. This is the guide track.

6. Now using Tab to Transient or Beat Detective begin to slice up the guide track.

7. Group the drums together so the edits affect all the drum tracks as a whole. Also be aware that you don't want any breaks/gaps in the regions of the drums. (except the guide track)

8. Turn off Tab to Transient. Now when you press tab you will go the regions instead. This will now take us to every transient in the guide track. In Keyboard focus mode hit Tab, B, Tab, B, Tab, B throughout the track. OR Use Beat Detective Region Separation. Both have advantages. Some will argue that beat detective has the Trigger Pad option to allow the cut to be ahead of the transient. Just remember that now we are quantizing the region start not the transient. If the pad is 10ms when all said and done just nudge everything back 10ms when done. Just to be weird for some reason I use 6ms trigger pad and a 3ms crossfade time.

9. Now you can Hard Quantize (cmd 0) or use beat detective and quantize all the parts.

10. Using beat detective smoothing to fill and crossfade (people tend to use the default 5ms). If using Beat Detective to separate some people will say the crossfade time should be half of the trigger pad time.

This has been gone over before but I thought the Guide track and transient designer idea was very helpful.

I hope someone gets something from this.

 

[ArthurD]

Awesome.

 

[BLUElightCory]

Why not just use BD to generate Beat Triggers from the kick and snare track (or the transient-enhanced guide track) and then group all of the drums before separating them? Would save a lot of time and would do the same thing (unless I'm missing something here).

 

[egan.]

+1 Unless I'm missing something beat detective already does this and it's pretty much what everyone does with an additional transient designer step.

 

[No More Beers]

Blue, that's what I do. I ungroup the drums, analyze the snare track and, before i separate, i group the tracks again, select them all and then separate. If it's not metal i do the same with the kick. The toms i slice and edit by hand. I think it saves time, as the fills can have 1/16s ou 1/16 triplets...

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Mmmm, this is what the "collection" mode is for in BD, why so many extra steps?

 

[Lasse Lammert]

wow, that's making it extra complicated

 

[Trevoire520]

Yeah I don't quite get what this adds other than an extra unnecessary step. With triggers on the drums I never have problems with BD detecting hits.

The fastest way I've found for drum editing these days is to use BD down to 8th notes for large sections of the song, and then go in and use quickkeys shortcuts to edit all the triplet/16th note stuff manually.

 

[Studdy]

Complicated? I thought this simplified it better than any of the others I've read. I also found i made less errors first time through using this method. Like I said in the first post, I know this has been beaten to death and there are a million ways to edit. I just thought it was a quick easy read that works.

 

[006]

When you have multiple people telling you that BD already does what you are saying, with less steps - yeah, your version is complicated.

 

[Studdy]

I've read everything there is on this forum and whether or not all the steps in my post are completely necessary I do believe that I've described the steps more accurately and simpler than any others i've seen. This is the reason I posted it. I think some people will benefit from it.

 

[bassguy]

I can see where you're coming from on this, but honestly it's just so much faster and more logical to do it all from within BD



Same result but all with Beat Detective. Guaranteed it'll be faster too.

 

[Studdy]

Not all people have BD with collective mode. Some can only do one at a time. This is just a general guide to BD or the technique can be applied to any daw. Just trying to help new comers that might find the BD threads on here confusing.

 

[mva801]

As long as you have multitrack BD, I've found the simplest way is to just ungroup the tracks, select your kick and snare, analyze, turn on groups, and slice all the tracks based on the kick and snare trigger points. Appears others do it this way as well. In SOME cases I'll do the kick separately. I always slice and conform, then smooth only. I don't crossfade til the end. Dont have PT10 yet so that will prob be sped up significantly.