alright so i started this thread a few weeks back, and have since refined my PT drum editing down to a science. Lasse will probably disagree, but my method is really fast and i can't ever detect any artifacts...this is also with sample blending in mind once i'm done. alright here's my method (which does not require multi-track BD), again:
FIRST i start by going through the whole song and doing basic cut / quantize / crossfade on either 1/4 note or 1/2 note chunks. this is VERY easy and gets everything close, atleast key transients. then i consolidate, go back over, and fine-tune with EA. it goes like this:
1. group all the drums. ALWAYS. for BD, manual slip, or EA. always.
2. start at the beginning and tab to key transients and snip with ctrl+E and tab to the next one. now what i'm trying to do here is essentially make a grid, depending on the part. let's say for example, it's a standard metalcore cheesy breakdown, in 4/4, with a crash hit at every quarter note. i'd snip at every quarter note. if there's a snare hit, i snip at the snare. if there's no snare hit but a kick, i snip at the kick, and if there's a crash hit by itself, i'll do my best to snip on the crash. that priority order is important, especially if you're sample replacing, because that's the order of important transients in room/overhead mics to prevent things from flamming/sounding weird. sometimes the cymbals are more important than the kick...just understand the reasoning here and use your best judgment.
EDIT: this part was very hard to explain. let me try again: say in the "breakdown" there's a kick, crash, and snare hit all at the same time. what i mean by prioritizing is knowing which transient to cut at. sometimes it's the earliest, usually it's the snare, and if the crash is by itself but the hit falls on a 1/4 note (or 1/2 note) then you try your best to snip it there.
but anyway...what my goal here is for each section to be diced up into chunks of all equal sizes. usually either 1/4 notes or 1/2 notes. the reason i do this is so that when i quantize, i can quantize to a definite grid resolution (either 1/4 notes or 1/2 notes, respectively) and it is completely fail proof.
EDIT: again, hard to explain. say 1/4 notes is appropriate for the passage (which it usually is.) what i'd basically end up with, after quantizing the regions, is a snip at every 1/4 note (where the click beeps) and a bunch of equal sized regions, all of which are a 1/4 note long.
3. so go through and slice up a section of a song, then (select tool) drag and select all those chunks and smack alt+0. quantize audio regions, to either 1/4 note or 1/2 note, and boom. quantized. can't fail.
4. while still selected, smack ctrl+8 (8 on the numpad, numlock on, ya doofus) to bring up beat detective. use edit smoothing, capture selection, fill and crossfade at 5ms, render the crossfades, boom, done. check it to make sure, consolidate, on to the next section.
EDIT: the LE and m-powered beat detective can do multi-track smoothing. you don't need MPTK. i don't know why, it just works.
5. after going through the whole song like this, you'll be partially quantized. consolidate! now, still grouped, enable elastic audio across all tracks. the algorithm doesn't really matter now, because we'll just be switching them all to x-form when we're done.
6. the best work flow for me is grid mode absolute, and smart tool. avoid using EA quantize for large chunks!! it's useful for a short fill, or single-track double bass/blasts, but not for large sections of multi-track drums. don't bother with it! you need to go through the whole song manually but trust me, you'll get really, REALLY fast, after a few songs.
hold the "start" key (not sure of the mac equivalent, someone chime in?) and click (in the bottom of a region, for grabber tool) to add a warp marker. you're going to be doing this a TON, so just get used to smacking every transient as you see it. after adding a bunch of markers where you want them (drum transients) you really just need to "touch" them, (in GRID MODE) with a very slight drag, to quantize and move on. say you have a fast fill, then most of the time you can get away with just selecting it, alt+0, and quantize EA events to say...16th notes. but i'll only do this for very short chunks, usually just fills, or like i said, single track double bass / blasts.
once done, give it a once-over listen, switch them all to x-form, render, and we're done.
don't forget to save-as after every few steps so your consolidates aren't permanent!
the argument against EA is a legitimate one, and that is that time stretching with complex algorithms poses a bit of a threat to the integrity of the audio itself, and with an even intermediate sized stretch across multi-track drums, you threaten the phase relationship between the mics.
i like my method, because you're already "partially" quantized, thus limiting the stretch distances. also thus far, the only times i've done this it has been with the intent of sample replacing the drums and blending in overhead/room ambience, which REDUCES (not eliminates) the abundance of phase issues. x-form seems to reduce the "weirdness" in cymbals to just about negligible with small stretches. the purists will disagree but i'm using this method on an album for the second time now and am very very excited for the end results. and you guize will certainly see as soon as it's done!
