Reaper style "slip" editing in PT

J

James Murphy

Member
Mar 26, 2002
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first time to the forum in a good while.... but i wanted to read was being said about 9.... and i noticed the "slip" editing thing come up again.

in the past i never really snapped to what everyone was on about because PT has a "Slip Mode", which just means that the grid is disabled....

but then i watched the vid, and wasn't really interested in the functionality...

then today in a convo with a colleague, he pointed out to me that PT has indeed had this type of functionality for some time, so i tried it out on 7.4.2, and sure enough, it works just fine. i never discovered it simply because i never wanted it.

it's called "nudge within region" and works by holding the Control key down while hitting "+" or "-" on the NumPad. you just set the NUDGE value in the usual place... and setting it to "samples" and choosing between 200 and 400 as the nudge value (they aren't choices in the drop-down so you have to manually enter it once) results in a nice smooth flow.

i never use this type of functionality myself, i prefer editing drums with BD, for a couple very good reasons, as opposed to editing by hand, but since some seem to enjoy working that way, i thought i'd mention that it actually is available in PT, and while it's keyboard-based, and not a mouse tool, you certainly can get quite smooth and quick with it at the right nudge settings.

so for those of you using PT already, and wanting to try out that type of editing... there ya go.



FTR, here's why i DON"T do this type of editing.....

1. with "by hand" editing like this, you are moving one hit at a time.... so, for instance, in an 8 bar passage where every hit is too loose, you have to move each kick and snare "slice" individually... while with BD i do that in a couple mouse clicks for the entire 8 bars.

2. .... and this is the most important one.... with this "by hand, slip" type of editing you are def not slamming things to the grid, and that's great... but you may very well be destroying a drummers "feel", since each hit is basically randomly moved by the user some degree closer to the grid... in BD you set a percentage. so for instance, if i take the hypothetical 8 bars that need "tightening up", i'll just set a percentage (say 30%) and each hit will be moved that percentage closer to the grid... so relative to each other the "feel" of the drummer is intact, just tightened. not an issue with a lot of metal drumming, but i certainly can be with some of it... and pretty much most rock.

i don't expect or intend to change anyone's mind about anything... this is all just FYI.
 
Hey James good to hear from you!

In the Cubase slip method and im sure it works the same way in Reaper, you select all the drum tracks and slice and slip, as a whole, no individual slipping needed unless you wanted to edit kicks separately.
 
you misunderstood me musickey.... i was saying exactly what you just repeated... yes, that much is clear.... you create a drum group, of course... goes without saying... and slice as you go. but you still have to slice each hit in a given section, whereas BD will locate, slice, and move the entire section for you, and do so in a way that doesn't destroy the intended feel as long as the "Strength" percentage isn't set too high, in just a few clicks.

and thx for the greetz, Bº)
 
Gotcha, Did misunderstand. Glad your dropped back in and didnt give me to bad of a verbal thrashing :D
 
finished new LaZarus AD mix recently... everything else is not announced yet, so i can't let the cat out of the bag, ;)
 
Hey James, good to see you around here again man!

Yeah this has been brought up before... It isn't really elegant or very useful in Pro Tools compared to being able to do it with the mouse, but it's in there.

By that same token, you can edit drums the Beat Detective way in Reaper too, but it isn't as elegant and is missing some features as well, just like slip in PT is by comparison.

I agree and disagree with your opinions about slip editing...

1. I definitely agree that for simple stuff/well tracked stuff/stuff that is already close to the grid, it is a huge waste of time to have to slip edit every single hit. Beat Detective is fast as hell when you give it material that it can easily make sense of without you having to do a lot of manual error checking. You can do huge sections at a time and blast through whole songs in pretty much no time at all. This is the reason I ported over the Beat Detective functionality to Reaper in the first place, I coded it all from scratch myself and it works like a charm. The only bummer is that the transient detection in Reaper is not as reliable as it is in Pro Tools, so that slows things down a lot.

The flip side of this is of course when dealing with really technical material that is poorly played (ie. quite off time and with inconsistent dynamics in the hits, making the detection harder to get right in Beat Detective), I personally find it more straightforward to slip edit. Beat Detective can handle this stuff perfectly fine of course, but I'd rather just slip each hit into place quickly with the mouse rather than manually adding the trigger points and typing the trigger times in by hand for missed hits. There's just less thinking to do when slipping that stuff and you can get into a groove and move along pretty fast. That of course is just personal preference, both methods work great and will get you good results. I'm never going to tell someone they are wrong for still preferring Beat Detective in these situations, it's all about what feels more comfortable to you.

2. I can see where you are coming from here in theory but I think if you experimented with it a bit yourself you would see in practice that it's not as much of an issue. There's not really anything "random" happening, every hit is getting moved intentionally. When you are slipping stuff, you aren't just putting it randomly near either side of the gridline, you are deliberately putting it somewhere, so it is not challenging to just "tighten it up" a bit by moving things just closer to the grid. No, every hit won't be moved perfectly mathematically the same amount proportionately as it would by setting a specific percentage, but I don't think it is challenging at all to maintain the original feel. If something is really early, you can slip it and still leave it early of course. You would be pretty silly to place it slightly late! ;)

At the end of the day they are both different tools that share some common ground as far as where they are useful. They both have flaws and they both excel in different areas and for different uses and workflows. It would be pretty stubborn and ignorant to shrug one off entirely in favor of the other because they aren't completely interchangeable anyways. Unfortunately as it stands there isn't a DAW out there that does an equally good job at implementing both ideas, so of course Pro Tools users are going to stick to Beat Detective even in situations where slip editing might have been a little quicker, and Reaper/Cubase users are going to stick to slip editing even in situations where Beat Detective would've been the better choice.

I definitely feel where you're coming from with this thread though James! On this board, Pro Tools users are the minority and PT generally has a bad reputation among new/young engineers (especially prior to the updates in PT9) even though they have never tried it and realized how brilliant and logical the workflow is. I can't count the number of times I've gotten frustrated with the PT shit-talking and come to it's defense, it is by far the most well thought out DAW I have ever used and at it's most fundamental level, nothing handles the concept of recording and editing audio as elegantly as Pro Tools does.
 
hey Adam, thanks for your detailed response... but in regard to your first couple sentences you gave in reply to my #2.... i'm not new, not by a long shot. so saying "if you experimented" is a bit weird for me to read... i don't need to experiment actually,because i've been doing this stuff for years... and by far, when groove is an issue, i prefer the way BD handles snapping events by a strength percentage rather than moving by hand. Bº)

i agree with your last paragraph completely, ;)
 
James Murphy said:
hey Adam, thanks for your detailed response... but in regard to your first couple sentences you gave in reply to my #2.... i'm not new, not by a long shot. so saying "if you experimented" is a bit weird for me to read... i don't need to experiment actually,because i've been doing this stuff for years... and by far, when groove is an issue, i prefer the way BD handles snapping events by a strength percentage rather than moving by hand. Bº)

i agree with your last paragraph completely, ;)
Click to expand...

Oh no doubt, I didn't mean to imply that... All I was saying was that I wasn't sure if you had actually had the chance to experiment with mouse-based slip editing for drum editing in any other hosts so as someone who has done it a lot I wanted to give me opinion on that subject.

It is still a fair argument no matter how you slice it (;)), I just wanted to convey that in my experience retaining the original feel has never presented a real problem or occurred to me as something challenging or cumbersome to do with that type of editing. You're doing everything manually and by hand of course, so you have all the control in the world to do whatever you want! Unfortunately that comes at the expense of time, which is where Beat Detective kicks ass. You can edit big sections at once and maintain as much or as little feel as you like in a very elegant way without having to do everything manually which is a big time saver when you are dealing with decent source tracks!

Beat Detective is still by far the best implementation I've ever seen for any sort of batch editing tool for this type of thing, for sure. It's a really great feature and I wish other DAW developers would catch on and incorporate something that does as good of a job as BD does.
 
JeffTD said:
^^He's saying that if you experimented with true slip editing (as you've admitted to not having done) you'd see that it's not a huge issue, which I completely agree with.
Click to expand...

hey Jeff... yeah, i haven't done it with that type of slip editing, but i have done drum editing by just cutting on every major time division of kicks and snares and manually moving by hand... exactly the same result as "slip" editing, just with a slightly different means of getting to it... and yeah, i also agree that with 99% of the extreme metal stuff everyone here is doing these days (including me for the most part) you won't run into any "feel" issues... but in stuff that actually DOES have a "groove" to it you can indeed find a difference, in favor of "strength percentage" based conforming... and as Adam has just said, BD is the the most elegant way to effect that type of edit that i've ever run into.

perhaps all Avid/PT guys here should request a mouse-based solution for PT's "slip" ("nudge within region", in PT parlance) functionality. based on the live AES stream i watched, they seem to be taking user requests under consideration much more proactively.

having said that, i'm not fond of the idea that they are paying that much attention to the entire user base... i worry that PT could become a bloated DAW with far too many options and features that just get in the way, and have not much value to the full-time engineer user-base. like "user-definable shortcuts" as an example of a complaint often raised by users that port in to PT from other platforms; see, i work all over, at various studios, and i know when i sit down in front of PT and hit a key-command, exactly how PT is going to respond. i no not look forward to a day in which i sit down and PT does not respond as i expect it too. i'm sure there'd be a "restore defaults" option in that scenario, but then that leaves you having to worry about how the in-house engineer feels about you changing them back.... just a can of worms i don't care to have opened, and it's just one among many.

i also see the potential benefits, but can't really weigh this out yet since this is still a new development in the way they handle new feature requests.... just a matter waiting and seeing now what happens moving forward with PT.
 
In some areas it would certainly help Avid to listen to the userbase. There are some simple things that have been omitted for a long time now and likely wouldn't take long to code at all. Like creating keyboard shortcuts for the common 'Delete fades', 'Export MIDI' and 'Create Click track' functions, which are all vital ... to me anyway. Can't imagine adding a mouse-based slip 'within region' mode would be too hard on them either. It's a feature that's semi-vital to those of us who edit guitars as we track, since there's no effective way to work Elastic Audio into a tracking scenario.

Adam, do you see any potential for an 'under-the-hood' timestretch feature being added to BD, much as what you did with your Reaper script?
 
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