HELP with drum playlists.

[ChristiannnWC]

I made an account on here just to have this answered, so any help is greatly appreciated!!

I've been working in Pro Tools for about 3-4 months now. I have a pretty decent grasp on everything except for one thing I've come across.

When I'm tracking a drummer usually what I have in mind is to have them play through the song 2-3 times (each time on a new playlist with the drum mics in a group) and then afterwards make a Comp track of course and get the best takes all into one. That's fine and dandy, but the actual tracking process is not.

They'll be going through one of the takes and mess up half way, but they liked everything they tracked up until that part. I'll just make a new playlist for them to start recording from where they messed up on, but the problem is they will want a playback from the previous take as a pre-roll count in instead of just metronome during the punch in process of where they messed up.

I would assume I'd just duplicate the last take and give them a good pre-roll? However, how is that last take still going to be played out of their headphones with the whole input monitoring on/off and all that.

Also, let's say I end up having to do this multiple times in a song. How do I go about having a clean session and making sure things don't get messy with having same exact takes on different playlists that were just there for "monitoring back before punch in" purposes instead of actually needing them in there.

If any of that was worded weird, sorry! But basically how do you guys go about playlists with multi tracked drums and punching in.

[albee1952]

I'm a bit fuzzy but will offer some advice that may help for the future. Some of this you may already know, but I want to give the whole picture for others too. Create a group of your drum tracks and set the tracks to show playlists. When you name your tracks at first, put ".01"(without the quotes) on the end of each track name(this way, each added playlist will be called Snare.02, Snare.03, etc) so you can look at the numbers and know which take you have. Instead of duplicating(because of the default naming), create new playlists. Now for pre-roll(for the band to lock with before the punch), just highlight a few bars before the punch point, hit Ctrl-C(to copy) on the previous playlist, use the P key to move the cursor up(to the new empty playlist) and hit Ctrl-V to paste. Now your new playlists will be numbered(so you can keep track of what take each pass is) and you can delete the pre-roll audio later.

[DC-Choppah]

Punch record mode.

I would consider this just a continuation of the first take, and use the same playlist. Just punch in at the point where you want to start recording the new take and set a few bars of pre-roll. Just make sure you are in Auto Input Monitoring mode so that the audio will be heard on the record-enabled track.

They will start playing on top of themselves as they listen to the cue mix and then keep going.

You need to be in Punch Record mode (I just use it always) so that everything gets recorded before the punch point. In punch record mode you will be recording the new clip while they are listening to the original clip. When you edit, you can just trim the regions to uncover the overlapping audio and find the right way to blend them together.

[ChristiannnWC]

Thanks for all of the replies so far guys, I'll definitely try out those things today and see how they work out.

[mesaone]

Duplicate the playlist that they want to punch in from, then do a punch-in. You'll retain your original, and have a new comped playlist for the punch.