quantizing live drums

[Jason Locklin]

just wandering if anyone has some tips or tricks on quantizing live drums. ive been dabling with beat detective but it was a little hard to get in to. if anyone has a some ideas.. thanks.

[clarpark]

one bar at a time.

[Jason Locklin]

thanks for the reply. so thats it, no other ways around it? have you messed with beat detective? it seemed ok but something i didnt want to get into if i didnt need to.

[Anibal]

I get to do up to 32 bars at a time or more with great results, it is tricky but possible. Keep trying and do a search in the DUC.

[PeeTee]

Create a click track to the tempo and grid the drums visually to that by toggling between slip and grid modes. It'll take about an hour to go through the whole kit...give or take.

[leebeefunny2]

i get great results with beat detective...most of the time i get done within 2 hours. it takes a little work to make sure there aren't clicks and pops or missing transients, but i find beat det. very useful.

[hiltonius]

I have never gotten good results with Beat Detective alone, so I just do it "the old fashoined way", by hand.

Here's the down and dirty:

- define the measure or two you want to work on

- set your grid to the smallest possible subdivision of the beat you'll need for the part (requires some musical understanding to do properly)

- group all the drum tracks together (you need to move them all together)

- step through the regions making cuts at every spot where there's supposed to be a hit (all cuts on the grid)

- go to the first new region, highlight the audio, zoom in pretty far, and using the control-+ and - keys, move the audio to the region boundary (using the control key maintains the region boundary while moving the audio within the region) that you've made on the grid, making sure that you are using the mic closest to the instrument making the hit as your visual guide

- step through all the newly created regions doing the same thing, crossfading carefully between each

At the end of this, you've got a bar or two of drums that are quantized properly to the grid. Make sure you've got some extra data space (preferably blank) at the beginning and end of the whole piece, then use AudioSuite "duplicate" (which will give the region a unique and easily identifiable name) to create a new file with the corrected rhythm.

Hope this helps.

Best,
Rich

Originally posted by Jason Paul:
just wandering if anyone has some tips or tricks on quantizing live drums. ive been dabling with beat detective but it was a little hard to get in to. if anyone has a some ideas.. thanks.

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[PeeTee]

BeatDefective™

[Eric Bazilian]

Oboy, I can't tell you how many hours' sleep I've lost doing this, both before and after Beat Detective.

If it's a good drummer with good time and dynamics, Beat Detective will take care of most of it, though you still need to go through the entire performance and look out for quantizing errors, funky region transitions, etc. I generally avoid the global crossfade function, but you do need to find the right separation buffer either way. I usually end up at around 7 ms.

On the other hand, having spent all those pre-BD years doing it manually, I often default to my old habits...grouping all the drum tracks, comping, then duplicating, and, beginning at bar one beat one, turning on the "Tab To Transients" option and, yes, scrolling through the entire performance, one hit at a time, and seeing how it lives with the tempo grid. One thing I found enormously helpful was getting a four-button trackball and setting it up so that I can go from Selector Tool in Slip Mode to Grabber in Grid mode, while separating the region simply by clicking on the upper left button, upper right button switches to Trimmer in Slip Mode, while the lower left button puts me back in Selector Mode/Slip Mode.

Whichever way you do it, it's gonna take some time, so open a nice bottle of whatever and settle in. A Powerbook with either PT Free or an MBox is nice sometimes in the Living Room Comfy Chair, but even with a Titanium the screen size does get a bit claustrophobic.

Fact is, though, unless you're trying to make the drums lock clinically to pre-existing loops (which I admit to doing often and enthusiastically, freely...), total quantization is, in my experience, anal-retentive overkill.

Then again, sometimes it's just Because We Can...

[hiltonius]

Originally posted by Eric Bazilian:
One thing I found enormously helpful was getting a four-button trackball and setting it up so that I can go from Selector Tool in Slip Mode to Grabber in Grid mode, while separating the region simply by clicking on the upper left button, upper right button switches to Trimmer in Slip Mode, while the lower left button puts me back in Selector Mode/Slip Mode.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">See, I can get all that done using the F keys. What drives me a little nuts is that there is no hot key way to select between different grids - ie. from bars/beats to samples. I use QuicKeys to accomplish this.

best,
Rich