Lessons

Lesson Info

Bonus Video: Editing

Now we're gonna talk a little bit about editing drums. We'll start with the most common situation that we encounter at Audio Hammer, which is editing a drummer who is recorded with a role in kick pad instead of a real kick drum. The benefits of editing the kicks separately from what the hands air doing will become very clear once we start editing this section that has 16th note kicks over quarter note hats. So the first thing we're gonna do is make sure our session is set up the way we want it. The first thing I noticed is that I don't need to be looking at three different snare tracks. We've got two tops and air mikes and a bottom snare mic, but I really only need to see one of them. So we're gonna keep the 57 here and move the other to snare tracks to the bottom, cause we want to be able to see as many tracks as possible and have the height of each track be a little higher than it is right now. We also really only need to see the direct mikes and not these room Mike's. So I'll select...

all the direct Mike's and make them a little bigger. The next thing we're gonna do is duplicate the playlist for all of these drums, so that we have a backup to reference of what was sent to us. Then we'll switch back to the main playlist where we will do all our editing. The other thing I like to do is go ahead and assign the drums to an elastic audio setting. In this case, I'm going to try using the polyphonic mode. However, sometimes different parts call for different elastic audio settings. Sometimes even different tracks will call for different elastic audio settings. For example, you may want to use the polyphonic setting on your room and overhead tracks while you use the rhythmic setting on your direct drum. Mike's other times The X form setting can sound the best, but it tends to bog down the CPU and slows down the workflow a little. But we'll see how far we can get using the polyphonic mode. You'll also notice that I have a MIDI track already created and routed to this instance of easy drummer. This track labeled Kick is the track that we recorded the Rolling kick pad to So the first thing we're going to do is pull Midi from that. Now, in the video where I discuss kick Midi alignment, we went through and made sure that every midi note lined up with the transient on our audio kick track. However, in this case, since we're simply going to be quanta izing the midi to the grid, we don't even have to worry about that. So what I'll do is make the kick track a little bigger, select the whole thing open Massey D r t analyze it now for the purposes of this video, I'm just gonna work on a couple sections here, so we'll select the stuff that I'm going to be working on. Set the trigger sensitivity, max out the velocities and then dragged the MIDI onto the mini track. Now we're going to consolidate the Midi region to be the same length as our audio region. Switch to note view, open our event operations window. Change the duration of these notes to 10 ticks, change our track height. A single note. See one. Now we're gonna open our event operations window again. Make sure at our Kwan ties great. Here matches our grid here. They're both set to 16th notes. I'm gonna change my nudge value to 10 milliseconds, which seems to be pretty good for getting many notes close enough to the grid that they Kwan ties to the right place. Now, if I open up the quickies window, you'll notice I have a short cut for Kwan ties from quantities menu. This command works on audio as well as many. I also have these two shortcuts which changed the grid setting here and in the event operations window. Now, looking at these mini notes and the grid, this double bass part is actually 32nd notes. I'm going to trigger this quant ties plus grid smaller command to change the grid here and the grid here to 32nd notes. All right, now we could start quanta izing this mini. Now, in this situation, we're going to be quanta izing everything on 100% to the grid. So these settings in the event operations window or find the way they are If we work, want izing to 90% strength, we would check this box, set it to and possibly even set the exclude within to somewhere around 10% which means if a note is within 10% of being dead on the grid, it's just going to ignore it and not quant ties it. But since we want these notes to be 100% on the grid, we're going to leave these settings the way they are now. I could just select all these notes. What's disable this setting so we don't have to hear all the kick select these notes. It's going to select the whole section, and I'll trigger my Kwan ties quickies command. All right now, you can immediately see that there are some gaps here that shouldn't be there. So I'm gonna copy one of these kick notes and start pasting him in the gaps where I know there should be kick. It's now. I'll re select all these notes in kwon ties again. So now we listen to just the click track and our kick drum. We should have a perfectly in time kick drum. Sounds great. No, I noticed a couple of these hits are actually at 1 26 velocity, so we'll go ahead and make sure they're they're all maxed out now. Let's finish quanta izing the rest of our K committee here because some of it isn't double bass. Let's listen to the part. These three notes sound like they're supposed to be triplets, so we're gonna leave that for a second. Let's go ahead and quantifies the rest of the stuff that is in a straight feel. All right, we can. Kwan ties those notes. These are supposed to be 16th but it looks like from where they are on the grid. If I hit quantities right now, this note might Kwan ties over here because it's so far off the grid. So we're going to use our nudge command and just nudge it a little closer to where it's supposed to be. And then Kwan ties. Now you can see that sounds weird because this snare hit here is actually supposed to be on this grid marker. But we'll get to that right now. All I'm doing is going through the whole song and quanta izing the cake committee to where I think it's supposed to be. If I get one wrong because the hands were a little off, we could go back and correct it later. No, just correct. These last two hits. Okay, Now, I also have a quickies command for switching the grid to triplets down here. Toggle triplet grid. So I'm gonna trigger that key command. Now, you can see we're in triplet mode here as well as here going to take the grid up from 32nd notes to 16th notes. Now, I noticed that these three kick hits also look like they're probably going to be Kwan ties to the wrong place. But I could see that this snare hit is supposed to be right pretty much where it is. But this snare head is coming in a little bit early so I can assume that this whole little phrase was played a little ahead of where it's supposed to be. So I'm just gonna go ahead and nudge this a little later and then Kwan ties. Now, this is where having the mind of a drummer helps a little bit because you have to be able to guess what they were intending for. Apart. It could be that these three kick hits were supposed to be 32nd notes, not 32nd note triplets, But I made the assumption that since there are three kick hits and they were a little ahead, just like this scenario hit. And if I nudged him a little later, they lined up pretty well with the triplet grid. Now, if I'm wrong and I sent this back to the producer, they may decide that it needs to be 32nd notes, and they could quickly Kwan ties it. But the less work that you make your producer do after the fact that better so you may need to work on your drummer. Mind reading skills. Let's go ahead and quantifies the rest of these triplets. This one looks pretty close, But you see, when I hit Kwan ties, the first note went to the wrong place. Someone a nudge it back over and hit Kwan ties again. Okay, I think that takes care of our triplets. Let's listen to the part real quick. Okay, Now I think all those kicks are in the right place, so we'll close the event operations window and then mute are kicked track. Let's go to the beginning of this section that we're working on. I'm gonna start it from this Tom buildup. Now, it looks like most of this Phil is going to be 32nd notes, and we'll have to figure out if these air triplets or 64th notes. But what I'm gonna do is hit command. Eight toe open beat, Detective, go to the clip separation tab. I'm gonna hit shift command G to disable my groups over here so that I can grab individual tracks rather than all of all of the tracks at once. And I'm just going to select the tracks that have hits on them. For the part that I'm working on this let's beat Detective detect where the transients are with a little better accuracy. So I know I have these Tom hits on these two tracks. And then I have snare hits and Tom hits on these two track. Now I'm going to hit shift forward slash two unlinked the timeline in edit selection. This allows me to keep my selection where it is and play from wherever on the timeline. Okay, let's go back to our beat detective window. We know that this is mostly made up of 32nd notes, so we're gonna keep are contained selection on 32nd notes. We're gonna hit, capture selection and then hit analyze and pro tools will try to find where all the transients are now. We can adjust this sensitivity to get as many of the hits as we can. Now, I could see that there are a bunch of false triggers on this Tom buildup part. So we're gonna pull back the sensitivity where we're just getting the hits that we want. And I'll manually add this hit in by clicking about where I think it's supposed to go. Now, over here, it looks like we have one hit that didn't get triggered. So I'll just click toe, add one there and then I'll hit shift Command G again to enable my groups and hit the semi colon key to shift my selection down, which will select all my drum tracks rather than just these four. Okay, now that all the hits are selected and our beat markers are in roughly the right place, we're gonna change our trigger pad to 10 milliseconds. Which means that when beat detective splits all these regions up, the actual region cut will come 10 milliseconds before where it detected the transient starts. That gives us some room for our cross fades later on. Now I'll hit separate Now, if a closed beat detective by hitting command eight again, you could see that Pro Tools has split up all of these hits and put a beat marker where it thinks the transit is. Now we're gonna verify that all those hits are in the right place. Justus, we did when we were doing snare Mitty. But first, let's finish splitting up the rest of our part. In most cases, I like to split up all the hits in song before I align or kwon ties anything. Now for this section, I'm going to select the overheads, the high hat track, the snare track, as well as these two Tom tracks that are being used in a fill and extend the selection to the end of this double bass part. And actually, it looks like the same drums are being used for the part after it. So I'm just gonna extend this election all the way to the end of the part that we're gonna be working on. It looks like there's a couple, Tom. It's on this track here at the end. Now I hit option F toe look at the whole section to kind of get a bird's eye view. Now we're gonna open beat detective again. We'll zoom back in a little bit. Let's play through the section and make sure that we've got everything selected that we need now. Right there. There were some Reid hits and I don't have the ride Mike selected right now, So we'll go ahead and select that play the rest of it. Okay, it looks like we've got everything that we need. So let's capture the selection, analyze it. And now, to make this easier on my eyes, what I like to do is go ahead and re enable the groups shift the selection up or down to make sure that we've got all the drum tracks selected. Note that this does not change what beat Detective is looking at when looking for transients. It only looks for transients on the tracks that you had selected when you hit, capture, selection and analyze. So now right off the bat, I see that this crash hasn't been detected. I will add that Now let's play through. You can see that one of these simple hits was not detected. Tools that one. Oops. I lost my selection An easy way to get it back as long as you have it made. Another selection since then is to hit option command Z. All right, we've got our selection back. Keep playing. There's a missing hit there in an extra one detected there. This one. I could see his detective a little early and one missing there. Oops. It looks like one ride hit is missing right there to delete these extra triggers. You hold option and click on the beat marker. Miss this crash hit and one right there. Okay, Now we've got all our hits roughly in place, so we will separate and we can close Beat Detective. Now. Now, what I would normally do is go to the beginning of the song and play through it and make sure that all my hits are separated. For example, if for some reason beat detective missed detecting one of these hits and they were in the same region, I would go ahead and split them and manually put a beat marker right here. So I'm gonna play through and make sure that we got all our hits separated. Let's go ahead and hit. Shift forward. Slash To re enable the linking timeline and edit selection. Okay, while our hits were split up correctly. So now we're going to do something similar, as in the snare MIDI tutorial going to quickies and make sure that our identify sink point shortcut is enabled. We're gonna vertically zoom our wave forms disabled tab to transients that we're having to our beat markers zoom in and verify that all of these are in the right place Now, Ideally, we want these beat markers to be as accurate to the start of the transient as we did when we were aligning midi to our drum track so I could see that this beat marker should really be over here. You could see that there's two transients happening here because to Tom's being hit at the same time. Now, in a situation like this, where we're aligning the drums 100% to the grid, I usually like to put the beat marker on whichever transient occurs first. Sometimes, however, you may want to put the beat marker halfway in between the two transients or on the second transient. It just depends on the kind of part and the feel that you're looking for. But for this part I think I'm going to put the beat markers all on the first transient that occurs. So let's tab to the next one. We could see that it should be right there. Tab that one was detected correctly. Let's zoom out a little bit to make sure that we're looking at the right tracks. Could see that this transient happens before this one. Like these transients were detective fairly accurately. Yeah, I could see that. I'm to zoomed in vertically here because I couldn't see the beginning of this transient, but I know it's right there. So we'll just keep tabbing and keep setting the beat markers where they're supposed to be if needed, you gonna increase the height of these tracks to get a better view of the wave forms, and we may need to zoom in horizontally a little more. We'll set our zoom level five to this zoom setting, and now it looks like we're I wanna fill here cause we're getting a lot of snare. And Tom Transient, this one. I could immediately see that there is no transient on the window here. So I zoom out and see that this is the transient that we're looking for as part of why it helps to have your zoom levels set up. I can quickly hit four to zoom out and get a better look at the transient and they hit five days. Um, back in now. Here. We're on to where the symbols come back in. So I'm gonna make these drum tracks a little smaller again. When you're looking for symbol transients, you may want to zoom out a little more than you would with drum heads. We'll set our zoom level four, this zoom setting. We're going to be a little less exact when we're looking for symbol transients. Now, this one is a crash. We could see it starts about right there. You see, this is the high hat, and that's pretty much on good zoom and even more. But really, these simple transients aren't nearly as clear as the drum transients are. So we're just gonna have to go by the point where the wave form height increases dramatically as the indication that that is where the transient should go. We could see this when should start a little earlier. I'm looking and you may. Your eyes may initially gravitate towards this point, but really the symbol transient starts about right here. We know this is a crash, and this overhead center Mike is probably the closest mike to that symbol. But you can also look at the other tracks to get a visual indication of where that symbol transient probably starts. In this case, you can see that there's a little bump on several tracks right here, so I think that's where the hits starts. Here's another one where it's a little harder to tell where the symbol it starts. But I'm looking right here because there's a little bump on several tracks it seems to line up about right there. Here's another tricky one. While we listen to it and see what this hit is. I think it's, Ah, high hat. Nope, it's a China. Why don't we look at this? Left China, maybe zoom in vertically a little more beat Detective pretty much got it right. It looks like it starts about right there. It's a pretty light hit two, so it won't be too bad if it's a millisecond off where it technically should be, would soon back down. You could see that you start to speed up a little bit. Once you get a feel for the part that you're working on, this one looks like the symbol Transient somewhere a little earlier. Probably about here. Same with this one. And same with this one. Now, this one is completely off the scenario transient. So let's zoom in a little more to see where the just near transient really starts. That's about right. Come back down to see this Tom Transient here. Now we can tell this is not on a transient, and the transient should be right here. Now, this looks like we may be on the ride. Hits? Yep. So let's go down to the ride, Mike, and make sure that these transients are accurate. So here's the first ride hit. Zoom in just a little bit. Okay, Now we're back to the rest of the symbols. Now, if you're doing this for the whole song, this could be a bit of a tedious process. And since usually we won't have to actually listen to the parts where we're aligning these beat markers unless we're not sure what a hit is, you can probably just watch Netflix or put on some music while you do this so that you don't drive yourself crazy. Okay, now we're at the end of our section here. Let's bring the zoom back down. Go to the beginning of our part. We're gonna open our Kwan ties window again. Now we need to select one of these audio regions and change elastic audio events, audio clips. Otherwise we can't Kwan ties the audio regions now we could start Kwan ties ing our drums now again work want izing 100% to the grid. If we were doing 90% we would put strength to 90 and probably exclude within 10%. Now these Big Tom hits our eighth notes. So let's change the grid. 2/8 notes. Select our hits and use our Kwan ties. Quick key shortcut. The reason I like this quantity shortcut is because it does more than just hit. Apply on this quantities window. If I open the shortcut, you could see these 1st 7 steps. What is doing is checking to see if this window is open. If it's not open, it opens the window. Kwan ties, is it and then closes it. So you could see if I trigger the shortcut. Now it opened the quantities window and then closed it after it was done. The other thing it does. It uses this shortcut trim region start to fill selection, which I also have assigned to a key. Now let's unq wanted this real quick. Open our window and I'll show you what it's doing. If I just hit, apply on the quantities window you see there these spaces in between the hits where the hits have been pulled apart. Now we need to fill those up with audio. Otherwise, we're gonna get pops. You hear those, pops? Okay, we're going to use the trim region, start to fill selection, short cut to fill up those gaps by pulling the beginning of these regions back a little. So if I trigger the shortcut fills up the space is without moving the regions. Now, you could do the same thing by using this trim tool and pulling him back. But this is just a automatic way to do it in our quickie shortcut. All of that is integrated into one keystroke. So let's try it again. Kwan ties and it fills the selection. Now let's check on our cross fates. So if I hit command after to bring up a cross fade window. Did you see that were set to equal power standard shape, create new fades but not create new fades, ends and out and not adjust existing fades and we want our fate length to be about five militants. You could play around with this value, but this is a good middle ground. Sometimes you may want to try 10 milliseconds if you're working on a Tom Heavy part. Other times when you're dealing with a very fast blast section, you may want to reduce the cross fade to two or three milliseconds. In this case, five milliseconds is fine. And now that we're set to five milliseconds, if I undo that and I just hit F, assuming that our keyboard focus is set to this edit window, if I hit F, it will create five milliseconds fades for this whole selection. Now we need to Kwan ties this big Phil here so I could see that most of these hits our 32nd notes and then something is going on here in the beginning. Now this could be to 64th notes, followed by 2 32nd notes, followed by 2 64th notes, followed by 2 32nd notes. Or if we switch to triplet grid, nudge these over so that the first hit lands on this 68 beat 34 could be that these are for triplet, 32nd notes and then four triplet. 32nd note. I think in this case it is the former option of a combination of 64th notes and 32nd notes. So why don't we go ahead and quantifies all these notes that are pretty close to the grid? We should have no problems if we just set to 32nd notes and then hit Kwan ties. Go ahead and add the cross fades and listen to it. Good. Now let's go to 64th grid. So I think what is supposed to be going on here is we've got to 64th notes to 32nd notes. So if I quantifies this, that's fine. And then we'll do the same thing. Starting here. Kwan ties and then extend this note prospect. Those That's what I think the drummer intended for this part. But if the producer decides that they should be triplets, you can always just switch back to the other playlist copy in the hits and qualifies him however he wants or leave him on. Kwan ties if he likes the feel of the original performance. Okay, now let's go back to 1/16 note grid in kwon ties. Some of these hits here looks like all of this, a straight feel. Here we have some 32nd notes. When we just go ahead and switch to 32nd note grid, it looks like this is all pretty close, and it should be Kwan ties to the right place. When I hit Kwan ties, it's just go up to there. I don't like to Kwan ties too much at one time because I want to be able to remember what the part originally sounded like and make sure that no hits got moved to the wrong place. So I've got my bird's eye view here, and I'm gonna hit Kwan ties. That looks like everything went to the right place, so it zoom in a little bit, make our cross fades, listen through good. These look like they were a little early, but they should Kwan ties to the right place. These look a little farther off, so we may want to switch to grid for that little quantities up to here. Good. Cross fade. All right, let's change our grid to 16th notes. Now, these will for sure be quant ties to the right place. You are fades. We're gonna need to be in 30 seconds for this part. All right? Looks like we can get all of this stuff. This hit looks like it's about halfway, so I'm not going to do that one quite yet. Looks like if I hit Kwan ties now, that could go to this place where it could go here where it's supposed to be. So we're going to do just nudge these two regions over a little bit. So that there going to be Kwan ties to the right place for sure. And then this is the end of our part. So we'll just quantifies the rest of these notes. Cross fade. Good. All right, now let's unused the kick and go back and listen to it. Depending on what you uses a sampler to be able to monitor what your kick committee is doing, you may encounter a little bit of latent. See between the audio here on these drum tracks and the midi feeding your drum sampler. But in my experience, if you're using easy Drummer and you have the buffer set to 2 56 or 5 12 samples, you probably won't be able to notice much. Layton. See? So let's go ahead and listen through. Good. All right. Now I'm going to mute my kick again and closed the event operations window. Now, we're gonna listen to our drum tracks minus the kick and listen for any artifacts that might have occurred because of our editing. Now, really, what I'm listening for is a sort of buzzy glitch ease kind of sound that happens when you pull two hits too far apart while we just listen through and see if we notice any weird sounding hit Now, the only hit that I noticed that I thought might have sounded a little weird and buzzy one of these Tom hits over here. I think it was one of these last two hits and you could see that the way we've quant ized it. There's a bit more space between the cross fade and the transient right here. Then on some of these other hits what that means it had to pull the two hits farther apart to get them tow line up with the grid. So if I delete this and just extend this region, you could see that the transient was there and got moved to there, which is, you see, that that's about 12 milliseconds now. to 15 milliseconds is about the maximum amount of time that you could pull two hits apart and not here an artifact. At least that's my kind of base guideline. Now there's a couple ways to deal with the situation like this, where you've got two hits that need to be on the grid. But when you pull them up that far apart, it creates some sort of artifact. One of the options is to copy and paste in a different hit, because what is happening when we pull these two hits apart and then pull this region back to cover up the space? In effect, we're hearing this part of the wave form twice, and that may seem subtle, but your ear comptel and your ear interprets it as a sort of buzzy, glitchy sort of thing. Now it's very minor there, but I'm just using this as an example, I'm gonna do undo all this. So, for example, if I needed to pull two of these snare hits farther apart, we would probably here an artifact. So I'm gonna pull this back here. You could see that the transient originally would have ended up right there. And now it's getting moved to there, which is a pretty big jump, about 42 milliseconds. So let's cross fade that and see what it sounds like. It almost sounds like there's a ghost note in there because we're hearing the transient decay, and then we're hearing a louder part of that decay. Come back in and decay all over again. So you see this sort of thing that happens when we moved transients too far from where they originally were. Let's go back to this Tom hit. This is a pretty minor artifact, and I probably wouldn't worry about it in real life, but I'm gonna give you a few options of how to deal with something like that. One option is the copy and paste to hit in from somewhere else. Now you have to be careful with this because you're also copying the bleed from the other Mike's. So if there's anything that doesn't quite match up and flow, you may hear it. So, for example, I could switch to relative grid mode and then, while holding all drag this region to replace the last time hit. Then we can delete these fades in the extra little regions here into a cross fade. But as you could see the ring from this other, Tom is decaying. It's decaying, it's decaying, and then all of a sudden gets louder because we copied it from here. Now, when we're cleaning up Tom's, we may take care of that problem, but we're still gonna hear that ring in the room. So if we listen to the overheads and our room tracks, we may notice something funny going on there. Maybe not. Seems like in this case, we could get away with it. Another option of what you could do is use elastic audio. So where is when we're doing beat? Detective? We're not actually stretching the audio. You can actually stretch the audio with elastic audio, and that sometimes can improve the sound of an edit. On the other hand, stretching audio can also create phase problems and other sorts of artifact. They could be undesirable. So you have to be careful and only use it when it's necessary. But to demonstrate off delete this last Tom hit extend this region Now we're gonna switch in tow, Warped view Zoom in on the time hit gonna put a warp marker at this Tom hit by holding control and clicking and then we're gonna put a warp marker right there. Now we're gonna switch to grid mode and drag this Tom it over and we'll pull this region back so that we're not cutting off our symbol transient, do a cross fade, switch back, wave, form, view and have a listen that seems to fix the problem as well. The other option is if you have an identical Phil somewhere else in the song, you can copy Paste the whole Phil or just the hits that you need. But again, you got to be careful with what was ringing out before those hits. So, for example, if there was a crash right here and you copied in a Tom hit from somewhere else where there wasn't a crash ringing in the exact same spot, you would probably hear that crash, cut off for a second and then come back in, which is obviously not desirable. So from those techniques, you could probably find a way to deal with most situations of sloppy playing, to the point where pulling two hits apart creates audio artifact. Now that we've checked all our head, it's over and corrected Any artifacts that we created, I'm going to save the project is something else. Let's call it Song edited. Now we're going to do is change this mini track to clip view, take our whole song and consolidate the audio files using Shift Bolt three. So now we have a consolidated version of our edited drums, and we still have our unedited version on the alternate playlist. Now let's take these snare tracks that we moved to the bottom of the session and move them back up. Go ahead and make all the tracks the same height. Lets reset the way form view using Ault A. Now we're going to remove all the unused regions from our session that we created from editing every time you split up in audiophile pro tools creates a new region that is a subset of a larger audiophile but we're not using these anymore. So what we're gonna do is hit shift, command you to select unused regions. It's also a menu command that you can access right here. Select, unused. And then we're gonna hit shift command, be to remove those regions from the project. Now, we don't want to delete the audio files off the disk. We just want to remove the regions from our session so that we can still access earlier versions of the project that have all the regions split up. We'll say yes. Sometimes you'll be left with these regions that probably should have been removed when you selected unused. And one way to get rid of them is to save the project, close the project, reopen it, and then do the select unused again. Hopefully, Then you'll get rid of all the ones that approach was missed originally. Now, the last thing that we're going to do if we just zipped up this Project folder and send it to our producer, we would be including anyway, files that were in the Projects audio files folder that we may have already removed from the project. But we didn't delete the files, so What we're gonna do is make a copy of the session that Onley has the audio files that are in use with this version of the project and the way you do that, is he gonna file, save copy in select audio files? Make sure that the sample rate and bit depth is correct. And make sure that the session format matches the version of pro tools that your producer or whoever you're sending the file to currently uses. If the person opening the files is running is still running version 78 or nine, we'll select this option to create a dot pdf file rather than a dot PT X file. Then we can hit. Okay, let's just save it to the desktop. Well, yes, to continue when this process is done, you'll be left with a folder that you can then compress and send to whoever you're sending it to. Now let's look at a situation where a real kick drum was used instead of a kick pad. When there's a real kick drum for most parts, you're not gonna be able to edit the kicks separately from the hands. The exception to that would be enough part where the cake is fast enough and the cake is muffled enough in the room and overheads that everywhere except the kick mike. It just kind of sounds like a constant stream of low end, for example, apart like this. If I listen to the overheads in room tracks, it's kind of hard to make out the transient of the kick. It's still there, but it's more of just a constant role. So it matters a little less that those transients in the room and overheads match up with what's going to be on our final edited kick drum track. Let's go back to a minute to this part. Now this is a thrash beat. If we were doing snare Midi, these snare hits would be set to 1 10 velocity just a side note, followed by a blast. For a part like this, we're gonna need to detect the kicks and split them up along with the hands. So let's go ahead and open beat Detective Switch to clip separation. Looks like we need our grid to be on 16th notes up until the blast, and we're just going to select our kick and snare now. Obviously there are symbols being hit here is well, but when we're editing drums, we kind of have to give priority to certain drums because the drum and those symbols aren't going to be hit it at exactly the same time. We could find the symbol transients for this part. But really, it's more important. Toe have the snare beyond time than toe. Have the symbols be perfectly on time? So we're gonna put all our transit markers on the kicks and snares, So we might as well just have beat Detective Onley. Look at those Let's capture the selection. It analyze what we switched to triplet mode to see if we can get these extra hits detected, which we did. Now we're going to extend the selection to the rest of the drum tracks and hit separate. Now we'll do the same thing as we did. We were editing with a kick pad, will go through and verify all are transient markers or in the right place. Like I said, in this case, we want our kicks and snares to be directly on the grid. So even though the symbol is being hit a little earlier than the kick, we're gonna put our marker where we think the kick transient starts. All right, now, it may be the case that when we Kwan ties this, we're gonna feel the Flamm of this kick and this and this symbol, so we may have to make an extra edit to get them to not flam. But first, let's just Kwan ties everything and see how it sounds. It looks like all this is a bit rush e to make sure that these get Kwan ties to the right place in a nudge him over a little. You know, it's select all these hits late Kwan ties five millisecond fades. Let's have a listen now. I'm definitely hearing some buzzy snare hits in there right there. We're gonna put some markers where we hear messed up hits. You hear one right there. I think the rest is okay. Now we need to pay attention to what the drummers doing because I think the best option in this case would be to copy and paste a different snare hit or a different kick hit over one of these two waken here is that we have to China hits and then we have this snare hit that gets buzzy and the same thing happens over here where we have our other buzzy hit. We'll do. Take this snare hit, cut it. Use relative grid mode to move this snare hit over here and paste in the one that was here. Over here. Do a little switcheroo now can redo our cross fades. Let's see if that helps. No. Still messed up something to do with the bleed going on there and over there, too. So let's undo that. No notice that this kick hit that comes after the buzzy snare is right on the first hi hat hit after the China. We have the same thing going on back here, right there. So what I think we could do is just copied this hit over here and over here. In fact, we may even want to copy of the snare hit before it as well. Sometimes using more than one hit can create a smoother edit, so we'll just copy these over here and over here. Now let's get rid of our fades. Make sure that we don't have any extra regions that stuck around to hit cross bait. That's definitely better. Still hearing a little bit right there. And what we may be able to do is use the same section from over here that we copied from before. Use this snare hit here, do a cross fades. Okay, I think that pretty much fix the problem. Okay, so that's a little more painstaking. And you probably have to deal with mawr artifacts because you're dealing with more split up hits and all these kick hit. Now, let's go back over here where we have this long run of double bass. Like I was saying before, I think in this case, we could probably edit the kicks in the hand separately for this part. We'll just have to do it and see how it sounds. Let's de select our drum group for a second that we're only selecting kicks. We're just gonna take this kick hit. Cut it. Now, I believe this part is supposed to be 16th note triplets. So what we're gonna do, just go ahead and delete all of this, then just paste in these K kids. The reason I'm on Lee pasting in one kick, it is because nine times out of 10 we're gonna be using a kick sample, and we're simply going to trigger the MIDI off of these kick. It's that we're dealing with right now, so I'm not really worried about it sounding repetitive because we're gonna end up using example. Anyway, once we've done that, go ahead and cross fade These it's all listening to it. I'm not really hearing a problem between our Kwan ties kicks in our room tracks because it's such a stream of constant double bass. Every once in a while I hear a hit that might sound like it's a little off time coming from the room tracks, but in the mix that probably won't be an issue. Now we can treat the rest of this section like we did when we were using a kick pad and edit the hands separately. Another situation you may encounter whether using a kick pad or real kick drum is that the producer wants the drums not perfectly on the grid. They want to preserve the human feel of a good drummer. Now, some of these tricks that we've been talking about still apply as faras copying in hits and moving things around to get rid of artifacts. But it's a much more straightforward procedure Basically what we want to do is first look for a section where the timing sounds fine to our years. It may not be perfect, but it's good enough to not have to edit it right now. I'm hearing this part that thrash beat doesn't really sound like it needs much editing. It may not be perfectly on the grid, but it sounds pretty good. So what I'm gonna do is switch to slip mode. I'm gonna look at some of these notes and see how far off the grid they really are. This kick it is about nine milliseconds off the grid. This snare hit is about eight milliseconds off the grid. So look around. See how far off these hits are in this section that you think sounds good enough. And then you're gonna want to set your nudge value to something low, like three or five milliseconds. No, we're gonna do is just split the region somewhere where we think the audio is drifting too much. When the drummer got to these hits, it sounded like you rushed a little bit. So we're just going to split it and nudge it over a little bit. Now, remember 12 to 15 milliseconds is about the max that you're gonna be able to move something before you start hearing artifacts. So keep that in mind when you're setting your nudge value so you can keep track of how much you've moved something based on how many times you hit the nudge button. So let's nudge this whole section about 15 milliseconds to the right and the nudge. These hits another little bit to the right. Now we can fill up these blank spaces, cross, fade and listen. I feel like I may have heard a little bit of a buzzy hit here, but nothing to be worried about. Let's go back here, and it looks like some of these hits came in a little late. So what? We split that and nudge it back a few milliseconds. That sounds good. It's not perfectly on the grid, but it sounds human, and it sounds type. This sort of editing tends to give you a little bit better. Sound quality because you're making less cuts in the audio. It also makes the drum sound a little more human. One of the downsides for us technical minded folk is that it's a little hard to give you rules or a specific process for this sort of editing, because it's much more up to interpretation of how tight something should be. But you some of the same tricks make sure that there are no artifacts. Keep your head. It's clean and as well make sure that no little bits of transients appear where they're not supposed to appear like here, where a cross fade is hiding most of a transient, but part of it is still coming through, which would create a pop. Sometimes I think of this sort of editing like a game. The game is how few edits can I make and still end up with a very tight performance. Remember, these are just a few techniques for editing drums. There are tons of drum editing tutorials out on the Internet, so watch a few different ones and see what kind of different techniques you can come up with. Sometimes it can seem like drum editing is a puzzle. You have all these little pieces, and you're trying to construct something that sounds tight and doesn't have any artifacts. One thing to watch out for when you're editing drums with a real kick drum and parts like this, where there's a blast beat where kicks and snares air hitting at the same time, you may get undesirable flam ing between the two drums, for example, a little flaming between the two drums is okay, but when you get something like this where you can clearly hear the separation between the two hits, you may need to tighten up this edit. One way to do that is to split the kick region, pull it back, nudge it over, create a cross fade and let's have a listen. And this is where things can get really tedious when you start trying to copy hits in from everywhere to cover up all these little flamme is and mistakes and editing artifacts. But just be patient and be creative with how you move things around to try to achieve the best edit that you can