Lessons

Lesson Info

Bonus Video: Kick Midi

So, first of all, you should have quickies installed, and you should import my shortcuts that I provided with the written instructions. Quickies is a pretty easy program toe. Learn some of these shortcuts I have set to be triggered from key commands, and those should work fine for you right off the bat. Some of them I have assigned two mouse buttons, so anywhere you see like button for here. That may not show up on yours. So what you need to do if you want to use mouse buttons to trigger these commands is go to the devices window and add your mouse to the list of devices and then pick a shortcut and change the hot key or device to whatever button you want to trigger that shortcut. If you have any questions with getting quickies to run, let me know and I'll be happy to help. Sometimes we're going to give you tracks just his wave files with a MIDI file as the tempo track and sometimes will give you actual pro tools sessions with all the audio and tempo information already in the project.

In this case, we're going to look at a project where we were just provided wave files. So I'm gonna show you how I like to set up sessions before you create the project, you're going to need to know the sample rate of the wave files that we've given you. If you're on Mountain Lion, you could tell what sample rate the wave files are at by right clicking, hitting get info and looking at the sample rate over here. So these are running at 48 case. We're going to create a new project. Bit depth, 24 bit sample rate, 48 k Now we're gonna import the audio files that we were given. You want a copy? Also, that they're copied into the new project folder that we've created. As you can see, I click on one of these says that the way file can be added directly to the current session Sample rate matches. If it's asking you to convert the files to a new sample rate, then you need to go ahead and make a new project with the sample rate matching the way files that we gave you. Next, we're gonna import the temple information from a MIDI file by going to file import Midi, and then we want to grab the temple map and the key signature and make sure the location is sessions Start in this video, I'm gonna talk about getting midi from kick tracks that were given, so we're gonna focus on those. However, when you're setting up your session, I would recommend putting it in a specific order. Usually what I do is kicks at the top, followed by snares followed by Tom's, followed by symbols. And then I will rename the tracks so that they don't have all these numbers that came with the file names actually have a quickies command to do that. It is this track numbers strip command, which you tell it, how many characters you want to strip off the file name in this case Go to the first track, make sure that the Texas selected and triggers a shortcut. They were done on this song. We have to kick tracks now. Sometimes we will give you kick tracks that are taken from a Roland kick pad, and sometimes there will be real kick drums. In this case, we're using a role in Kick pat. So here's what the kick tracks sound like. In my experience, the two kick tracks will trigger slightly differently. So in this case, what we're going to do is create two new MIDI tracks as well as a stereo box track. So rather than condense these to kick tracks to one MIDI track, we're going to trigger it to too many tracks and then aligned them separately. We're going to send our new Midi tracks too easy, Drummer. I'm going to use the metal Easy X for our sound source and Onley. The kick and snare sounds are loaded, since we're not triggering Tom's on this project. Now let's send those MIDI tracks too easy. Drummer and I like to set the height too many, and I like to Seoul a safe. So if we want to hear what the samples are doing, all we have to do is solo out the easy drummer channel. Next, we're going to take many from our first kick track, so select the whole thing. I like to use Massey D R T in order to get mini, but you can also use late trigger Massey, D R T and Slate trigger both pretty accurate, although after we pull the Midi from this kick track, we're gonna end up tabbing through each mini note and making sure it's a line to the audio perfectly. Now we're going to analyze the kick audio the way Massey D R T works is you set thes sensitivity and loudness sliders so that it is only triggering the hits that you want. But we may get a false trigger or two anyway, So I'm just gonna set the sensitivity slider somewhere in here and look at some of the kick hits and make sure that we're only getting kick hits and not bleed from other tracks. It looks like we missed. They hit there. There's always a fine line between letting too many false triggers come through and having to manually delete them later and having to manually add too many light hits that the trigger software missed. This looks pretty good, so we're going to go ahead and pull the MIDI from this track, so I select the whole track switch to grid mode by hitting F four. We want to make sure our note is C one. As you can see, I've maxed out the velocities because for this metal stuff. We want to set the velocity to a constant value and then use automation to manually control the dynamics of the kick drum. So in Massey, I will use the mini dragon drop button to pull the MIDI to the first mini track, and I want the Midi tracks to be right above their respective audio tracks. Now what I could do is select the audio hit P to move the selection up one track, and then you shift Ault three to consolidate the MIDI track to be the same length as the audio track. Now let's do the second mini track. It looks like the same settings will work on both tracks in this case. Sometimes you may have to slightly adjust it, but again, we're going to go back and verify that all the hits that we need are there. So you don't have to check the whole song while you're looking in the D R T window. Let's pull the midi for kick, too. Select the audio hit P and consolidate the midi. Now what we need to do is manually drag the mini read so it matches the audio as close as we can get it, then we're going to go back and tap through each note to make sure that the individual notes are where they should be. So, what you should do, zoom into a track, zoom vertically and then zoom in on a midi note. We could see that this many note looks like it's coming in about sample or too late. Let's see what the next money? No, it looks like I'm just hitting tab to go through these many notes that looks dead on how it looks. A sample or too late sample or too late. Sample late example or too late. OK, so why we take, I'm gonna separate the Midi region so that we can nudge it backwards. I'm gonna set our nudge value to samples. We're gonna nudge it back to samples using the minus key. Now, if we tab through, they look pretty close. Let's do the same thing with the second kick track. Go ahead, separate it. What's tab through? These seem to be varying mawr in position than the first track. But generally it looks like they're a sample or too late as well. So we're just gonna nudge it back. One sample Now we can re consolidate thes many regions and now we're going to switch to note view on these Midi tracks. I'm selecting both many tracks and then holding shift option and clicking notes on track view so that they both switched at the same time. Now, with shift and all still held, I'm gonna click track height, single note, see one so that we only see that note on the track. Now I'm gonna do click on both tracks. It command A to select all the notes hit option zero toe, open the event operations window, change the duration to 10 ticks. This way, when we're moving notes around, we don't accidentally overwrite the note next to it by overlapping them. Now we're going to listen through the to kick tracks and listen for any miss triggers or missed triggers. In this case, I didn't have to fix any hits, which means I set the sensitivity of Massey d rt just right for the song. Now what we're going to do is group each audio kick track to its corresponding MIDI kick track. Let's just call them kick one and kick, too. You want them to be edit groups now this is why who had to consolidate the Midi region to be the same length as the audio region. Now, with the many region on top of the audio region and the edit group assigned Weaken Tab through the MIDI notes such that if I want to click on a part of the way form, I'm also selecting on the MIDI kick track. Let's say, for example, that this trigger hit was off. What I can do is cut it click where the kick transient starts and hit paste that is basically the workflow of what we're going to do for all the kicks, all the snares and all the times. So what we want to do is make thes kick tracks really big and make sure that we're vertically zoomed in pretty far. It's tab to the first kick note. Zoom in. I'm gonna set my zoom level five where I am now so that I can easily get back to that zoom setting. Usually, I only used them settings 34 and five, so three will be somewhere around here. Four will be from around there, and I'm setting the zoom levels by holding command and clicking on the 345 buttons, and you recall the zoom level by hitting 345 not on the num pad, but on the top of your keyboard. Three for fly. Okay, now what we're going to do is tab through each kick note and visually, make sure that the mini note lines up with the kick transient. Now, since there are so many kick notes in most metal songs, we're going to do this pretty quickly compared to how we do snares and Tom's with snares and Tom's making sure the sample start is as close as possible to the audio. Transient is very important because we're trying to keep the phase relationship of our snare and Tom samples as consistent as possible with the rial snare and Tom tracks. So we want the MIDI notes to happen at the same part of the transient on every single hit with kicks. If the Midi notes are a sample or two off, it matters a little less, especially in a case like this, where we're dealing with kick pads and we're not augmenting a real kick track with samples were simply going to be using samples, but we still wanted to be very accurate. In this case, the drummer wasn't edited to a grid, so we want to maintain the feel of the performance. So let's start off on the first kick track and start tabbing through notes. Now, I'm not going to stop tabbing until my eyes tell me that one of those many notes was off. This takes a little practice, but you're gonna want to go pretty fast with it And just trust your brain to tell you when something's off and then you can hit all tab to go back to whatever hit you think it was. That was slightly off. So, for example, you could see that some of these notes are maybe off the transient by a sampler to And when I say a sample, I mean the smallest unit that you can access in pro tools. So this is a sample. It would be too samples, three samples. So what I'm looking for is a range of error between two or three samples somewhere in that range. So I'm gonna keep tabbing now. This one is obviously off, so I'm gonna hit zoom level four to see where we are. Okay? It mistook this noise as a kick hit. So what I'm gonna do is hit X to cut the note I'm gonna click near where I think the transit is supposed to be hit five to zoom back in and hit V to paste and keep tabbing There's another one. I had to all tab back to it, so I'm gonna cut that one hit Zoom Level four Click where I think it's gonna go. Zoom level five refined my selection and paste. You'll get very fast that this once you do it a few times, this one just looks like a softer kick it and not a Miss Trigger. But I'm gonna zoom back out to make sure Yeah, let's zoom back in and keep going. This one kind of exceeds the margin of error that I've set for myself. So I'm gonna cut, click where I think it should go and paste and then continue. Now it looks like we missed a couple here, so let's look and see where this one is supposed to go. The software algorithms are pretty good at detecting transients, but you want to be looking for where the wave form switches from a straight line or from one shape into a sharp curve and put the MIDI note there. This one slightly off this one looks like the transient was cut during editing, so we're just gonna align it toe what's left of the transient. You will have bursts where you don't have to fix any notes for a minute of the song, and then you'll have to fix every note. It depends on how consistent the drummer wasn't hitting the cake pad and how fast he was going. You'll notice that when a drummer does doubles on two feet, meaning two hits on one foot and then two hits on another foot on really fast double bass parts, it tends to get sloppier lighter, and the trigger has a harder time telling where the transient starts. I'm resuming a little more. Since we have so many of these soft hits, I want to make sure that I know where the transient starts. Okay, that's all the kick hits for the first kick. Let's do the 2nd 1 now. As you could tell, the Midi notes on the second kick track are a little less accurate to the audio than they were on the first track. So unfortunately, we're just gonna have to correct every note that looks off to us. Go ahead and introduce you to one of the other quickies shortcuts that I use for this sort of thing. Usually, I only use this shortcut for snare and Tom Midi alignment, but in this case, I think it will work well. So let's go to quickies. I have two shortcuts here. Paste, trig and paste. Trig 10.3. Something changed in pro tools 10.3 toe where sometimes when you tab through many notes, you have to hit tab twice before you can go to the next note. Um, I don't know why, but in any case, I have slightly different versions of the shortcut here. Eso If you're on a version of pro tools before 10.3, then use this version. If not, then use this version. So basically all you do with the shortcut is hit. Cut on a note click where you think it's gonna go and hit T. Now it will pace that. Go to the next note and cut that note and just do the same thing. So all you have to do is click where the Transit, You should Go and hit T for every note. In this case, I'm going to zoom in vertically a little more just so I could see where the curve of the transient starts to happen. Okay, that was all of the second track of kicks. Let's make these regions small again. And if we listen to our easy drummer track along with our kick audio tracks, they should all line up. I put Easy Drummer on an ox track and none instrument track because it seems to do better with keeping Layton seat down so that when I play the kick audio along with the MIDI, the hits line up with each other. Now we can switch the view of these Midi kick tracks to clip mode, and we're done with the kicks.