Lessons

Lesson Info

Bonus Video: Snare Midi

The process for getting many from snare tracks is similar to kick tracks, except we have a lot less notes to deal with, and our accuracy needs to be better. First, let's create a new mini track and name it snare. Now let's make our snare track pretty big. An open Massey D R t select the whole Samir track. Analyze it. Similar to kick. The idea here is to get as many notes right with this few Miss Triggers and his few miss notes as possible. But we're going to verify all the notes or their after we're done with the RT. What you want to do is aim the sensitivity slider toe where there's a valley in all these markers. Now, I know this drummer does have some ghost notes in his playing, so I'm gonna try to capture as many of those as possible and simply delete all the miss triggers that I find. But solo out the snare track and listen through a little bit and see how close we are. As you can see that Phil was pretty close. There's one miss trigger at least looks like we have some miss trigger...

s over here. But that's OK. You could delete him in d r t by just clicking like this, but I think it's faster to do it after you've already taken the Mickey out of D R T. I'm gonna bump the sensitivity up just a little bit to see if we can get rid of some Miss triggers later in the process. We're going to correct the velocities for these snare and Tom hits. But when you're pulling the midi from the audio, you want d rt or trigger to print the velocities is close to how you want them in the final version as you can, especially fills all the single hard hits we're going to correct to a single velocity value. But we want the Phils to be dynamic, So why don't we zoom in on some pills and make sure that the velocity looks about right? This takes a little practice because you're basically eyeballing it. But what I'm gonna do is select audio for the whole sneer track and nudged the velocities up until I start to see that they're maxing out. That's probably about where we want the Phils to be now a d r t. You can adjust this slider to make things more dynamic or less dynamic. I find values close to the default usually work pretty well. Maybe even make it slightly more dynamic and then adjust the whole thing up a little. So now we're going to do the same. Thing is with Kick. I'll select the whole region, switch to grid mode and they go to the beginning of the session and drag the median. Then we'll consolidate the Midi region to be the same length as the audio region. Switch to note view, select all the notes, hit all zero toe open event operations and change the duration to 10 ticks. Now let's go ahead and group this near track to this near Midi track and with the snare tracks soloed vertically, zoom in a little bit. Now we're gonna listen through the song and delete any miss triggers. Now, here you see, we had a couple of ghost notes, but we're gonna wait and add those last. Now there's a Miss Trigger way. Have some more ghost notes there that we're gonna have to add later. Now that sounded like a flam, but it only registered his one note this one sounds like a flam, too, but I think he had a Tom in the snare rather than to scenario. It's, I could tell, because there's this little mini transient that's probably a different drum bleeding into the snare mic. If we listen to one of the other audio tracks that we were given, maybe we could tell. Yep, that certainly sounds like a comment right there, but this sounds like a snare flam. So what we'll do is go back to the sneer track. Let's see if we could figure out where the second hit of the flam starts going to switch to slip mode. This is where my eye was drawn. Sometimes it can be a little tricky finding the second transient in a flam. The transient starts. It's starting to get a little smaller, and then it gets big again. And that's basically what we're looking for. And once we see the shape, I could be pretty sure that that is the transient that I'm looking for. I'm gonna pace a new note there. We'll get rid of this Miss Trigger. You can use shift in space to play the audio at half speed. The pitch will drop to. But sometimes it helps and be able to tell what exactly is going on in a drum fill? Sounds like we've got a snare hit here. And then a Tom hit here, followed by these snare hits. Let's listen to that Phil again. That was right. Here's another flam that was Detective as a single hit. So let's copy this note and it looks like the transient starts here. I'm gonna guess right there. Let's get rid of this. Miss Trigger. Looks like both hits were detected on both of these clams. This one, though, was not. This is a tricky one, but it looks to me like the transient either starts there or there. I'm gonna go with this one now when sounded like another Tom Plus snare flam. But let's verify that yet now one could go either way. Oh, that was Tom hit. Let's slow this Phil down and see which hits are Tom's in which are snares this hit in this hit or Tom Hits and then we've got another snare hit right here. Go ahead and pace that one in. It will set the velocity to be a little lower. That's basically what we're going to do with the ghost notes, but I find that it goes faster. If you do them all last gonna take this Tom hit that was Detective a snare hit and just move it to the sneer hit that wasn't detected. Okay, now we're gonna tab through the notes just like we did with the Kicks. Except this time, we're going to use the paste, trig command and quickies for every note to make sure that they are as close as possible. So it's tab to the first note and hit five to zoom in what's hit X soon and vertically. A little more so we could see the curve of the transient. And let's start pasting now immediately were NFL eso It may be harder to tell where the initial transient is, so it zoom out a little bit. It should be right there, which is where we were in first place. Well, hit t. Now this occasionally happens. I'm not sure why, but sometimes you'll hit t and it'll tab to the next note, but not cut it A something to do with pro tools. 10.3. But I'm not sure it's ever gonna be fixed so just learn to deal with it, to find where the transient starts, like with the kick drums were looking for, where the curve turns sharply up or down. It will be the same for all the hits on a given track, meaning all hits will either start going up or all hits will start going down. So all you need to do is look for where the curve turns sharply. In this case, it's gonna be about right here. Sometimes you'll see a transit like this where the dip seems a bit shorter than the others. Now I actually think in this case, the transient starts right here, and as you do this sort of alignment more often, you'll start to recognize these strange shapes in the transience and where they come from. But when several hits come in secession, sometimes you'll find that the initial transient looks a little different. Remember to use your resume levels if you're unsure about a note. If you zoom out sometimes you could see the transient more clearly. Now if you're editing a project where the drums were edited, ah, 100% to the grid and you tab through notes and you're seeing that these transients are aligned exactly. Two. The grid lines, Then what you could do is just take your MIDI notes and quantifies them. In this case, that's not what's going on. And you can only do that if the person editing the drums was as detailed about finding the transience when they were editing as you are when you're cleaning it up. Otherwise, we don't get the accuracy that we're looking for. Now that we've aligned all those snare hits, we can fix the velocities on the snare hits and then add the ghost notes. Since the snare Audio and the snare MIDI tracker grouped Weaken, Just drag one of them and we're didn't make them both the same size Switch the Midi track to Velocity View, Select all and hit Option A to center it and reset the zoom. Now we're gonna make a few passes over the whole thing. The first pass we make, we're going to look for single hits that all need to be set to 127 velocity in some songs that maybe the majority of the hits. In other songs, the drummer will do lots of thrash beats in which case will set those snares to a smaller value like 1 10 So it's listen through and we're gonna look for snare hits with a decent amount of space between them that are supposed to be hard. First, let's disable our paste tricky so he can use the R and T keys to zoom in and out. This snare hit needed to be 127 usually with Flam. One hit will be slightly quieter than the other. In this case, the first hit obviously came in louder than the second hit. So we'll just take these two notes and drag them up so that the top note is 127 and the other notice slightly below it 1 Somewhere in that area is where I would set lamb velocities anyway. Usually the first note would be 1 27 and the second note would be somewhere between 1 18 and usually in a fill. The highest the snare velocity will get is about 1 25 That way we're still leaving the hardest of hard hits to single hits like you would find in a breakdown, since I would consider this part a fill section. I'm just gonna leave it alone way. Then we have another flam, so let's drag that up. In this case, the second note was louder. So we'll make that 11 27 and the first note will be 1 We make this note 127. Now these air the usual sorts of notes that we would make 127. Well, that was like there was a little bit of dynamics back here. However, in this case, I think it's fine if they're all 1 This is about where I would draw the line between setting single hits at 1 27 setting them to something lower like 1 10 But I think in this case I'm just gonna make him 1 These can all be 1 Like I said, any more frequent and I would probably take thes snares and make them all 1 10 velocity. Okay, Now, I noticed that there weren't any parts that I would consider thrash beats in this song that would normally be the next past. That I do is looking for sections like that and setting all the velocities to 1 But since there aren't any thrash beats in the song, we could skip that next. We're going to go through all the fills and make sure their velocities are about right now. Sometimes in the fill, a hit will be detected too hard or too soft, and we'll have to manually correct those. But usually we want to preserve the dynamics of whatever trigger or D R T gave us in terms of velocity dynamics. So let's play through the song again. And in this case, we're gonna want to make sure that our MIDI track is sent to Easy Drummer. And let's hear Easy Drummer along with our snare. Go ahead and meet the kick tracks. We're just hearing snare now. D R T defaults to setting all the many notes. To see one in this case is we're sending it to Easy Drummer. We need to set them all the D one to be read. It snares So it's open event operations with option zero. Go to transpose and transpose all notes to D one. Turn our snare track up, so we have a nice blend between the sample and the real snare now here's where it starts to get a little up for interpretation as faras what velocities you set things to in general, I would say that the hardest hits and a snare Phil should be somewhere around 1 18 to 20 That's when you're doing something like this, where the drummer is not playing super fast and he has time to really make those scenario hits hard. He's still not hitting as hard as he could, so we're not going to set those notes 227. But somewhere around 1 to 1 21 would be about right. So let's look at the hardest notes in this part, and it looks like they're showing up around 1 17 1 15 so we could take all this and bump it up by 32 or three. Now our hardest hits are around 1 18 to 1 This last little bit came in a little softer, so we'll just nudge it up for something like this. We probably want the velocities to be around 100 somewhere from 90 to 105. If the first note in a Phil is significantly harder, we might make it say 1 10 and have the rest be around 100. In this case, it looks like d rt got the velocities pretty close. So we're looking at 98 101 197. That should be about right. So now you just kind of skip through and go to the Phils. Now this one looks like we've got a hard hit followed by some that should be around 95 to 100. So let's see where we're at 1 13 and then those air in the nineties. Okay, so we'll pull this hit up a little bit, too. Maybe 1 That sounds about right. This one, I think, should probably the first hit should be around 1 13 and then the rest should be 105 region. And that looks about right. Maybe we'll pull this one up. Just a touch. Let's go to the next fill, which is over here. That sounds pretty good. I think we could even bump it up just a little bit so that those hard hits air coming in around 1 in the lower ones around 90. All right, let's go. The next bill. The's hits should probably be coming in around 1 to 1 13 14 ish, so we could probably boost them a little bit. What's up? All right. You should probably be a little higher. 1 14 1 10 And that sounds about right. Maybe even a little higher on that. First it. Okay, find the next fill. Sometimes you'll want to exaggerate the dynamics of the MIDI. So in this case, it detected this softest hit as 72. Now I think that should probably more like 45 to 50. And we'll exaggerate this one correspondingly to about 80. And this one should be 112. Sounds about right, Maybe even under 15. Let's find the next bill. Those should be the harder one should be around 105 and the lower one should be around 90 90. That's good. This is another where we may want to exaggerate the policies a little bit, but they look pretty good. You can always mute the real snare and listen to the sampled sneer. If you kind of want to get a feel of how your dynamics are, and then let's listen to the real snare. It sounds really close. These two hits should probably be in the 1 10 somewhere. Where is this one? Should probably be down around 70. Thanks. Phil is like the intro. So the hardest hit should come in around 1 That looks about right. For the rest of again. These should be around 100 which they are. This is a really light hit, so it should come in around and these could probably be brought up just a little bit. We got one more, Phil. Those are pretty light. They should probably be around 90 now. They're also aren't any blasts in this song. So why don't we pretend for a second that this section is a blast beat? What I would do in that case is pulling my event operations window. Go to change velocity and set all to and random buys by value of two. It apply. And now our notes are 1991 89 right around 90. And that's probably where they should be for blast beats. If this were a thrash beat, I would select all of these set all toe 1 10 and turn off randomize so that they're all want in Now that we've done that, all that's left to do is go back and add all the ghost notes that we missed. So let's take a note that had a low value, a low velocity value. Copy it. We're gonna make sure that we're zoomed in pretty far vertically on the rial snare tracks. Let's play through and we're Gonna do is going to stop whenever we hear a ghost note and paste it in. Let's go ahead and disable Easy Drummer for now, so we could focus on the real snare track that sounded like a to hit drag. So we'll zoom in on the first tip and paste Now, for most of these ghosts. Notes. Your velocity values should be more like 10 to 30. So we're gonna use 15 is our default and copy that note. Let's go to the second note it paste. You see this hit is slightly softer, so we'll pull the velocity down just a little bit. There's another one that would sound it a little louder, so let's call it 30. There's another double drag some of these ghost notes. It will be tricky to tell where exactly where the transient is But fortunately, since the transient is so soft, it will be less of a problem if it's slightly off from where the transient technically should be. All we're trying to do here is give some definition to these ghost notes because sometimes they can get lost in the bleed that comes into a snare mic. So by having the samples there in the background, hopefully you'll be able to hear the ghost notes a little clearer in the final mix. Now here we have a couple ghost notes. Again, you may want to play at half speed to be able to hear exactly which transient is the ghost note way. Have one there and one here, and one is obviously louder than the other. So we'll set the velocity of the 2nd 1 to about 40. Here's another one. We'll call this one about 35. Here. We've got one note that was missing. This one's a tricky one, but I think this is the transient. We're gonna reduce the velocity that because 77 is way too high, let's call the 1st 1 about 30 and called 2nd 1 about 15. There's a little ghost note right there. No one so light. I'm gonna call it 10. It sounds like we've got a ghost note in here somewhere. Like this one is Ah, snare hit in the other ones of Tom. I want to make sure I didn't miss a ghost note there. Nope. Get a couple goes notes here. Now it's hard to tell if that's an editing mistake or a drag. I'm gonna go with the drag, though, cause it looks like there's a transient right here with slightly different from the 1st So let's say this one is 10 and this one is ah, 20. Okay, when you're done with that, we should have a completed snare midi track. Now that we're done, why don't we have a quick listen through with snare and kick together? Cool.