Lessons
Day 1
1Class Introduction
21:53 2The Tone Pie and Process Overview
13:35 3Getting the Lay of the Land and Q&A
32:58 4Assemble Your Gear
14:34 5Drum Tuning Part 1
33:56 6Drum Tuning Part 2
39:49 7Fine Tuning Tones Part 1
35:29Fine Tuning Tones Part 2
54:24 9General Guidelines of Tracking Drums
32:27 10Tracking with Sean Reinert
32:50 11Pop Quiz
17:57 12Basics of Superior Drummer
30:00 13EZDrummer vs Superior Drummer
25:32 14Constructing a Metal Drum Kit Part 1
41:09 15Constructing a Metal Drum Kit Part 2
26:14 16Constructing a Rock Drum Kit
38:03 17Grooves and Programming
14:33 18General Q&A
18:31 19Prepping Virtual Drums for the Mix
37:16 20Superior Review with Q&A
22:01 21Intro to Mixing and Drum Clean Up
33:13 22Interview with John Douglass
25:00 23Intro to Drum Editing
21:32 24Manual Editing Approach
15:30 25Editing with Beat Detective
16:46 26Editing with Elastic Audio
29:16 27Sample Layering
20:14 28Replacements
23:13 29Gain Staging and Bussing
15:45 30Mixing Essentials
32:06 31Compression and Parallel Compression
13:22 32Reverb and Automation
28:18 33Mixing Tips and Tricks
26:53Day 2
Day 3
34Bonus: EZDrummer - Introduction
17:38 35Bonus: EZDrummer - Intro to EZDrummer
14:47 36Bonus: EZDrummer - EZDrummer Foundations
29:30 37Bonus: EZDrummer - How a Drummer Plays
19:51 38Bonus: EZDrummer - Part Writing Part 1
32:54 39Bonus: EZDrummer - Part Writing Part 2
29:35 40Bonus: EZDrummer - Part Writing Q&A
10:21 41Bonus: EZDrummer - Intro to Grooves
13:48 42Bonus: EZDrummer - Writing from Scratch
26:49 43Bonus: EZDrummer - Intro to Fills
20:51 44Bonus: EZDrummer - Writing Fills
27:20 45Bonus: EZDrummer - Mixing in Your DAW
14:13 46Bonus: EZDrummer - Bussing and EQ
25:36 47Bonus: EZDrummer - Compression and Reverb
18:26 48Bonus: EZDrummer - Conclusion with Q&A
12:30 49Bonus Video: Editing
1:07:00 50Bonus Video: Toms and Cymbals
29:02 51Bonus Video: Snare Midi
32:26 52Bonus Video: Kick Midi
20:35Lesson Info
Editing with Beat Detective
Let's talk about be detective real quick. We go to the unedited version of this track. You can see these are actual takes. Comes from an album. It's no. I chose an example That's kind of slow so that we can actually get this done. And so I can illustrate my points more. Ah, more clearly, check out this track. Listen, toe how it basically is all over the place. I don't think you even need to hear a click to hear that. Just try to feel the groove of this. It hurts, right? It's hard to listen to. I don't really know how else to say it's just playing uncomfortable. And the zoo man. You see, while the kicks have been corrected, the hands are all over the place. Just I had I had had kind of a head behind ahead. I had kind of behind kind of ahead, kind behind right on. But that's random. That that's not That's not skill. That's total randomness ahead. You can see this is all over the place. Well, hey, I mean, you know, if you're going to, you have ah, basically a series of random events happe...
ning here and at some point is bound a bound to be right on through massive clocks, right twice. Exactly. It's just probability that at some point there will be some hit that's on now. We could manually edit this, and it would actually pretty simple because the material is very slow. And then we would just select the area. This is looking kind of ahead. Move it on to the beach. But there's more wrong with it than just that. It's deeper than just moving it over. That high hat is on. Another planet like this needs to be actually doctored. Yeah, the manual editing is not what this situation calls for. This situation calls for the detective, so go to event operations. Well, actually the event menu and go to beat Detective And funny little note for you guys. If you want to see the old version beat Detective, just take a look. Thea, the graphical user interface for it used to be kind of humorous. I don't understand why they changed it anyways. Select a small area. To begin with, you could be eclipse separation and capture the selection than analyze. As you can see, it dropped hit points basically on all the transients. Now you can go in and align these hit points, and that's what you want to do, because it's not always going to get them right. But you get the idea. I'm sure see, that's totally in the wrong spot. What'll happen is it'll move the middle of this snare hit rather than the transient. So you want to line these up to the transience like I'm doing and you want to set a reasonable trigger pad right here, I'd say to 15 milliseconds just to make sure that no transients get cut off. So I think the high hat was the biggest offender in that whole thing. That's what was really throwing this off. So I want to make sure that the strength is, ah, strong enough, meaning what it actually picks up from. The drum performance is strong enough to detect the high hat, and it looks like it is. I'm gonna just go through this, make sure that it's doing what it needs to do on the transients, not in the middle of the way of forms. Let me just say, with quick keys, you can fly through this stuff like, literally fly through it like we'd be done with half the song already with a song that's this simple. Now I am showing you the slow version of this, but I just want to illustrate the point that we'd be halfway done. All right, that's not quite on the transient. Move that over. No can also have a cool option here. This is show trigger time. That's for those of you who really do need to see basically, when you select show true your time you see 20 to 3000 What that means is that this purple line is going to be where it cuts the wave form and it is going to move it to 23 3000 on the grid right there. C 20 to 4000 That's where it's gonna move this one. So on so forth. Drop one there because the computer did not drop on there for me. And that's why it's important that you line up the transience to the big. You line up the purple line to the beginning of the transients because it's about to move everything. So to make sure that this selection is, uh, complete all right. I think it's good to go. It's separate. And now the tough part got a cliff Conform. This is where you need to use your ears. Should be really wary of editing at 100% strength. That means that's going to take it and put it exactly on the grid is going to sound like a drum machine. Let's just see what happens when I hit conform. See all these spaces basically cut It took all the cut up files and put them where it said it was gonna put the 100% to the grid. So you're gonna hear clicks and pops where those where those holes are right now. I'm not gonna smoothies out yet. What you're listening for is where this falls on the beat. You're not listening for clicks and pops Now, the reason I played it for you guys like that is because you need to learn when you're using beat detective, you need to learn to listen through the clicks and the pops before you smooth things out. It's a lot easier to do, I think whole sections of smoothing you should be able to hear that this is on. But just so you know, when you goto edit, smoothing and you hit smooth, it's going to fill in these gaps and cross fade everything. Now I personally can hear places where there's a double high hat and I can hear how it destroyed the track. But at the same time, the track was awful before. This is better than it was before it was unlistenable. And when you add four guitars and bass and vocals, you're not gonna notice those little little glitches quite as much. Those are very, very minor. They will disappear. Uh, it's It's a price you do have to pay for editing with beat detectives. So, uh, I think that it's worth it sometimes. Like again. What we had before was just unpassable. So you have to take extreme measures when you get that sort of performance. And again I keep referencing a drummer blowing it. That's what I mean, giving you stuff in the studio that you can actually use now that you could use. There you go. I will give you guys one more example. How to do this. Find some other type of section. It gets a little more complicated when you have a bunch of blast beats going on, but the concept is exactly the same. You line up the purple lines to the transients. You make sure that the trigger times air right with show trigger time, you separate it, you conform it. You listen to see if it messed it up, and then you edit, smoothing and smooth it. Good to go. Let's check out one more spot. I don't think that that's all that great. We'll just edit that and see if it can sound a little bit tighter. Same song? Yeah, well, honestly. Playing slow is a lot harder than playing fast for a lot of guys. And you can really find people's weaknesses when they have to play slow section some. Whatever tempo this is at, I can't see all the way over here. 100 is excruciatingly slow for some drummers to play in ultra halftime like that. So anyways, real quick capture selection, analyze you get your hit points. I feel like it gave me a few too many note. Looks like it gave me the right amount. You go in and you line these up. They are pretty lined up. Separate, click, conform and let's do this one at 90%. Which is more how I would actually do this between 80 and 90%. 100 is just to metronomic, and you have a cool function here. Exclude within. What that does is if it comes within whatever percentage from the grid, you say, like 10% or something, it'll leave those hits alone. So, for instance, with Sean pushing and pulling naturally, if I say exclude within 50% and oh, basically, it'll only get hits that airway off, then it'll leave everything alone. Not not move it. So in this case, since I want to illustrate an example, I'm not gonna include exclude within because that makes it a step more subtle. So conform. And that's what happens when you don't check your trigger times. So that's why you want to check your trigger times. So go back. Undo clip separation. Let's see what happened. I don't know if you saw, but it moved it over quite a bit and check it out. This trigger time is wrong. 201 for is not where this should be. That's all the way over here. This should be 201 So just get rid of that. So if you double click on it gives you this little window, you tell it what to do, and then it will tend to fix the ones after that for you. So these correspond, correspond looks legit so far. Okay, I'm going back to the first hit. First hits are always the toughest, but that looks right. So separate conform, and it's moving and it's tighter. So that's how you use beat Detective. That is a very simplified version of it. However, if you can't do that, you're not ready for John's videos. You're not ready to move quickly. I would master what I just showed you before you even try to do custom key commands. You're just not ready for it yet. And you guys have any questions about be Detective is how it's working, making sense to you guys. It's actually not that complicated. It's just time intensive. You guys ever used it before? I never have. I've primarily used logic. I've never used pro tools, so the tools are a little bit different. But there's similar features, I guess so. I've sexually I've done similar things, but not specifically with beat detective. I have heard that different D. A W's have similar types of of editing from Yeah, I have used Cue based primarily and there's, um, very similar function and Q base. And have you used it? Yeah, and it's works more or less the same way where creates hit points and spices. Have you had a good results with it? Not basically mangling the audio like the detective will sometimes. Um, no. I always had to go in and do, um, like manual editing like you did there as well. So it's similar and the workflow that you just described there. But, well, one thing that I will say is that a lot of people agree that pro tools is the way to go for editing. Now, I guarantee that that's gonna blow up the chat room that, uh and, um, someone's gonna drone strike me for saying that. But I think except for at the elite level, it seems to me like pro tools has the best built in functions for editing. You can do it in any program you conduce anything audio related in any of the D A W's. But it seems to me like pro tools is the way to go, at least for this
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
El Bulbo Studio
This class will give you confidence when tracking drums. Eyal's interaction with the drummer will help you communicate better with the artist to get the best performance and tone. The added bonus on drum replacement is very valuable and will improve your mixes.
a Creativelive Student
My drum sound has improved by 150% and counting. I'm grateful that Eyal would share this information with us. Not every technique is for every situation, but they all work. It's up to you to have the vision and to use the right tools for the job. Thank you guys!!
Michael Nolasco
To the guy that said buyer beware: this is an advanced production class, it's not meant for beginners who are learning to mic up a kit. I'm a beginner, but i'm using superior drummer, so this class was perfect for me to learn how to process drums post recording. I refer to it constantly. The editing videos are also prime information.
Student Work
Related Classes
Recording Drums