Lessons

Lesson Info

Manual Editing Approach

three ways to do this. Three ways to skin the cat and pro tools that Erica men getting good with. I've already mentioned them. You want to get good at manual editing, be detective An elastic audio manual editing is literally choosing sections, moving them over again. That's the most musical way to do things that you can make broad strokes with your edits like Save This section right here was just a little bit early overall, and we didn't like that. We wanted it to be a little more honor, maybe a little bit more behind, just separated and just slightly nudge it. That's it. That's manual editing. That's Ah, now you know everything you need to know about manual editing. So with a drummer like Sean Reiner, that's what we would do now. Beat Detective is something that you find here in the event menu, and we will talk about it in more detail. But this right here is a whole new world of pain than a gun Teoh introduce you to. But first, let's talk about manual editing. I think it goes without ...

saying that can be really tedious, and you definitely have to use your ears because you have no visual guide. Really? Like like hit points and things like that. I mean, yes, you have the grid, but just lining this up to the grid is not good enough. And if you're gonna just lining up to the grid, just use beat Detective, because it will do it for you If you're gonna cut it up manually this much. This is what beat detective does automatically. So you can't do this with your eyes. Let's see here. I cut it up this much and start sliding it to where I think it should be. Based on where the grid is, things start to get weird. I can already tell. Mind you this is Shawn's performance for the other day. So he is a push and pull drummer. Let's see how that is. Yeah, not bad. The thing I did at the very beginning of the song sounded horrible to me. I tried to edit it last night. Let's see here if I was going to fix something. Okay, So he came in a hair early. Right here. Doesn't actually bother me, but it might bother me with some drummers. So this first hit, I'd move it over, but the second hit seems fine. I mean, it looks fine. Sounds fine. So just move this first hit over. It might actually be better right there. So leave. That makes the one be a little bit more established. And you've got this problem here, though, of this happening twice. This would be a good time, Teoh, Breakout, elastic audio and use them in conjunction with each other. First thing I would do, however, is check the Phil Is the filling time? Well, looks like the Phil is pushing and pulling too. So let's see. I was excited. Now that kick hit seems a little weird to me. Yeah, sounds a little too intense. And I feel like that's gonna throw us off every time we hear this. I wanted to sound more like that. So this is one spot where I would grab another kick in place in the right spot. So separate it, copy it, paste it, and then check where it happens in the overheads. Just a little little click and pop that that I just got rid of. Okay, that's all the fading stuff that I showed you guys in the previous section. You have to do that every single time that you ah, copy and paste something you have to cross fit. I know that's basic stuff, but believe me, I have ah have gotten guys who don't do this stuff. So now that is off from the symbols. Can you hear that? So where should it be a little earlier? Yep. But now I have to cross fade that again. And this is the problem with using real kicks is ah, you have to cross fade everything as opposed to Mitty. You have to cross fade Nothing. So I don't really see a reason to mess with this song too much. There was a snare hit I didn't like, so I thought it was a little early and maybe a little bit of a week hit. So and I just move that one hit over, turn my groups back on and pull back. And now here's something else that you should keep in mind when you move something over like I just did. You see, I took that snare and moved over onto the grid a little bit more. Not exactly. It just did it by sight. Just a little bit. You then end up with a situation where the snare happens in the original place on the file, that's all the files that are on the left. And then it happens in the new place that you moved it to on the files that are on the right. So you want to draw back the files that are on the right like that, and then cross fade. Now that snare hit sounds better. What's up? Um, what would you do if you are moving the snare, Say a little bit more than that? Because wouldn't it start to be heard in relation to the room and overheads? Well, I'm I'm grabbing. Are you grabbing all the trying to grab everything? Yeah. Yeah. You don't Just don't thank you for saying that because this is super important. Do not move the snares by themselves. You have to grab everything. You have to grab all your rooms, all your overheads, everything and move it together. So that's why I made a drum group. As you can see, I'm selecting that. It's selecting everything. That's why you want to move it over now with kicks. That is the only instrument where you have a little bit more leeway, but you only have leeway if the kick is super muffled and the performance is relatively tight and you're not getting much kick in the other microphones like there's less of a chance of things phasing out. But you remember the phase examples from the other day. If you move the snare over by itself. Remember when I showed you the files moved over from each other? That's what starts to happen, is and goes out of phase, and by editing it, you make it worse. So keep phase coherency when you edit, move everything at the same time. So on that note, Steve's in the chat room says, Hey, L you're destroying that track, your wrecking the phase relationship between the toms and everything else. So, um, explain yourself to Steve's how my wrecking that Tom, the relationship of phase between everything when moving everything at the same time. I'm not just moving one instrument at a time. You're moving everything together. So the face first, as long as you move everything that we should preserve the faith, it's not changing any of the phase. So let me just say again, I would never actually try to edit this track in real life. And ah, as a matter of fact, I will pull up a track that I would add it called edit example. So give pro tools a moment, toe load, that track. Yeah, Steve, The way to destroy the track is to move everything separate from everything else. So here's another track. If I wanted to see, I have a group called all drums right here that's selected. When I select in one place, it's grabbing everything. You see that? So when I make a cut and I move it, see everything is moving. Everything moved together. Nothing is changing phase Waas. However, if I was to say turn the group off and then grab these snares arbitrarily and say I don't like where these are even other perfectly on the grid, move them there. Now we're talking phase problems, so I hope that clarifies. So I'm gonna show you guys a video by John. It's maybe a two minute clip of maybe a 35 minute video that you get with the purchase of the course that will describe edits to you in full on painstaking detail. For those of you that want the ninja level. Here's a preview of that. 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 1/4 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 your mikes on the bottom stair mike, but I really only need to see one of them. So we're gonna keep the here and move the other to snare tracks to the bottom because 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 going to 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 bit. 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. All right, So for and start talking about beat detective me to say that for those of you who want to go into the step by step, of how we actually do this, that's what those videos air for. That's why we made them for you guys. I'm here talking to you guys more about editing concepts than a step by step. How to if you don't have the concepts nailed, none of the stuff is gonna mean a thing because you will at it, not in the context of the music that you're working on, and that is the number one thing. So and there there are for people who who do purchase any time, access to the course. We've got four of those videos for about 30 to minutes each. So over two hours of that advanced said it. English doesn't think we'll soon be seeing another sample on. Yeah, I'm gonna show you guys another example. I think if I remember correctly, it's of Kick Replacement. And the videos are about editing, kick, replacement and snare replacement, as well as cleanup in painstaking detail like you guys just saw. If you really want to know the step by step on how we do this, it's illustrated there and again, I'm mawr. Explain to guys the philosophy which we use when we edit drums