Lessons

Lesson Info

Recording Shells and Editing

Now we're gonna dio is since we're tracking the drums and simple separate I'm going to throw up actually I have my fabulous assistant here my vanna white yeah vanna white here thrones actually let's throw those are those cracks symbols still around okay way and we can use the crack symbols for this the duct tape yeah just so they'll be kind of like crap here and where they go ok or we can use the real simple that's fine doesn't right there so we'll throw those symbols up and, uh the only thing that you may have to do is actually I'll get up for this and jason, we may not need those symbols because depending on how you're feeling because sometimes the symbol is around here and the pillow hangs off a little bit more it might be in your way would you rather the symbols just kind of be like talk to type? Are you ok with a smaller target? Okay, all right, so let's, just grab those two pillows wherever they are giving you haven't yeah, and then let's throw this and actually only show what I'...

m doing here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just kind of set this down like this at an angle and then we'll probably have to bring this up a little bit right toe raise it to where uh we might just have to make do unless we kind of read to redesign your whole kit um okay, let me see that and what we'll do is we'll just kind of I'm going to take this on here too, so we're just kind of giving you a target to hit because as you are actually hold this right hear that seem about right to where you yeah, cool there's your symbol? Um, so a lot of times if you're trying to air drum the parts um I find it a lot of the times drummers just just can't really get it because you're it's such like a muscle memory type of thing to hit something and have it rebound off um that if you're just air drumming, it gets really weird and you start to get frustrated really fast, which is totally understandable. Okay, thank you. Okay, then do another wrap around and if you if you want, we can turn these sideways to so it's a wider target, okay, you step outside the stiffer the better, right? Sorry. I mean, you gotta have some fun. Okay? You want a kind of jam on that? See if you're comfortable with it? Like I said, it's super weird and it seems super awkward, but you'll be surprised that how important this kind of starts to feel so how about you just jam and make sure that those air cool make sure they're not gonna break when you hit him and kind of just get a feel for it because I know it's trust me israel weird and I'm letting everyone know it's really weird and if you start playing on it and you tell me it feels really weird it's not gonna be weird so uh check check it out and see just kind of game a little bit you that closer a little bit e how's that feel you're like ok this is that workable that ok cool um you know do we have any yet we do one more pillow because we need one for the high hat yeah pretty much we'll just kind of drape it over the top and actually before we get started can you can you dear hat clutch so that there's no open and closed so that is just type the whole time yeah because that way if you're doing any pedal work we don't get the bottom symbol laughing out yeah kind of hanging like this like I said this is not this is not a glamorous class at all it's about trying to make it work with what you got and doing doing weird stuff because in the end it doesn't matter what you're drunk it looks like when you're recording it you know like you might have to have I know pretty like I've even used it like I have a drum tech who does really huge records sometimes will have like uh they're not like they're not tampons there like the maxi pads on bill you those like on bottom drum heads, you know, because it's like a perfect what kind of patted thing? And it's got a sticky side and you can put it on like the bottom of drum heads and it's awesome when they were great and it is just so funny because you like you're coming in or you have, like, you know, tissue that's kind of gaffe taped on it, but it's like the perfect amount of moon gels too much, but, you know, like just some gaff tape, isn't it enough? So you do all sorts of different things that sometimes you come in and look at the kid years like his pawn shop kid is that, but then you hear it in the control room like sounds great sounds like a million dollars and that's kind of what we're getting at is like doing whatever it takes to kind of if you've got to play like, upside down in a bathroom, then that's what it takes, but if his long as it sounds great in the end, I think that's what we're certain port um okay, so ready take from the top, okay? And this is going to be really weird too because as you're hearing a kid with no symbols it always sounds just really strange but then once we start putting in symbols and then everything kind of can't even out ok here we go first time ever yeah yeah can you notice how there was that one section when you're doing kind of the hat and snare roll like there's probably no way you could have done that without having your right hand doing the hat you know because it's kind of like it yeah totally yeah it's tough huh? So yeah that's why the pillows sometimes were really important to have something to hit because you have that memory and like as you're doing your crossover fills and things like that you know it's just like I need something to let me know that like as a hit that it's time for this hand to go here because it's all of them muscle memory I mean as a guitar player imagine trying to like play kind of like maybe like a like a sweet child of mine kind of drum riff but like ok cool will only play every other note you know it's like don't don't don't don't you like I can play that I'm so used to playing it the right way um there was one section here I don't want to get too picky but it sounded like you may have gotten a little and are they getting audio out there? I wasn't sure if they were able to get audio on this stream as okay let me know and if not maybe like as we're tracking the drums they can just open my mike because he doesn't have any drums going to his headphones and I think that's the same mixture output that that they're getting so let's see here I mean he doesn't really need to be edited like if this was if this was a project I was doing from, like the first probably like fifteen seconds that I saw you playing a bit okay, you've got this thing handled um and I would probably just mickey played a million times until you became comfortable playing like that even more because I mean that's just such a weird setup that you know and I could tell it to you as soon as he started playing you're like you're like ok like that is a super awkward but you know and then you would get it to where you were comfortable with it and then you know, because by the end of the song you're ok, I think I got this um so and you have kind of a cool field but for the I think for the to show how easy it is to kind of like edit drums like this without the big, you know, whatever you at it drums always have the symbols in there that kind of cause you like you know, if you're have edit points sometimes they'll kind of be wrong edit points because of the symbols so this is kind of interesting way of doing things um so I think you can relax for like, a hot minute while I just completely computerized your your performance yeah, great job. I wish I could play drums I love drums so much. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is well, first off another thing you need to hear is, um I just checked the preferences over here. Okay, so I like to kind of color code my tracks um for whatever reason, I like doing pink for drums because I think it's I think it's just so I think it's so funny because to me drums or so bad asked that like I like to put them this pink um I normally do blue for base probably because it starts with b green for guitars and then I normally go back to a different shade of pink for vocals especially because it just kind of puts the singer in check I mean kind of fun. Um, so I'm gonna kind of focus on using elastic audio for this um it's really easy to use um and fast it does sound different than actually chopping drums up because what happens is as you so well actually before I get into that reminded that kind of talk about how it sounds so what I'm doing here within pro tools there's this um this little kind of great out area here and as you click on this little uh ok says as you click on where it says elastic audio you're gonna want to go well I like polyphonic because I feel like it screws it up the least um and then in here under way form we will go toe warp and this is just kind of a quick and dirty way that I will do it sometimes um as you hold down control your hand on I'm also in the super tool which I use a lot um your hand turns into a plus sign and then if you quit there you can have it gives you this kind of work point and it's important to put those at the end of your regions because what happens is so I'm gonna put a little marker right here where this kick drum is just so you guys can remember that that's the last kick drum of song and it's low I'm just gonna title of last kicks just so because what happens is if you start moving things around here I find this a little bit off that's the problem with the good drummers that it's you know really always pretty close but I should do ok, so yeah, I know right um so if I were to move this point to the grid what it's done is it's shrunk the whole region and now it's moved everything over so see where this kick is now compared to where it was so that's moved everything after that point forward and depending on how off you are and how many edits you're doing by the time you get to the end of the song you're you're just like I don't even know what beat this dude is playing because it's like so far off from what it was supposed to be now so it is important to, um I find for me it's important to put these kind of like I don't put him around every couple sections just so if I do have to do heavy editing then and if there's complex beats especially like if you're mixing up uh mike say triplets um or like, you know, like sixteen, thirty second triplets, types of things and it's a film is kind of going into a section and it's supposed to come in on like a like a up eighth note, but then you've moved it over so that it's actually closer to the down of the eighth note and if the drummer isn't there with you while you're editing, you may just like edit the drums wrong and then you know the next day the band comes in you have this weird feel that like but in your head you're like it I don't know this sounds weird to me but maybe that's right? I don't know um and then german comes in and what the hell happened my drums what did you do? It sucks, you know? And then it's a real good way to start your session off bad and having the band think that you're completely incompetent so make sure you pay attention to what the drums were actually doing and that's another reason why getting to know the song and pre production is so important because then you know, all these things are kind of worked out beforehand and if you can kind of learn the song and if you're a musician, that shouldn't be a problem, but I think if you're a non musician person trying to do this type of work it's going to be a little bit more of a struggle for you but you know it's just something worth paying attention to. So what I'm gonna do right now is I am going to go and and I'm going to open up um event operations quantifies I'm just going to kind of go nuts on this and do it pretty close to being on the grid he's all eight notes strength all kind of put down to maybe like let's just say five and what that does is your strength makes it so that it's pretty much on the grid but not completely on the grid um I don't want to stay it's still preserves like some human field but you know that's kind of as much as we can get for what we're working with so what I'm gonna do this since the majority of this stuff is eighteen sixteen second he's kind of applied to this pretty low one because I can't stand click track at all um they were seen those kind of when bands post videos of them in the studio working and it's like a check us out we're in the studio and all you hear is like drives me nuts so you khun you can barely hear like that kind of like the pillow noise um I'm grating that as well because depending on how deep we want to get into this you could go through and where he's not playing anything you could just go on mute all those sections and cut him out if you wanted to get super kind of mutt lange with it but for the purpose of this all just kind of leave things pretty raw but the reason why I am kwan tai zing those is so that as he's playing the high hat next the high hat will be hitting the same time is that and then you won't be able to hear it at all this one was going to do by hand e sometimes you can get away with doing big chunks other times you can't and it just really depends on the drums in the park over there, so as you can see, even though the computer puts things you know, quote unquote perfect, you still have to go through and double check, which I think is really important because there's a lot of mess ups in here and this is even I feel like for the computer that should be a pretty simple job because you don't have the symbols kind of like giving you false triggering points as I'm qantas is what I'm doing, I'm just highlighting a section and as you'll notice this event window, when I have any time I have a war point selected within my selection, this apply button will light up, and that lets me kwan ties it to a section, so as undoing these clusters of points, I can just go through kind of if I were if I had talked with the band beforehand and it was like an actual production and we would talk about how much we wanted to leave it as a live feel uh, like, this is something that I'm noticing right now, and you might notice that already with your plane so after your snare hit, you're kind of rushing your kick trump um that would be something that we could talk about as far as ok do we want to kind of keep practising that and get it to where you're after your scenario kind of mme or close to that beat? Or do we want to leave that as kind of like dude that's kind of my thing like that's part of my field because it does kind of like make it a little bit more like aggressive sounding like when you kind of rushed that a little bit, so that would be something that we would talk about if it was a different situation, but for this purpose I'm just going to make you kind of sound like a computer that's kind of a creative way of editing if you are totally just getting nuts on um editing drums, sometimes you may find the like if you're if you're locking your flam tze into a grid um, this kick that comes after the flames might feel a little rushed to you and in my brain, I think it's because when you hear a flam, you don't think of it as like to snare hits it's like just a wide hit and you've got your start in your end of it and the end of that is closer to the your next kick trump which makes it feel like that kick might be rushed a little bit um so sometimes depending on song like you may want to kind of nudge these forward a little bit, which I've just done and sometimes it feels better sometimes doesn't matter at all that kick feels a little faster a little bit but that's something that we can kind of nudging board just a little bit right now but in the end it may be something that you want to wait till the vocals on there or you wait till the riffs or played because sometimes the way the brits are played um make you wantto make the drums feel a certain way and if they're kind of on top of it and rushing that riff sometimes it's cooler than if they're kind of pulling it back questions that I could kind of answer while I'm doing this my favorite question right now is what brand of pillows do you prefer? They have to be none of none of the cheap stuff for sure definitely if you live with your parents, steel your parents pillows off of their bed and put duct tape all over him will be stoked and you know if you live with your girlfriend used for pillows, for sure because you don't want it up taping your hair? Um um yeah, I don't think it matters it really firm pillows air actually the best because firm foam pillows another thing you don't even have to use pillows like you could use maybe like pieces of those phone if you have extra foam yeah um it really just has to be any sort of something that you can hit and that you feel comfortable hitting as a drummer you know that you're not going to break that makes this little of noises possible yeah yeah yeah um we got a whole bunch of people from all over the world that watch obviously the creative live music channel we have a question from sweden chris jones says hi bo you're from sweden here do you know that guy it was the last thing chris jones if not you do now I want to say is he a facebook bro I don't know help captain what's your opinion on copy and pacing the better parts of ah performance I think it's fine um I think each record you have teo I don't think that I can really form an opinion like a broad opinion like that I think in some situations it's fine um however like I was talking about yesterday I I think that um I want to say I can't take credit for this but I want to say a guy really famous producer here she has a book coming out names michael buying horn I had the chance to do uh to engineer a record for him if you don't know who he is he's huge dude he did hey produced soundgarden's super unknown he did marilyn manson's mechanical animals uh like uh was that I want to say he did corn like untouchables or something like some massive he's just a huge big time dude, that is just he's one of the guys that has golden years and can can hear things that you just didn't even think of um and he can not only hear things but he can feel things to um he taught me a lot about where I learned a lot just by doing that one record with him a lot about feel and the way that like the sounds of a record or the sounds of the instrument can can make you feel about apart um and kind of taking a tio having engineer kind of take a second seat uh to that or a back seat to it um so as far as copy and pasting before I get too far off on a tangent with him um I think that that's fine I would prefer the band to be able to play it um more than once especially if you're talking about like a lead vocal um I think that our years um you know the way our ears work is we hear sounds and we we instantly kind of categorize them in our brain and I think that's why drum samples are so boring to me because as soon as you start hearing like a snare phil that has the same drum sample over and over again your ear hears that and it's like that's the same thing I've already heard it before that's weird, you know, like and something like if you hear like you know a bird chirping outside, right oh that's a bird I've heard that before it got it and when you start here and I think that our ears I can hear the same part over and over again like within music so if you're copying and pasting the same riff over and over again you can definitely hear that and I think it's very obvious if you start pasting like, for instance, if you hear kind of a lot of pop music when if it's kind of like a kelly clarkson style song and you start hearing that kind of like that barely pushed guitar intro and it's just kind of like that jin jin jin jin jin jin jin jin jin jing like that's just the same hit like pasted sixteen times it's so boring to me but then you hear you know a rock band playing um I think that's wrong then you hear rock them playing the part and there's a little bit of push and pull like within that jin jin jin jin and you hear the different like scratching of the picks you know to me that's interesting so if you if you're copying and pasting tons of stuff, I think it can get kind of boring but then again, you may not have time to replay everything a million times and if your song has twelve courses in it and you only have an hour to get the song, then maybe it makes more sense to paste a couple of them computers well, that was when you're placing markers point yeah, what you're moving you're placing it specifically on the track that transient exists yeah, is there a particular reason for them? Yes, so as your if you look here like, see where the kick is that transient hits before so the kick mic picks up the kicks out before the snare mike does and it kicks it up before the overhead and then of course before the room. So if I'm moving the kick drum, I want to move the front of the kick trump because, for instance, if let's say if there was another hit here and I wanted and I chose this transient, you'll see how it starts to shrink the attack of that the initial attack of the kick drum and especially when you're getting into like really fast notes it can really shrink the transient or extend the transient too much and then now you have kind of like softer sounding drums if he extended too much and then same thing he worked really hard to gain a lot of length in your in your kick you know you spent all this time getting a kick drum sound like and then now you're like like kind of squishing that transient office and now you're kicked goes from so it's that's the weird thing about elastic audio um so but yeah so the the reason why I click on the transit of that track is for that reason also you're placing your markers in a group and you're moving the entire drum kit what would there be something bad if you would move all those individual markers and line him up on this angry point what would happen that sounded uh when what so if you zoom in on the kit transient you're saying how the kick is picked up by the snare and overhead like but those markers are farther apart yet yes so if you if you move those um so for instance um let me show you like on a snare track so that it's a little bit more obvious so so this snare because I don't have a phase switch on these preempts I have to flip the phase within pro tools here on this plug in for this overhead to be in phase with the snare um I'll show you what it sounds with in verses without it so here is the snare in the overhead in phase kind of body um and I could have probably spent a little more time like getting the overheads a little bit maurine face but what happens is if I try to move this individually you're going tio if you don't move everything all at once like if I tried to just move like this overhead up here now see how I'm moving the mikes the phase relation is totally different than what it wass so later too well, yeah it's one of those things where the main reason is that it's going to really mess up your phase and if you've spent a long time by for instance, just looking at this I could have probably just moved that overhead a little bit higher, you know? Or maybe moved it lower and then flipped face um, did you tune the snare drum up this morning when you got it okay? Because as I had kind of set up that overhead last night and it's what I was talking about the tuning of your snare so last night we had this narrative and a little bit lower and it was a much more drastic difference of where the overhead and the phase was it was pretty much like if I flipped the phase so it was out of phase you couldn't even really here the snare and then you put it in phases and all of a sudden like so the main reason is that if you if you're working really hard to get your drum mike's all in the phase especially if you have multiple mikes on a snare to um it will it will really screw up um and I guess that's kind of my only reason face was just about keeping your drone tone intact between all the different phones right? Yeah exactly I feel like I need to hire you to like explain what I'm trying to say because every single time I've said something you're so much better at explaining it to me good luck I guess my one hour of focus and that right right I'm glad you're here we do have one question why you're doing that in finishing that up ah why are you moving the drum so much without listening when a train drummer played what he thought was best well actually plain to the music aren't you taking some life out of the drums yeah definitely you're taking a ton of life I feel like I feel like I tried to preface this right with that I'm definitely sucking all the life out of the intentionally yeah um and I would say and this city is sucking all the life out of it it's just that I'm showing what you can do um you know with this particular style of drumming or this particular style of tracking drums um and the reason why I'm not listening to it as much is because one I'm talking into when I'm on the grid like this. I know I kind of know what it's supposed to sound like, um, just because I've done it so many millions of times and, you know, like I said, for the purpose of this it's, um, the point is to just show that you congrats things up really easy and then adding symbols because what happens is if if this is a little bit off, you know, then we're gonna have to have you play the symbols. Mohr, because, like, oh, you're rushing that sections they had this feels so you actually have to rush the click at this same section in the song tio make those symbols happen, whereas, like, if I just great everything. Now then we can just have you blast through the symbols and then just kind of, like, great him up again. And then I'm going faster through that.