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 sneer 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 afterward done with d r t what you want to do is aimed 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 is possible and simply delete all the miss triggers that I find let's solo out the snare track and listened 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 of this triggers ...

over here but that's okay, you could delete him in d rt by just clicking like this, but I think it's faster to do it after you've already taking the mickey out of d rt coming a 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 it's, but when you're pulling the middie 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 films 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 the audio for the whole snare track and nudge 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 worked pretty well, maybe even make it slightly more dynamic and then adjust the whole thing up a little bit, so now we're going to do the same thing is with kick, I'll select the whole region switch to grid mode. And then go to the beginning of the session and dragged 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 to open event operations and changed the duration to ten takes now let's go ahead and group the snare track to the snare many track and with the snare track soloed well, 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 goes notes but we're gonna wait and add those last no there's a miss trigger we have some more ghost notes there that we're gonna have to add later now that sounded like a flam but it only registered is one note this one sounds like a flam too but I think he had a tom in a snare rather than to snare hits you could tell because there's this little mini transient that's probably a different drum bleeding into the snare mike if we listen to one of the other audio tracks that we were given maybe we could tell yeah, that certainly sounds like a tom that right there but this sounds like a snare flam so what we'll do is go back to the center track let's see if we could figure out where the second hit of the flam starts from the switch to slip mode this is where my was drawn sometimes it can be a little tricky finding the second transit 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 this shape I could be pretty sure that that is the transient that I'm looking for I'm gonna paste 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 there's a single hit so let's copy this note and it looks like the transient starts here I'm gonna guess right there just get rid of this miss trigger looks like both hits were detected on both of these flames. This one no 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 yep that one could go either way oh, that was tom hit but slow this phil down and see which hits are tom's in which our snares this hit in this hit or tom it's, and then we've got another snare hit right here. I'm gonna go ahead and paste that one in. We'll 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 take this, tom hit that was detected a snare hit and just move it to this near hit that wasn't detected. Ok, 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 quick keys 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 let's hit x suman vertically a little more so we could see the curve of the transient and let's start pasting now immediately were nfl. Ah, so it may be harder to tell where the initial transient is sold. Zoom out a little bit. It should be right there, which is where we were in first place, we'll 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. Ah, as something to do with pro tools ten point three, but I'm not sure it's ever going to 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'll be the same for all the hits on a given track, meaning all hits will either start going up. They're 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 going to be about right here? Sometimes you'll see 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 start to recognize these strange shapes and the transients and where they come from. But when several hits come in succession, sometimes you'll find that the initial transit 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 one hundred percent to the grid and you tab through notes and you're seeing that these transients are aligned exactly to the grid lines then what you could do is just take your many notes and kwan ties them in this case that's not what's going on and you could only do that if the person editing the drums was is detailed about finding the transients 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 middie track to velocity view, select all and hit option a to center it and reset zoom now we're going to make a few passes over the whole thing the first passed we make we're going to look for single hits that all need to be set to one hundred twenty seven velocity in some songs that maybe the majority of the hits and other songs the drummer will do lots of thrash beats in which case will set those stairs to a smaller value like one ten so it's listened through and we're going to look for snare hits with a decent amount of space between them they're supposed to be hard first, let's disable our pace tricky so he can use the are anti keys to zoom in and out. This snare hit needed to be one hundred twenty seven, usually with flam cz 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 one hundred twenty seven and the other notice slightly below it. One twenty somewhere in that area is where I would set lamb velocities anyway. Usually the first note would be one twenty seven, and the second note would be somewhere between one eighteen and one twenty one, usually in a fill. The highest the snare velocity will get is about one twenty five 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 phil section, I'm just going to leave it alone way have another flam so let's drag that up in this case, the second note was louder, so we'll make that one one twenty seven and the first note will be one twenty we make this note one hundred twenty seven now these air the usual sorts of notes that we would make one hundred twenty seven although it's not like there was a little bit of dynamics back here, however in this case I think it's fine if they're all won twenty seven this's about where I would draw the line between setting single hits at one twenty seven and setting them to something lower like one ten but I think in this case I'm just going to make him one twenty seven the's can all be one twenty seven like I said any more frequent and I would probably take thes snares and make them all one ten 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 passed that I do is looking for sections like that and setting all the velocities two one ten but since there aren't any thrash beats in the song we could skip that next we're going to go through all the phils and make sure their velocities are about right now sometimes in a fil 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 rt gave us in terms of velocity dynamics so let's play through the song again and in this case we're going to want to make sure that our many track is sent to easy drummer and let's hear easy drummer along with our snare go ahead, meet the kick tracks we're just hearing snare now di rt 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 to d one to be read his snares so let's open event operations with option zero go to transpose and transpose all notes to d one snare track up so we have a nice blend between the sample and the rial snare now here's where it starts to get a little up for interpretation as faras what velocities you set things too in general I would say that the hardest hits in a snare phil should be somewhere around one eighteen to one twenty 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 snare hits hard he's still not hitting his heart as he could so we're not going to set those notes two hundred twenty seven but somewhere around one eighteen to one twenty one would be about right. So let's look at the hardest notes in this part and it looks like they're showing up around one seventeen one fifteen so we could take all this and bump it up by three two or three now are hardest hits are around one eighteen one twenty 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 one hundred somewhere from ninety, two hundred five if the first note in a phil is significantly harder we might make it say one ten and have the rest be around one hundred in this case it looks like d r t got the velocities pretty close so we're looking at ninety eight one hundred one hundred ninety seven that should be about right so now you just kind of skipped through and go to the phils now this one looks like we've got a hard hit followed by some that should be around ninety five to one hundred sylhet see where we're at one thirteen and in those air in the nineties okay, so we'll pull this hit up a little bit so maybe one sixteen that sounds about right this one I think she'd probably the first hit should be around one thirteen and then the rest should be one of five region and that looks about right maybe we'll pull this one up just touch let's go to the next phil 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 one ten and the lower ones around ninety all right let's go to the next the's hits should probably be coming in around one ten to one thirteen fourteen ish so we could probably boost him a little bit that's right he should probably be a little higher one fourteen one ten that sounds about right maybe even a little higher on that first hit okay let's find the next film sometimes you want to exaggerate the dynamics of the midi so in this case it detected this softest hit as seventy two now I think that should probably be more like forty five to fifty and will exaggerate this one correspondingly to about eighty and this one should be one hundred twelve sounds about right maybe even a hundred fifteen let's find the next bill those should be the harder ones should be around one hundred one hundred five and the lower one should be around nine 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 listened to the sampled snare if you kind of want to get a feel of how your dynamics are and then let's listen to the real story it sounds fairly close these two hits should probably be in the one ten somewhere where is this one should probably be down around seventy thiss school is like the intro so the hardest hit should come in around one twenty it looks about right for the rest of them again these should be around one hundred which they are this's a really light hit so it should come in around forty five and these could probably be brought up just a little bit we got one more fill those air pretty light they should probably be around ninety now they're also aren't any blasts in this song. So while we pretend for a second that this section is a blast beat, what I would do in that case is pull up my event operations window, go to change velocity and set all to ninety one and rand buys by value of to apply and now our notes are nineteen, ninety one, eighty nine right around ninety 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 one ten and turn off randomize so that they're all one ten now that we've done that, all that's left to do is go back and add all that 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 real snare track let's play through and all we're gonna do is going to stop whenever we hear ghosts note and pasted in let's, go ahead and disable easy drummer for now so we could focus on the real snare track that sounded like a two hit drag soul zoom in on the first hit and paste now for most of these ghost notes your velocity values should be more like ten to thirty so we're going to use fifteen as our default and copy that note let's go to the second note hit paste well, 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 a little louder so let's call it thirty 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 transit 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 mike. 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 of those notes again you may want to play at half speed to be able to hear exactly which transient is the ghost note so we have one there and one here and one is obviously louder than the other so is that the velocity of the second one too forty here's another one where to call this one about thirty five here we've got one note that was missing this one's a tricky one, but I think this is the transit. We'll reduce the velocity that because seventy seven is way too high, what's called the first one about thirty and called second one, about fifteen there's little ghost note right there, no one so light I'm going to call it ten it sounds like we've got a ghost note in here somewhere like this one is ah snare hit and the other one's a tom I want to make sure I didn't miss it goes note there. No got a couple goes now. It's hard to tell if that's an editing mistake or a drag, I'm going to go with a drag, so because it looks like there's, a transient right here but slightly different from the first one. So let's say this one is ten and this one is ah twenty okay, when you're done with that, we should have a completed snare many track now that we're done while we have a quick listen through with snare and kick together.