Lessons

Lesson Info

Bonus Video with Purchase: "Kick Midi"

So first of all, you should have quickies installed, and you should import my short cuts that I provided with the written instructions. Quickies is a pretty easy program toe. Learn some of these shortcuts I have set to be triggered from key commands, and those should work fine for you right off the bat. Some of them I have assigned to mouse buttons, so anywhere you see, like button for here. Ah, that may not show up on yours, so what you need to do if you want to use mouse buttons to trigger these commands is go to the devices window and add your mouse to the list of devices and then pick a shortcut and change the hot key or device, too, whatever. But you want to trigger that shortcut. If you have any questions with getting quick keys to run, let me know, and I'll be happy to help. Sometimes we're going to give you tracks just his way files with a middie file as the tempo track and sometimes will give you actual pro tools sessions with all the audio and simple information already. In t...

he project, in this case, we're going to look at a project where we were just provided wave files, so I'm going to show you how I like to set up sessions before you create the project, you're going to need to know the sample rate of the wave files that we've given you. If you're on mountain line, you could tell what sample rate the way files are at by right clicking, hitting, get info and looking at the sample rate over here. So these are running at forty eight case, we're going to create a new project, bit depth, twenty four bit sample rate, forty eight k. Now we're going to import the audio files that were given you want to copy also that they're copied into the new project folder that we've created, as you could see if I click on one of these, says that the way file can be added directly to the current session. Sample rate matches. If it's asking you to convert the files to a new sample rate than you need to go ahead and make a new project with the sample rate matching the way files that we gave you next, we're going to import the temple information from the men, the file by going to file import midi and then we want to grab. The temple map and the key signature and make sure the location is sessions start in this video, I'm going to talk about getting midi from kick tracks that were given, so we're going to focus on those. However, when you're setting up your session, I would recommend putting it in a specific order. Usually what I do is kicks at the top, followed by snares followed by tom's followed by symbols, and then I will rename the tracks so that they don't have all these numbers that came with the file names actually have a quickies command to do that. It is this track numbers strip command, which you tell it how many characters you want to strip off the file name in this case, one, two, three, four, five, six go to the first track, make sure that the texas selected and triggers a shortcut never done on this song we have to kick tracks now. Sometimes we will give you kick tracks that are taken from a roland kick pad, and sometimes there will be real kick drums. In this case, we're using a role in kick pat so here's what the kick tracks sound like in my experience, the two kick tracks will trigger slightly differently, so in this case, what we're going to do is create two new mini tracks as well as a stereo ox track so rather than condense these to kick tracks to one mini track we're going to trigger it to too many tracks and then align them separately we're going to send our new mini tracks too easy drummer I'm going to use the metal easy x for our sound source and on lee the kick and snare sounds are loaded evidence we're not triggering tom's on this project now it's sending those many tracks too easy drummer and I like to set the height too many and I like to seoul is safe so if we want to hear what the samples are doing all we have to do is solo out the easy drummer channel next we're going to take many from our first kick track so select the whole thing I like to use mass e d r t in order to get many but you can also use slate trigger mass e d rt and slate trigger both pretty accurate although after we pull the middie from this kick track we're going to end up tapping through each mini note and making sure it's a line to the audio perfectly now we're going to analyze the kick audio the way massey d r t works is you set the's sensitivity and loudness sliders so that it is only triggering the hits that you want but we may get a false trigger to anyway so I'm just going to set the sensitivity slider somewhere in here and look at some of the cake it's and make sure that we're only getting tickets and not believe from other tracks and it looks like we missed hit there there's always a fine line between letting too many false triggers come through and having to manually delete them later and having to manually add too many light hits that the trigger software missed. This looks pretty good so we're going to go ahead and pull the middie from this track so I select the whole track switch to grid mode by hitting f or we want to make sure our note is c one as you could see, I've maxed out the velocities because for this metal stuff we want to set the velocity to a constant value and then use automation to manually control the dynamics of the kick drum. So in massey I will use the mini drag and drop button to pull the middie too the first many track and I want the many tracks to be right above their respective audio tracks. Now what I could do is select the audio hit p to move the selection up one track and then you shift ault three to consolidate the mini track to be the same length as the audio track now let's do the second many track it looks like the same settings will work on both tracks in this case sometimes you may have to slightly adjust it but again we're going to go back and verify that all the hits that we need our there so you don't have to check the whole song while you're looking in the d r t window let's pull the middie for kick too select the audio hit p and consolidate the middie now we need to do is manually drag the midi read so it matches the audio as close as we can get it then we're going to go back and tap through each note to make sure that the individual notes are where they should be so what you should do zoom into a track zoom vertically and then zoom in on a middie note we could see that this many note looks like it's coming in about sample or too late let's see what the next money no it looks like I'm just hitting tab to go through these many notes that looks dead on how it looks a sample or too late sampler too late sample late sampler too late okay, so why we take separate the midi region so that we can nudge it backwards? We're gonna set our nudge value to samples we're going to nudge it back two samples using the minus key now if we tad through they look pretty close let's do the same thing with the second kick track you go ahead separate it what's tab through these seemed to be varying mohr in position than the first track, but generally it looks like they're a sample or too late as well, so we're just going to nudge it back one sample now we can re consolidate the's many regions and now we're going to switch to note view on these many tracks I'm selecting both many tracks and then holding shift option and clicking notes on track for you so that they both switch at the same time. Now with shift and all still held, I'm going to click track height single note c one so that we only see that note on the track now we're going to do is click on both tracks hit command a to select all the notes hit option zero toe open the event operations window change the duration to ten tick this way when we're moving notes around, we don't accidentally overwrite the note next to it by overlapping them. Now we're going to listen through the to kick tracks and listen for any miss triggers or missed triggers. In this case, I didn't have to fix any hits, which means I set the sensitivity of mass e d r t just right for this song now what we're going to do his group each audio kick track to its corresponding midi kick track let's just call them kick one and kicked to we want them to be edit groups now this is why who had to consolidate the midi region to be the same length as the audio region now with the many region on top of the audio region and the group assigned, we can tap through the many notes such that if I want to click on a part of the way form I'm also selecting on the middie kick track let's say for example that this trigger hit was off what I can do is cut it clicked where the kick transient starts and hit paste that is basically the work flow of what we're going to do for all the kicks, all the snares and all the toms so what we want to do is make these kick tracks really big and make sure that we're vertically zoomed in pretty far let's tab to the first kick note zoom in I'm going to set my zoom level five to where I am now so that I can easily get back to that zoom setting usually I only used him settings three, four and five so three will be somewhere around here four will be from around there and I'm setting the zoom levels by holding command and clicking on the three four five buttons and you recall the zoom level by hitting three four five not on the number pad but on the top of your keyboard three four five okay, now what we're going to dio is tab through each kick note and visually make sure that the many note lines up with the kick transient now, since there are so many kick notes in most metal songs, we're going to do this pretty quickly compared to how we do snares and tom's with snares and tom's making sure the sample start is as close as possible to the audio transient is very important because we're trying to keep the phase relationship of our snare and tom samples as consistent as possible with the rial snaring tom tracks, so we want the middie notes to happen at the same part of the transient on every single hit with kicks. If the many notes are a sample or two off, it matters a little less, especially in a case like this where we're dealing with kick pads and we're not augmenting a real kick track with samples were simply going to be using samples, but we still wanted to be very accurate in this case. The drummer wasn't edited to a grid, so we want to maintain the feel of the performance so let's, start off on the first kick track and start tabbing through notes. Now I'm not going to stop tabbing until my eyes tell me that one of those many notes was off, you know this takes a little practice, but you're going to want to go pretty fast with it and just trust your brain to tell you when something's off and then you can hit all tab to go backto whatever hit you think it was that was slightly off so for example you could see that some of these notes our maybe off the transient by a sampler two and when I say a sample I mean the smallest unit that you can access in pro tools so this is a sample this would be to samples three samples so what I'm looking for is a range of error between two or three samples somewhere in that range so I'm gonna keep chatting now this one is obviously off somebody hit zoom level four to see where we are okay? It mistook this noise as a kick it so what I'm going to do is hit x to cut the note I'm gonna click near where I think the transition is supposed to be hit five zoom back in and hit v to paste and keep chatting there's another one I had to all tab back to it so I'm gonna cut that one hits in level for click where I think it's going to go zoom level five refined my selection and paste you'll get very fast that this once you do it a few times this one just looks like a softer kick it and not a miss trigger but I'm gonna zoom back out to make sure yeah let's zoom back in and keep going this one kind of exceeds the margin of error that I've set for myself, so I'm gonna cut click where I think it should go and paste and then continue. Now looks like we missed a couple here so let's look and see where this one was supposed to go. The software algorithms are pretty good at detecting transients, but you want to be looking for where the wave forms switches from a straight line or from one shape into a sharp curve and put the middie note there. This one slightly off this one looks like the transient was cut during editing, so we're just going to align it toe what's left of the transient, you will have bursts where you don't have to fix any notes for a minute of the song, and then you'll have to fix every note. It depends on how consistent the drummer was in hitting the cake pad and how fast he was going. You'll notice that when a drummer does doubles on two feet, meaning two hits on one foot and then two hits on another foot on really fast double bass parts, it tends to get sloppier lighter and the trigger has a harder time telling where the transit starts. I'm a zoom in a little more since we have so many of these soft hits, I want to make sure that I know where the transient starts ok, that's, all the tickets for the first kick. Let's do the second one now, as you could tell, the middie notes on the second kick track are a little less accurate to the audio. Then they were on the first track. So unfortunately we're due is gonna have to correct every note that looks off to us. We go ahead and introduce you to one of the other quickie shortcuts that I use for this sort of thing. Usually I only use this shortcut force in air and tom midi alignment. But in this case, I think it will work well. So let's, go to quick keys. I have two shortcuts here. Paste trig and paste. Trig ten point three. Something changed in pro tools. Ten point three tow. Where? Sometimes when you tab through many notes, you have to hit tab twice before you can go to the next note. Um, I don't know why, but in any case, I have slightly different versions of the shortcut here, eh? So if you're on a version of pro tools before ten, point three and use this version. If not, then use this version. So basically, all you do with this shortcut is hit cut on a note. Click where you think it's going to go and hit t now, little pace that go to the next note and cut that note and just do the same thing. So all you have to do is click where the transit should go and hit t for every note. In this case, I'm going to zoom in vertically a little more just so I could see where the curve of the transient starts to happen. Okay, that was all of the second track of kicks. Let's, make these regions small again, and if we listen to our easy drummer track, along with our kick audio tracks, they should all line up. I put easy drummer on an ox track and un instrument track because it seems to do better with keeping late and seat down, so that when I play the kick audio along with the middie, the hits line up with each other. Now we could switch the view of these midi kick tracks to clip mode, and we're done with the kicks.