What the pros know and the amateurs don't is that there is no single foolproof technique to editing drums. This is all highly dependent on the quality of the drummer, genre of the music and the song itself!
What you need is an arsenal of techniques which will allow you to choose the most suitable method for the task in hand.
Introducing the Audio Production Tips - Drum Editing Workshop.
This drum editing workshop shows you all these different approaches to editing drums, so that you have the skills to adapt to the needs of the song.
Manual Drum Editing
Manual editing is where you nudge audio files around in Pro Tools in order to correct timing.
There are several “tricks” to keep in mind when choosing to do manual editing that will make your workflow much quicker, such as the “tab to transient” feature, as well as certain “hotkey” shortcuts to split regions, grouping tracks together and crossfading entire groups of tracks, etc…
Beat Detective
Once you have a firm understanding of how manual audio editing is done, you can feel free to use the various functions at your disposal to make this sometimes lengthy process quicker and easier.
Beat Detective is an incredibly useful function that is part of the Pro Tools interface, that will drastically shorten the amount of time spent editing and time-correcting tracks.
We will show you where Beat Detective is located within the interface, as well as how to use the various features, and how small changes in these features will alter the way Beat Detective affects your tracks.
Elastic Audio
Elastic Audio uses an automatic detection algorithm to pick up the transient and then uses either time compression or expansion to stretch the audio to where it needs to be.
We will explore the various “detection” modes and how they differ, as well as the two “timing” modes.
My Hybrid Approach
In this video, we will be explaining our “hybrid approach” to drum editing.
As the name suggests, we’ll be using certain functions that we’ve previously mentioned, but in a slightly more unconventional way.
Groove Template Approach
Now that we have a pretty good understanding of several different methods for time correcting drums to a grid, let's look at how we can create a new "grid" based on the musicality of a drummer's playing.
Bleed Removal
Sometimes having some "bleed" between multiple mic sources can be a good thing, and can be a characteristic of certain genres of music. However, in other genres such as pop, metal and alternative rock, this bleed between mics serves no real purpose. And knowing how to control, reduce or remove it completely will help you to create a cleaner, more impactful recording.
Drum Sample Triggering
These days, one of the more popular things to do in modern music production is to trigger drum samples. You can either use triggers to layer sounds on top of your recorded drum parts, or replace your recorded sounds completely with triggered ones.
Learn the do's and don'ts of drum triggering and the various methods available to do this.
Pete has a wealth of experience in the music industry. He is as comfortable with engineering/production as he is with mixing.
He is an audio engineering lecturer at Abbey Road Institute, London and is the author of Audio Production Tips: Getting the Sound Right at the Source, published by Focal Press in 2015.
He has worked at some of the most well-known studios in the UK, including Metropolis, where he has worked with major artists such as Pharrell, Snoop, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Kiwanuka and Dua Lipa.
Edit a full multi-track drum session in less than 30 mins per song.
Know when to use gates versus automatic or manual methods of bleed removal.
Understand the pro secrets to drum triggering for augmentation or replacement.
As I am a Pro Tools user and therefore the videos use that too.
However, the principles show here are universal. To port these over you might have to spend a little bit of time working out the terminology and workflow used in other DAWs.
All of the drum timing tools are native to Pro Tools.
However, Pro Tools does not include a native drum replacement plug-in so I am using Steven Slate Trigger.
This workshop also shows you a manual approach to drum triggering that will work without any specific plug-ins.
Please allow 4-6 hours to complete the videos.
The drum editing assignment can be completed in 1-2 hours dependant on skill level.
We're so sure that this course will teach you dynamic processing, that we're offering a no-questions-asked 60-day guarantee.
In other words, if you aren’t satisfied for any reason, just let us know and we’ll give you your money back.
50% Complete
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