Are you sick of having editing slow you down, or worse still saving it til the end leaving a mountain to climb? 

Are you sick of having to manually moving hits around with trial and error?

Have you battled with your software thinking there must be an easier way??

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.