During the update from Strike to Strike 2 we lost the function to be able to apply custom grooves to Strike patterns in Pro Tools. This was a valuable feature that allowed you to take a live drum performance and then add the feel of that performance to a Strike track. I’ve spoken with AIR and that is on their to-do list for future updates, however in the meantime here is a step-by-step guide on how to do it in Strike 2.
If you want to get the best from Strike 2 then check out my full here.First work out your song in Strike so that all the patterns you want in your track are playing in the correct order. Then go to the ‘Record Export’ pane on the far right and select MIDI, leave the setting on the bottom as ‘Full’ this will record a the pattern in the native Strike key mapping.
Then press the red icon and start Strike playing, when it has finished going through the entire song press stop. If you want to get tight timing in your tracks there are a few things you can do to make sure your performance is on the money. Here are my top 5;.
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Get The Metronome Beat RightOne trick drummers use, especially on slow tempos is to make sure you metronome is running at 8 clicks per bar rather than 4 clicks per bar. This helps to keep your playing super tight. Get the Metronome Sounding RightThe sound of a click can make a lot of difference, thankfully Pro Tools 11 features that will offer many more click sounds to chose from. Even if you don’t intend to upgrade then you can modify the click to trigger any MIDI sound, you can also simply create you own click drag by dragging clips onto the timeline and lining them up on the grid and then looping them. Get Your Monitor Mix RightSpend time making sure you have both the mix and the metronome right in your ears. Too quiet and you won’t play in time, too loud and it will bleed into your recording. If you are working with clicks then make sure you have good quality enclosed headphones, especially around drums as there are multiple mics the click can bleed into.
Practice Makes PerfectI’ve worked with human metronomes who seem to be tight as a drum machine, but ask them and they will tell you they spent hours learning to play to a click. The good news is that you can improve your timing with practice, the bad news is you have to put in the work. Cheat!Sometimes you get performances that were played live, without a click or you just have a someone who has sloppy timing.
If you can’t get the performance you need then you may have to resort to using the excellent tools for getting stuff in to time such as Beat Detective, Elastic Time or good old fashion cut and nudge - but if you can use these as a last resort, a great performance is always more musical.So there we are, 5 ways to get tight timing in Pro Tools. If you have any of your own, please comment.Extra resources;.
You might think this is a joke, but the real answer to get great timing in Pro Tools is to play better in the first place. The 4 options below are simply fixes after the event and in some ways all of them will either change the timing and/or the feel of the original performance and you will lose something.There is one thing better than all the technological fixes in Pro Tools and that’s a great musician really knocking a performance out of the park, choose this one every time.
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Method 2 - Use Elastic Audio. Some may think this a little old school, but this is still my sure fire way of getting drums in time. It takes a little work to understand but once grasped you can do it in around 3 moves.Select the audio you want to get into time, if it’s a drum kit then make sure you work with it as a group.Then go to the Edit Menu and select Separate Clip At Transients. This will have Pro Tools go through the audio and separate every clip on the transient.Then select the grid and a grid value, try 16 first if it’s a regular beat.Then hit the Command/Windows key and the ‘0’ key to move all the chopped up audio clips onto the beat.
00:00:07 Hey! Ben is a NYC based producer/engineer who has worked with artists from MGMT to Soulja Boy, Bebel Giberto to Lloyd Banks, Ryan Leslie, Olivia, Tony Yayo, Red Cafe, Edie Brickell, Carole Pope and hundreds of other artists from around the world. He grew up in Iowa and then attended the University of Miami.In addition to being a fantastic musician he is also a tremendous geek when it comes to anything technical, be it software, plug-ins, microphones or outboard gear. It's this marriage of musical creativity and technical know-how that makes him an in demand producer/engineer. You, and Fab have been my guides for this music jungle that I am traveling through. Thank you!I have watched this video in hopes that I can use 'beat detective' to sync the banjo with the click track. He is onlyoff a few times but it really sticks out and I want to highlight the banjo in this song that I am mixing with Pro Tools 10.
You have explained it so well, and I truly appreciate your step by step method. Now I'll experiment. Thanks again for being there for all of us who need you and Fab! Soho router security. Sending a big HUG to Pure Mix!!
Becky Jo Benson.
Tempo Markers in the Tempo Ruler. Tempo MappingBeat Detective can be used with any MIDI or audio that was recorded without any timing reference to create a tempo map of the performance so you can record other MIDI / audio and quantize them to the initial performance or simply to create a grid for your session.
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One great example for this is if you start your recording session with drums and you do not want to use a metronome – you can let the drummer record at his/ her own tempo and then create a tempo map off the performance which you can use to record the other instruments. QuantizingMost of times, even if you record a performance with a click from a defined tempo map, the performance won’t be perfectly aligned to the grid. Having a performance quantized to match the grid perfectly is not always preferable but it is really useful to know how to if you do end up needing this capability.
Beat Detective can achieve this task for you and align audio recordings to a predefined grid. Quantizing Off The GridEven if you do not use a time reference when recording you can still quantize the performance – however this technique will also create a simple tempo map. Changing The Tempo Of A PerformanceHave you ever wondered how that guitar solo would sound at double speed? Beat Detective lets you find out with just a few clicks – however this is not the best way to go about, nor the fastest as Pro Tools has a tool that is simpler to use for this: Elastic Audio.
Create Groove Templates/ Quantize To Groove TemplatesThere are times that your drummer just plays a part with amazing groove and you want to extract that swing for using on other tracks in the project. Beat Detective enables you to extract the groove of a performance and use it to quantize other MIDI/ audio track with it. Of course, you can also use Beat Detective to quantize performances using a groove template you created or the ones that are built into Pro Tools. SmoothingThe process of editing things like drums with Beat Detective leaves a plethora of small unedited clips which cannot be used as such within the session.
The “Edit Smoothing” tab allows you to perform batch fades and space filling between the clips.The Beat Detective WindowOut of all the windows of Pro Tools tools, Beat Detective is maybe one of the most complex and daunting at first. Understanding how the window is divided and what each pane does will make operation a lot easier. Let’s take a look at this powerful tool:(To bring the window up in Pro Tools press CTRL + 8/ CMD + 8). The “Operation” section in the Beat Detective window.This section will allow us to select the operating mode of Beat Detective – the names of the operating modes speak for themselves but lets take a closer look at each:Bar Beat Marker Generation – You will use this mode when creating tempo maps from recorded performances. This can be used with both audio and MIDI.Groove Template Extraction – You will use this mode when extracting groove templates from recorded performances. This can be used with both audio and MIDI.Clip Separation – In order to quantize audio you will need to separate it first and this operating mode enables you to do just that. This can only be used with audio.Clip Conform – This operating mode enables you to quantize performances to a predefined grid.
This can only be used with audio.Edit Smoothing – Clip separation leaves us with many small clips which will have audible artifacts from the slicing process. Edit smoothing creates batch fades and fills in the gaps between the clips. This can only be used with audio. The “Selection” section in the Beat Detective Window.The “Selection” section allows us to select what part of the session we will be working on. You cannot actually use Beat Detective without selecting an area of the timeline first. You can introduce the selection manually or capture the selection that you have already made in the edit window IF A PREDEFINED GRID/ TEMPO MAP EXISTS – if you use capture selection when you are trying to create a tempo map you will fail miserably.
To properly create a tempo map you have to enter the values manually correctly so take some time to count the bars in the song for the section you are tempo mapping. Also this section enables us to choose the kind of subdivisions that are played throughout the selection. The “Detection” section of the Beat Detective window.This section is actually only available in the Bar Beat Marker Generation, Groove Template Extraction and Clip Separation modes.
When selecting the last two operating modes the detection section turns to the “Conform” section/ “Smoothing” section. The “Detection” section allows for selecting different algorithms to use for analyzing the waveform, the sensitivity of the analysis (how great the amplitude of a transient event has to be to create a trigger) and the resolution of the analysis. The “Smoothing” section in the Beat Detective window.When Edit Smoothing is selected the “Detection” window will turn into “Smoothing” and it allows you to choose whether you want batch crossfades or not and the length of the crossfades.The last section allows us to scroll between trigger events (transient information that the analysis process detects as relevant to the tempo of the performance) and shows us the progress of a current operation. Some of the actions Beat Detective can perform are quite CPU intensive so they might take a while to finish depending on your current system. The “Status/ Scroll” section of the Beat Detective window.Final ThoughtsBeat Detective is by all means one of the most powerful tools in Pro Tools – it enables us users to do amazing things with our sessions and recordings.
I keep thinking about how music production was 20 years ago and how it is today and I sometimes can’t believe how much things changed and how powerful the tools we have today are. Beat Detective is definitely one of those tools I recommend learning inside and out as you producer chops will greatly benefit from this.
Drum Editing - Slicing vs Time Compression & ExpansionWithout getting into too much detail, I find that there are usually 2 different school's of thought when it comes to editing Multitrack Drums in a DAW. Full disclosure here - yes I'm generalizing, but for those who have been doing this for the last decade or more, I find that they usually rely solely on a slicing method of working. Whereas some of the newer generation couldn't be bothered.Now first off, let me just get this out of the way - USE WHICH EVER METHOD YOU PREFER! If it works for you then that's great. But while I'm on the topic, let me also say that I personally will always use a slicing method whenever I can on the right sources.
Ie: percussive / rhythmic elements. To me, there is nothing that beats it despite how good the current time-stretching algorithms may be.
Drum Editing In Pro Tools Using Beat Detective - What's All The Fuss About?If you are serious about audio engineering and have ever tracked or edited live drums, I'm almost certain that you would have at least heard of this style of editing. Just to be clear - for some of you, you may not have any interest in using slicing (and that's perfectly fine).
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But for those who (like me) came from Pro Tools, my guess is that the way in which you have become accustomed to working when editing multitrack drums, involved using.Now for those who have no idea what Beat Detective is, it's essentially a way of working in which audio events (regions) are cut exactly at the initial transient point of say a kick or snare hit for example, and then the beginning of each audio event (representing the start of the transient) is quantized to a grid value. Example: 16th notes. This will obviously result in a vast amount of audio events that are all cut up and shuffled around on your time-line.Furthermore, any gaps that remain, are then back-filled, and any overlaps that occur would be obviously canceled out. The last step is adding appropriate crossfades between all the adjacent audio events, and double checking your edits - and when done right it's pretty much seamless.However one aspect that I haven't yet mentioned, is that although the entire process sounds quite daunting and time consuming - Beat Detective in general involves an automated workflow that handles all of these tasks with ease in a few different steps. But here's the thing that I think not a lot of people realize - As of Version 3.3, SO DOES STUDIO ONE!! Studio One's Take On Automating The Above ProcessWhen I made the move over to Studio One, the one area that I just kept having to hop over to Pro Tools for was drum editing. At that time, Studio One had a few, well.
Let's just call them 'quirks' with the way it handled slicing multitrack drums. Long story short, I got frustrated and worked out a workflow that could be used to 'mimic' all the steps needed to achieve what I wanted to do without having to export audio events to be edited in Pro Tools & re-imported.Long story short, my good friends at PreSonus got wind of the video that I had done, and took it upon themselves to basically re-vamp their entire process. About 5 months or so later when Studio One 3.3 was released, (in my humble opinion) it finally worked as it should. The one cool thing though is that Studio One actually does all of the above in 1 single step!There are a few differences here and there of course, and I would ALWAYS advise double checking your edits before committing. But in general, it's my opinion that it's right on par with Beat Detective in terms of efficiency when used correctly.So if you've made it this far through this article, my guess is that this is something you may be interested in. Furthermore, I would encourage anyone editing multitrack drums to at least have a look at this workflow regardless of whether they've ever used Beat Detective or not.
A Quick Note On The Video AboveYes, the video is long - BUT! My goal here was not only to show how to set everything up and use it in what I consider to be the most efficient way. But also to show how to do manual editing after the fact, to get the timing of your tracks sounding exactly how you need them to without fussing about.In this video, I demonstrate how to go about using a 'Beat Detective Style' Drum slicing work-flow when editing/quantizing Multitrack Drums in Studio One 4.
Although Studio One Version 4 was used, this video is applicable to anyone using Studio One version 3.3 and above.And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button.:)Cheers, Marcus.
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