Zynewave.
Mike GI’m still struggling with drums.
When I want a track with a live feel, i usually start with bass and snare drums, which i record live with the metronome turned on.
Then i turn off the metronome and add the other parts and instruments.
I often have 2 problems:
Issue 1 – My drums don’t line up to the grid (e.g. All notes
consistently occuring before the grid snaplines)
Issue 2 – A few of the notes are just randonly and obviously way
out of time
I’m not sure how much of an problem issue 1 is, I guess it will
cause lots of minor issues becuase all other parts will follow the
drums and therefore be slightly not aligned to the grid. Making
copying and pasting and moving things around slightly more tricky
etc.
If in an attempt to auto the out of time notes, I quantise
everything it looses all the feel.
Also many notes jump to the next grid line (Due in part to issue 1
I think)
At the moment i go through the whole track manually adjusting the
individual hits that sound to my ear “out of time”. this is a very
time consuming task and i always spot more “out of time” bits in
the drums later on, after i’ve laid down loads of other stuff on
top of the drums.
And I’m not really ever very happy with the results.
I don’t really have a specific question, i’m looking to see what
other people do and if anyone has any suggestions. (Please!!)
Since starting writing this i’ve come up with these ideas:
-To deal with issue 1, I could select all events (or at least
whole sections at a time) and manually drag the selection slightly
to the right so that they line up with the grid better. (Must try
this next time I start a track!)
-It would be good to have the following quantise features in my
favourite DAW (podium):
A – Quantise above threshold (only move hits that are out of time
by more than a certain amount)
B – quantise by % (move notes closer to the grid but not all the
way i.e. Just de-emphaises the errors but not totally kill the
swing/feel)
(Do other DAWs have this kind of feature?)
Mike GOK lets refine the previous post down to the following:
“Quantise a bit” feature request…
A – Quantise above threshold (only move hits that are out of time
by more than a certain amount)
B – quantise by % (move notes closer to the grid but not all the
way i.e. Just de-emphaises the errors but not totally kill the
swing/feel)
Anyone else want/need this kind of feature?
Any plans fritz?
Cheers,
Mike
(Previous post was admittedly far too long and too specific to my own ineptitude with drums :oops:)
thcilnnahojDo you quantize other instruments that you play before/after laying down the drums? I’d guess not, if you want it to sound more organic. Sometimes a ‘missed’ beat can sound quite good if it doesn’t stand out all by itself. But then again, I like (acoustic) drums that have not-so-great timing. 🙂
Right now I do it the same way as you: go through parts and move notes by hand.
One way would be to use something like groove templates (not in Podium, though), but that would in essence just quantize other instruments to the ever-so-slightly off beat drums, which kind of misses the point.
You could also try playing with the ‘randomize note timing’ setting in the track properties. However, it has very little effect on short notes – and since I guess nobody holds their drum notes… 😆
Also, Frits pretty much said he’d remove those options once MIDI fx are implemented, as that offers many more possibilities.
Otherwise, a flexible quantize option sounds like a good idea for a feature request.
