Drum Midi - Quantize and Time Align to Bed Track

[Scott Kendrick]

OK - there has to be a better way or maybe I'm crazy for trying to do what I'm doing. My band is recording cover tracks, and so what I like to do is record the drum track with the original underneath it as our scratch track. I use my Roland TD 25 to capture midi into EZDrummer while I play along to the original. I then add EZ Drummer as an instrument into Cakewalk and import my midi. All is good so far...

But then I want to clean up the timing some and ensure alignment with the original track... the problem starts with the fact that most tracks we are doing are not perfect tempo and like any song temp drifts a little here and there. So I walk through the audio of the original and use the Set Beat at Now feature to align the tempo to the original track. I do this all manually for now and don't use AudioSnap to try to fast track anything. I'm doing this so I can use Quantize to get the timing of the midi track nice and clean.

The problem is, when I start doing this it slightly changes the tempo from time to time, but because midi has tempo baked in, now my once fairly closely aligned drum track gets quite a bit off (because while setting tempo markers has no impact on the audio file of the original, it changes the location of the midi notes). I then spend a lot more time, trying to get the drum track back aligned (quantizing in the process).

Is there a better way to do what I'm trying to do? Both quantize the midi and align to an original?

Thanks

Scott

[Blogospherianman]

5 hours ago, Scott Kendrick said:

Roland TD 25 to capture midi into EZDrummer while I play along to the original. I then add EZ Drummer as an instrument into Cakewalk and import my midi. All is good so far...

I would personally capture the MIDI inside Cakewalk instead of EZ Drummer.  Not saying that is your problem, but even slight differences of tempo maps or even the default tempos in the 2  programs can throw things off.  Ez drummer is recording midi to a default grid and tempo.  It may be different than what you had Cakewalk initially set to. That should have shown up right when you imported the MIDI though.

If it sounded good together AFTER the import then I suspect something else may be at play.  I would still capture MIDI directly in Cakewalk though. That way the audio you are referencing is lined up (if you play it good) with the midi you are capturing.  Furthermore I personally like to set the tempo map to follow the reference FIRST,  before I play along.  You can also turn on Audio Snap (clip follows project) and adjust the tempo of the original to a new better tempo with or without the original fluctuations... then play along. Save the project as (Project name) - Original Tempo Map BEFORE you change and move on. Then Save As - New Tempo.  That way you can still change your mind later. 😄
If the MIDI sounded good (all the way through) after you imported, Set Measure/Beat at Now should NOT change the relationship between the MIDI and the audio UNLESS you happened to have Audio Snap (Clip follows project) enabled on the audio, then it would.

Turn on Cakewalk’s metronome and listen to make sure your grid is lined up properly. I personally like to manually set the Tempo map To an Audio track before MIDI recording using the Tempo View and drawing while Listening to the Click track I make it sound like the drummer and metronome are grooving.  To me it’s a smoother grid done this way because you can hear the relationship between grid and groove. Just cause a Kick drum hit is there doesn’t necessarily mean that the grid beat 1 should be. Maybe the kick rushed the grid and it was fine in context. With the metronome on checking with the source material you can make it sound as though the live drummer was playing right with your tempo map.  
Hope that helps!  If not we’ll try again. You can always PM me a project to look at.

✌️
 

[Scott Kendrick]

50 minutes ago, Blogospherianman said:

I personally like to set the tempo map to follow the reference FIRST,  before I play along.

 

Genius! This makes a ton of sense... yes because then the start and stops of the measures is already set to the original track, and so my midi notes should line up as I play along. Thanks soo much! Will try it on next track. I'm assuming I can play the audio direct from cakewalk while recording on the ezdrummer track? Any instructions/links for how to make sure the TD 25 is connected to Cakewalk or is it all done through the  EZDrummer instrument still?

[Blogospherianman]

Just Load EZ drummer in Cakewalk as a Synth VST.  Set the input of the Synth’s Midi track (newly created when you inserted the Synth VST) to be wherever your TD-25 is coming in midi wise. And since you’re drumming you probably should keep your latency slider in preferences fairly low, or as low as your system will take comfortably.

Side note:  

I like to use Izotope R x 7 to isolate vox, bass, percussion and other, so when I play along with drums I can mute just the original drums. Then while laying bass I mute the original bass, etc.  Makes it kind of fun. 

[Scott Kendrick]

cool - thanks for the additional tip! Will let you know if I have any troubles getting it set up..

[Scott Kendrick]

Struggling with this... I can hear the drum sounds in cakewalk when I hit the drums... but nothing records when I try to record. and the latency, despite dropping the buffer all the way down, makes it impossible to play along with the bed track.

Reading this https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013182/Im-getting-a-delay-or-latency-when-recording-or-performing-synths to see if I can do anything to improve latency. But may have to go back to the old way.

Any thoughts?

[Blogospherianman]

Are you using ASIO drivers for your sound card?  (Audio driver in preferences) Which soundcard you using? Are you arming and recording the midi track for ez drummer? Are you running any Audio FX like reverb or the likes?

Edited July 12, 2020 by Blogospherianman

[Scott Kendrick]

I may have figured out the one issue with with the midi not being captured. In EzDrummer there is a Enable Midi Out setting which I had to set... not currently connected to my TD25 but just hitting the drums in EZDrummer did get captured.

As for latency.. I see a lot of settings in various places for ASIO but not really sure what that is or where to set it (e.g. cakewalk, ezdrumer, my pc sound settings).

I was reading other threads and I saw some recommending hardware devices as interfaces, or one suggestion was to not listen to what was being captured but instead listen to what's being played via the roland brain... need to some how get the cakewalk click track to mix with the output from the brain.

[Scott Kendrick]

So I enabled the ASIO in preferences but then I get no sound out of Cakewalk. In fact when I launch Cakewalk now with that set I get an error - There are no audio devices for the current driver model on your system.

 

There were all kinds of settings I wasn't sure about .. like playback and record timing master... should those be my TD25?

[scook]

49 minutes ago, Scott Kendrick said:

As for latency.. I see a lot of settings in various places for ASIO but not really sure what that is or where to set it (e.g. cakewalk, ezdrumer, my pc sound settings).

ASIO is an audio driver specification. The better audio interface manufacturers provide drivers based on this specification for use with applications like Cakewalk that benefit from low latency drivers. Unfortunately, there is not a reliable ASIO driver for the sound chips integrated on PC motherboards. For PC sound chips the best driver modes in Win10 are the two WASAPI settings followed by WDM and finally MME.

49 minutes ago, Scott Kendrick said:

I was reading other threads and I saw some recommending hardware devices as interfaces, or one suggestion was to not listen to what was being captured but instead listen to what's being played via the roland brain... need to some how get the cakewalk click track to mix with the output from the brain.

This is the best solution for low latency monitoring even if one has a good audio interface with an ASIO driver. Audio interfaces build for DAW use have a way to mix the signal coming from the DAW and their audio inputs for monitoring purposes. Without a dedicated interface, you will still need a way to get the signal out of the PC and maybe use the "audio in" on the TD-25 for monitoring purposes.

[Scott Kendrick]

the audio in on the td25 should work - thanks for that suggestion.

[Scott Kendrick]

I think I have this working pretty well - switched audio to WASAPI and things are lining up nicely. However as this is my first time recording directly into Cakewalk, I'm seeing something else weird (maybe for another thread). For part of my track more than half if the midi notes are white even though nothing is selected... but then the last half the track, no problem.  Any thoughts... screen shot attache

 

 

[scook]

Separate threads for unrelated issues is a good idea. It may get faster replies and help other users looking for solutions.

It looks like the PRV is showing muted and unmuted clips. This is the default, I prefer hiding muted clips - an option in the PRC view menu.

The muted clip(s) are probably the result of recording mode set to comping.

 

[Scott Kendrick]

Well I think you solved it... not sure how I got muted clip in there as I thought I deleted before starting over, but it was set to comping instead of overwrite. They are hidden now with PRV setting.

Between the two of you, you've been a huge help on getting this sorted and think I'm on the right path now. Thanks a ton! If I have different/other issues, I'll start a new thread.