Drum Replacer - best practices?

[jackson white]

got a mess of rather poorly recorded drums, thought I'd see if I could make a quick batch of  lemonade with the Drum Replacer in Cakewalk. in principle, no problem, but wondering if there might be some better practices. the goal is to improve the existing sounds (very well played) without losing the groove (trigger timing/potential phase issues) and without getting all wonky with mismatched ambience with the OH/Room mics. The issues i ran into are;

1. [!] Soloing -any- track with a DR Region FX enabled throws the playback completely out of sync, have to stop and restart the track. Tried a couple of buffer settings but no improvement or audio dropout(5).
2. [?] Could not find any documentation on the vertical colored bar in the waveform display. Looks like a predelay with a popup readout in ms, so assuming it's delaying the loaded sample relative to the trigger, but would like to confirm exactly what it does.
3. [?] Appreciating the "dynamics" % feature but wondering if it supports multi samples (because timbre vs. volume)
4. [wish] The original Sonar docs show both active AND blank DR lane/waveform displays.
   A better workflow when switching back and forth between tracks (i.e. kick/snare) would be to only display active DR lanes to avoid any confusion about -which- track to work on given the MultiDock only shows the last selected instance of DR). My assumption is the DR aims to be efficient by presenting the top 3 choices for selecting a replacement sample on initialization. ime, the most common use case (by far) is layering multiple samples of the same type on a track (i.e. multiple kick samples). since you can't display more than one instance of the DR (AFAIK), the preference here would be to either select the initial drum type for the first DR lane AFTER analysis OR be able to "blank" any DR display/lanes that aren't used to load a sample.
5. [?] Could not initially drop a .wav file into the sample window for a lane, but that's since behaved as expected. Wondering if there is a state where it might -not- take a user sample.
6. [?] The waveform display shows a ghosted image behind the primary frequency adjustable wave. Anything useful with this?

Any comments/suggestions based on your experience are appreciated, including any alternatives that you might prefer over this.

And understand something like AD2/Session Drummer w/MIDI are an alternative, but don't love their sounds and changing the tempo or any form of quantization won't fly here.

TIA

Edited February 5, 2023 by jackson white
deet on dropout

[reginaldStjohn]

The top of this page seems to delineate the Cakewalk preferred method of using the Drum Replacer. Of course, it doesn't address the sync issues if soloed.

https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=Region_FX.07.html

[jackson white]

@reginaldStjohn  thx, np to use it, but couldn't find much other than the basics in the dox and a couple of tutorials. relatively new to Cakewalk, thought maybe some longtime Sonar user here had more experience or insight from the feature launch.  was wondering about the nature of the filter to determine the 3 kit pieces. but probably expecting too much, looks more like an "80%" feature and i'm in the 20% group. 

[abacab]

Not sure if this helps, but here's some background on Drum Replacer, from the Sonar rolling updates history available here: https://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/Whats-New#start

Initially released in May 2015 "Sonar Everett" https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013408/SONAR-2015-Everett-Update-Notes

Drum Replacer updates released in June 2015 "Sonar Foxboro". https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013411/SONAR-2015-Foxboro-Update-Notes

https://www.cakewalk.com/Products/Drum-Replacer

https://www.cakewalk.com/Products/Drum-Replacer/Videos

Edited February 7, 2023 by abacab

[jackson white]

@abacab thx, the "rolling update notes' were helpful, hadn't risen to the top in previous searches. 

[John Vere]

What I think a lot of people don’t realize is you can creat the drm replacer track and now drag that to a midi or instrument track.  Now just remove the regional effect from the audio track and get on with blending the VST drums with the original etc. 

I made a video about this method 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 13, 2023 by John Vere