Piano Roll edits of SI Drums

[Larry T.]

Greetings All. Haven't been able to locate an answer so here we go....

i am trying to use Piano Roll to position SI Drums snare drum hits, cymbal hits, etcetera....some of it is quite easy....but, for certain timings of my songs i just can't get the Piano Roll note positioned correctly, specifically, the kick drum, no matter where i drag it to it's not in time with the music...i even tried "doing the math" by right clicking the midi kick drum note and writing down its specifics (occurrence time based on the ruler, duration, velocity, pitch, etcetera) and comparing to another section of the song where the kick drum is in time....is that basically the answer??....using the ruler's time position and entering it into the midi kick drum notes????  Changing the Piano Roll from 1/16 notes to 1/32 or 1/64, perhaps??

TIA

Cheers!!!!

[John Vere]

Not sure how you started the project as this would be the key. You normally either lay down the first recordings to the metronome or even better a basic drum beat. 

After I have a few guide tracks with bass, guitar and scratch vocal i often record the drums  part by part. Say start with a kick track. I then quantize it using the settings that closely matched the correct grid. 
So I’m not sure how you arrived at laying down your dum parts. But Quantization is how I tighten up drum parts. 
 

There are hundreds of ways to create a song and Cakewalk can do them all. Watch some videos to get ideas on how others do it to get some ideas. 

Edited October 7, 2021 by John Vere

[John Vere]

Here’s a new way I discovered that is perfect for singer songwriter stuff. 
Input 1 vocal mike 

Input 2 guitar 

Record your song best as you can focus on the tempo and a solid punchy rhythm . Don’t worry about the details of performance as these 2 track will get re done. Don’t use the metronome 

Drag the guitar track to the time line to create a tempo map. 
Record a bass track.

Drag the bass track to a midi track and quantize and edit. Make it perfect. Use you favourite bass VST 

Insert you drum VST and now lay down kick track and quantize and edit to lock in with the bass. 
Now record the rest of the kit part by part. Quantize and edit. 

Now lay down some keyboard parts to fill in the space and add interest or a counter rhythm part. Of course you quantize! 

you now should  have a bed track that is squeaky tight. 

Now sing you heart out and  get a perfect vocal track. Gotta love Melodyne 5 

Last I like to do the guitars  so as to not walk all over the vocals and this will also ad the needed sloppiness to the tune. 
 

[Larry T.]

Hello John....Thank You for the detailed help. I play the drums myself, Ringo style not like Steve Gadd, and i have never had a problem with my timing when playing live or recording, but this........? lol!!!! Cheers!!!! ????

[John Vere]

My timing is very good as well and it should be after playing for almost 60 years!  
I also can play real drums and I mostly played in old time country type bands wearing that hat. 
That’s why I’m hyper sensitive to latency. 
So if a note is off the grid by a tiny bit I hear it. 
And even though I’m a long time bass player with some  stuff to make it sound good I now convert my parts to midi and this solves a few things for me. 
One of those things is to archive all my projects for future proofing and that’s midi. Midi will always be a format that opens on any computer. 

[John Ritter]

This turned into an interesting topic on process.  My process has evolved over time, but nowadays I tend to record the basic scratch tracks over a drum loop, then go back in and record the live drums over it once I've laid everything down.  I'll re-record guitar, bass and keys or whatever if necessary. That way I can get the song written without worrying about timing.  The other reason I do this is that I find it difficult to play to a click track for an entire song - it tends to make my playing overly conservative, easier to play over the loop.  Of course this has little to do with the question, but I found John's comments interesting.

[John Vere]

2 hours ago, John Ritter said:

This turned into an interesting topic on process.  My process has evolved over time,

Yes absolutely we are always evolving over time. Part of this is the advancements made with the technology. When all I had was a 4 track.. that was a very different process to write a song and turn it into a full piece of music. I've been lucky to have  both real instruments, like drums, and midi since the very first days. You had to stripe one of those precious 4 tracks with time code to sync up your Atari computer with midi. That left you with only 3 tracks of audio. To this day I'm still pretty minimal in my track count. 

Then we got our hands on 8 and 12 track cassette recorders and  life was easy.  My first attempts with Cakewalk in the early 2000's was nasty due to the lack of a proper audio interface. I put it all aside and continued to use my Out of the Box digital system- Atari, Yamaha MD8, Yamaha 0-1v mixer and a DAT recorder for mastering. I made my best recordings to date on that system. 

But back to the process, once I did start using Cakewalk I still treated it like my old system. I had no clue how to even edit midi using PVR. It took a long time and as Cakewalk has added new and better features, like the drag and drop audio to midi and drag and drop to timeline tempo map, my process changes to take advantage of those tools. 

I still like recording with a band or at least part of a band best. That process is easiest to get a great recording for me. Set up to optimize the drums in a treated room of some kind. Then I lay down a scratch vocal and guitar as the drummer and me interact live in the same room.  There will be a little vocal bleed into the overheads but hopefully I don't change the timing or the lyrics.  Try and do a few songs at once. We did our Uncle Ruckle album this was with the bass player being in the room as well.