quantize 8-10 live drum tracks is possible in Cakewalk?

[Silvio Gazquez]

Hey,

I was wondering if it's possible to quantize an 8-10 live drum tracks with audiosnap?

I wasn't able to find much tutorials about that...

[David Baay]

I happened to stumble across the following posted by Lord Tim on the old forum a while ago, and thought his suggested procedure was nicely succinct.  Note that the purpose of applying a common set of transient markers to all tracks is to ensure that stretching doesn't introduce any phase errors with room mics and bleed across other mics:

Record the takes (duh)

Select each track, enable Audiosnap and set the threshold level to 100% to disable the transients

If this is a simple drum track with no kicks playing in time with the snare (so you're getting possible flamming), I bounce kick and snare to a new track ** (see note below)

On that track, enable Audiosnap, drag the threshold slider down until it detects most or all of the hits, adjust accordingly by moving transients around or inserting / deleting as necessary.

On that track, right click it and choose Pool > Add Clip to Pool

Select every other track, right click on one and choose Pool > Apply transient pool markers

Manually tighten or quantize your guide track as you see fit.

Select every other track, right click and choose Pool > Quantize to Pool

No splits, no crossfades needed, no weird gaps, no endless clips. All of the phase is correct and it just works.
 
** Audiosnap has a BIG problem with ghost notes and weird detections. What I tend to do is put a gate on the kick and snare track and get them extremely clean sounding (to the point of them sounding bad, but so there's a definite attack to each hit, and no noise between the hits) and the bounce THAT to a new track. You can delete the gates after that. You new guide track will have super clear hits and Audiosnap will be a million times better at detecting the transients.
 
This gets a bit more complex with double kick work where things fall on the same beat, or places where you want to set your timing guide from something else (ie: you have a killer ride pattern which is a bit off but that's where everything follows.) You need to decide what is most important, quantize minus any overlapping hits, then go back a few more times and lock in those remaining transients with the rest of the group. Not ideal but I've had great results from doing that.

[Silvio Gazquez]

14 minutes ago, David Baay said:

I happened to stumble across the following posted by Lord Tim on the old forum a while ago, and thought his suggested procedure was nicely succinct.  Note that the purpose of applying a common set of transient markers to all tracks is to ensure that stretching doesn't introduce any phase errors with room mics and bleed across other mics:

Record the takes (duh)

Select each track, enable Audiosnap and set the threshold level to 100% to disable the transients

If this is a simple drum track with no kicks playing in time with the snare (so you're getting possible flamming), I bounce kick and snare to a new track ** (see note below)

On that track, enable Audiosnap, drag the threshold slider down until it detects most or all of the hits, adjust accordingly by moving transients around or inserting / deleting as necessary.

On that track, right click it and choose Pool > Add Clip to Pool

Select every other track, right click on one and choose Pool > Apply transient pool markers

Manually tighten or quantize your guide track as you see fit.

Select every other track, right click and choose Pool > Quantize to Pool

No splits, no crossfades needed, no weird gaps, no endless clips. All of the phase is correct and it just works.
 
** Audiosnap has a BIG problem with ghost notes and weird detections. What I tend to do is put a gate on the kick and snare track and get them extremely clean sounding (to the point of them sounding bad, but so there's a definite attack to each hit, and no noise between the hits) and the bounce THAT to a new track. You can delete the gates after that. You new guide track will have super clear hits and Audiosnap will be a million times better at detecting the transients.
 
This gets a bit more complex with double kick work where things fall on the same beat, or places where you want to set your timing guide from something else (ie: you have a killer ride pattern which is a bit off but that's where everything follows.) You need to decide what is most important, quantize minus any overlapping hits, then go back a few more times and lock in those remaining transients with the rest of the group. Not ideal but I've had great results from doing that.

Thanks for your feedback. It sounds kind of complicated and like this type of quantizing with multitracks in cakewalk is not pretty convenient.

Isn't there a non cakewalk plugin or other tool to use instead of audiosnap? inside cakewalk of course

 

[David Baay]

Multi-track audio quantizing *is* complicated because of the need to avoid phase errors. And it unavoidably takes a bit of massaging of audio transient markers  on the guide track to get a good result.

The only real alternative is to split the audio at transient markers and quantize the clips which is what Lord Tim was recommending against with his post, and you'd still need to use a common set of transient markers on all tracks.

I'm not aware of any other tools or other DAWs that make this significantly easier.

You can search cakewalk/sonar multitrack drum quantizing on Youtube to find tutorials. I haven't reviewed any, but here's one:

 

 

[Silvio Gazquez]

yeah, I have watched a few tutorials but werent a big help. I will check that one anyway.

Thanks for your help!