This just revolutionized my drum editing. I was healing the splits manually before which took hours. I've been mixing with Reaper for 10 years, and only just now thought to look for a way to optimize my drum editing. Which is silly of me, cause this info was available for basically the whole time.
Thank you Kenny! You have made decoding reaper unbelievably much better and more thorough. Your videos are straight to the point, concise, and easy to understand. Thank you for all you do.
This is amazing. But the only thing Reaper is missing that it really, really needs is a "strength" control slider for the quantize function. I know it has that in the MIDI editor. It needs it for audio, and then there's literally not one thing Reaper doesn't have going for it. Other than that, it is truly superior in every way to any other DAW (my opinion)
Very nice solution ! A similar method is to split items at grid, offset fades back, and then use the "move item content" mouse modifier to adjust item content inside items edges (it can adjust for all items in groups as well). It can be helpful sometimes like if you suddendly have a very loud toms solo and you only want to quantize at measure start. (theoricall exemple the method have to be choose in context).
Hi, thanks so much for the great video. I can't wait to try it. Is there a way to leave some variation? Instead of snapping all the drums perfectly to the grid, I'd like to be able to move them, say 60% closer to the grid, or exclude moving transients that are already close enough to the grid by some margin. -- To keep it sounding human and natural, but fix the parts that are the most sloppy.
You could manually split where the more out of time hits are and quantise those and leave the closer hits natural. Edit. I know this is ancient haha you've probably figured it by now.
Great tool, good for kicks and snares, a bit poor for closed hi-hats between them, for example. Maybe that's just me. But I think we should be able to move those transient markers to a better time point before splitting everything with a lot of misplacing cut points and spend a lot of time fixing them. ReCycle is a Granpa program that used to allow that... I thought we could do that on Reaper, too. Two things that I miss on Reaper. This, to move the transient markers freely and set the velocity of the keys signed to the sample start offset point. So we can simulate drums sounds (softer and louder) way better than having only the velocity signed to the volume of that drum sound sample. Great program, of course. No doubt about it.
(just a note: on 10:59 on my reaper to move around items it's not with brackets by default, but with "?" and "ì". Is it possible that shortcut changes by the layout of keyboard?)
Hi Kenny, I have troubles editing metal drums, because of the fast double bass performance... And with a simple drum beat this is easy, but if you have quick double bass stuff and snares, there is a danger for flams... I have also troubles with stretch markers to edit overheads and room mic... I only can edit kick snare and thats not in line with the overheads /room then...:( Any advice??? I bought reaper 5.33 a few days back and before that I used cubase 5... I,m very happy with Reaper philosophy and programm for 58 euros..yeah!! Thanks for the advice man!!!
@Reaper Mania : Hi Kenny ! One quick question : what is the name of the action that you use (via your "Ctrl + Bracket" shortcut, that doesn't work on my AZERTY keyboard) to go from one crossfade to the next ? Tried to find it through the actions menu (using "crossfade") but didn't find anything. Thank you !
Item navigation: Move cursor left to edge of item; Item navigation: Move cursor right to edge of item. I gave them shortcuts Ctrl + LEFT ARROR; Ctrl + RIGHT ARROW
It's Item navigation: move cursor left/right to nearest item edge. Move cursor right to edge of item only works for selected items so you'd have to select the whole track every time you use it.
Do you not align the phase of all tracks beforehand? I noticed at 13:24 that the transient of the snare hit on the Room mics are a little bit off compared to the close snare mic. I always do that at first and then edit them. What do you suggest?
Nope, we hear them at the same time(aligned), we are never at two different places in the room simultaniously listening to the set. Tho we hear echos and we can emulate that by delaying the room mics by a dussin ms so its the same time it would take the sound to get to the walls and back again
Does this still work properly in 5.40? I have "trim content behind media items when editing" turned on, but dynamic split produces overlapping items. The only way I can manage to do this is by splitting and then using Shift+X on every resultant item, which is clearly not a good solution. Could there be anything else I need to turn on or off?
So, is it best to not have any "gaps" inside media? Say in dead space of vocals or a pause/dropout in drums? Was always under the impression that it is best, specially if there is bleed over from mics, to just have each hit/recorded audio on the track. Example: the bass drum has a too much bleed and we isolate the kick/kick sample and use the room mics to fill in any "dead space". Or vocals are all separated by when there is singing and when there isn't. Why would there need to be anything in between?
I think you're right about it being okay to have gaps in kick and snare. But it's not okay to have gaps in the overheads, and since this process applies the same edits to every (grouped) drum track, all the other drum tracks "come along for the ride" with the overhead edits.
Hey, first off: great tutorial! But I kinda fucked up my whole project while doing this. Is there a way to restore the original files without the quantizing etc.? Please help :) Thanks in advance!
Why would a person not want to have gaps? And why would would a person want to have gaps? What does that do to the sound of everything, especially if it's just like a snare of kick hit?
With a multi-miked, acoustic source such as drums, you want your project to convey what happened in the room during the performance, which was continuous sound- hence, you don't want gaps in your project's drum track. Maybe in a particular style like hip hop or electronic, it would be desirable to have abrupt, jarring silence to achieve a certain effect- in this case, you might (be crazy and) want gaps.
This was a super helpful video to get my drum tracks 95% of the way there. I'd like to add a tip i picked up from ADAMWATHAN on ultimatemetal.com... I found his tip really helped me clean up the drum cross fade edits rather quickly and, so far, easier than the video's suggestion on how to do it.... After I dynamic split the snare and kick tracks, I selected all the drum tracks, I right clicked, and went into: ITEM PROCESSING => QUANTIZE ITEM POSITIONS TO THE GRID for the snare ...then, i chose a 1/64th grid,. Select check box : SHORTEN EARLIER with a 0ms value and then un-select check Box: EXTEND STARTS. Then hit quantize. As soon as I did that, I made sure I still had all of my drum tracks selected, right clicked on the snare again and went back to : ITEM PROCESSING => QUANTIZE ITEM POSITIONS TO THE GRID and selected quantize again, but this time: Select check box: EXTEND START with 30ms value and Select check box: SHORTEN EARLIER with 30ms value That did the final trick pretty much perfectly synced out of time live drums for me... My Life for ReaperMania!
This method misses one important extra step imo. Time stretching on drums sounds unnatural because of the transients not the sustain. Try this. To fill the gaps take a time streched version of each section where the gaps are (best thing to do is make a duplicate of each drum part and use kenny's other strech marker method) then crossfade the time stretched version with the one with gaps in each part. Make sure you make the crossfades pretty long and avoid hitting any transients in the time stretched version. Obviously there is a point where this method would still cause issues (i.e. The drums are extremely off time) but I've found this makes things sound much more natural. I hope I explained that all correctly but give it a shot. I use it all the time. Sounds much better imo. A bit time consuming though
Very interesting.....but it is also....... very frustrating.......because.....you put..........so many pauses..........in between words.........it could have been.......a shorter video...........if you spoke.......normally....... :) Cheers
