Asking advice regarding drum quantizing..

Hello there,

I was wondering if you guys could give me tips how to get better results with drum quantizing at cubase 6. What I have is 8 tracks (Bd, SN, Overheads, 2xtom and sn&bd trigger) of drums played somewhat ok. There is some tempo drifting and therefore I want to lock it to tightly to grid (for my own reasons).

The drum beat is quite straightforward pop/rock/twist drum beat with some basic snare fill etc. I’m trying to use the new drum quantizing feature. The actual quantizing works fine, but I cant get decent results with the auto crossfade thingy. I constantly get click ands pop on those edit points plus at the points where the drummer is playing with open hihat the hihat starts to wobble on those edit points. I’m quantizing the drums based on the bass drum, because I felt that I got most natural feeling that way (when I used bd and snare it started to sound way too much like machine. Now there is some natural drift inside the beat which is ok). I’ve been trying to play with the edit point to offset it littlebit or no offset, and same thing with crossfades, just cant seem to get clean enough edit. The best results so far I’ve got with having the edits offset -2 ms and having 0.9 long crossfades and nudging them bit off from the edit points, but I’m still not happy with the edits. I’ve also tryed to have to snap to zero crossing on and off during edits.

Do you guys have any suggestions how to get better edits? And no, better drum is not opinion and for my own sadistic reasons I want to kick to be on the grid. :wink: So those of you who have more experience, i would be happy to get some advice.

You should have done all the edits with Snap To Zero X-ing dis-abled to prevent the phase issues. Re: the pops, did the parts overlap enough to get a good x-fade?

If the drum strays from the beat too much then quantising to the grid can quite often compromise the hats and cymbal.
It’s up to you to decide how much is too much. It all kind of hinges on the original tracks being played reasonably well in the first place. I find the default offset a good starting place and crossfade at about 5 to 8. Sometimes if the gaps at cut points is too large due to a badly out of time bit the close gaps function can result in a small glitch due to the same part being reveled at the gap, then manual editing may be required to minimise the error, and/or moving the crossfade about.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the tips. When playing around I found that the best way is just to combine the automatic approach and then manually correct as much as possible. Now the problem seems to be that I’m hearing clicks and pop just out of paranoia on every edit. :wink: Though I’m still thinking that am I creating more problems with this quantizing or am I just going to leave the tracks as they are.

I assume that the parts had pretty good overlap which means that theoreticly they should be ok, but especially with the hihats and cymbals there is small amount of wobbly kind of sound on those xfade spots. Or maybe I’m just paranoia and thinking that I’m hearing something that there isnt.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to answer me. All the best guys! :slight_smile:

Heavy drum editing by cutting, moving and crossfading will often result in audible artifacts (wobble?) on the O/H, hats tracks, again the seriousness of this depends on how much masking by the music is occurring. sometimes it’s better to just leave alone or correct just the more serious beats.

It really does pay to work the drummer at the point of tracking to get everything in time as much as possible first.

Of course I do realise this is not always possible for various reasons :laughing: