I just started looking for info on how to adjust timing on some drum tracks. There seem to be a lot of really impressive features in this area. The quantizing and hitpoint detection stuff looks very cool. What I couldn’t find was a way to just drag a single hit in time and have it stretch the drum tracks to compensate. After a bit of digging it looks like this is one thing that is not possible. I’d love to be wrong about that. Is there something I’m missing, or a decent workaround? I saw some people talking about exporting to another DAW, or something involving Audacity, but I’d like to avoid that.
Here’s the workaround within Cubase: Multitrack Free Warp - Cubase - Steinberg Forums
Not too elegant, many users are demanding that feature for quite a while but sadly you’re not wrong about it. It’s not here yet and nobody knows if/when it will come…
While it’s not possible to audio warp multiple tracks as the same time, you really should look into slip editing instead. Audio warping and time stretching produce artifacts and will mess with the transients, which you really don’t want for drums and other instruments where transients are important.
Try to watch this Multitrack Drum Editing in Cubase - YouTube
That looks interesting (slip editing). I’m going to check that out. I guess the one thing that’s not clear from that video: when you move the beats over, what fills in the space? I guess it would have to stretch the audio you’re moving away from, and contract the section you’re moving toward…
Slip editing doesn’t produce a gap. You cut the events, hold ctrl + alt and drag the waveforms within the events’ boundaries. You’ll have to do crossfades of course to get seamless audio. In case you’ll get artefacts try moving, extend/shorten the fades.
I’ll recommend setting up autofades, so you wont have to think about it.
Yes, why not. My experience with drum edits is that optimizing fades manually is still the only way to know everything runs as it should though.
May depend on the level of detail that’s needed for the drum performance. When audio overlaps are too close to original (tiny moves/slips) I often hear decaying cymbals phasing during the crossfades etc. Some may care for it, some won’t. I do but I’ve had commercial recordings for mixing where it seemed that the ultra pros simply didn’t. Indeed it doesn’t matter much when the end result will be a more or less distorted sausage waveform. I prefer proper handcraft 
Well, setting up correct fade time and experiment with the fade curve I never have problems with auto fades.
If you hear phasing on the cymbals it’s likely the fade time are too long. Try 1ms fade time with either equal power or S-curve.
Over the years I have done hundreds of hours of drum editing. Not just four on the floor stuff, lots of dense metal - sometimes the only way to get that stuff tight are micro edits, zillions of cuts and fades. 95 % of the fades work by default, the rest is still manual adjustment.
Believe me, I’ve tried each and every method to shorten drum editing processes. ‘Quick and dirty’ is pretty straightforward but for quality work there’s still an amount of time involved.
The good thing is, that you can just use autofades and when you get to that specific cut/edit where the global autofade setting wont do it, then adding a manual fade will overide the autofade and you are good to go.
I’m doing dense metal as well, and autofades just saves me a ton of time not having to add a fade manually for every single cut.
These days I’m not editing a lot of drums anymore as i usually convert them to midi or working with programmed drums. However I’m still chopping up guitar and bass tracks with billions of cuts. Only type of tracks where i find that manually editing will not always work is for vocal tracks, so for these i might lean towards using free warp. But I’m only using audio warp if manually slipediting wont do it.
Have to try autofades - I know they’re there but their invisibilty held me off. I just select all and hit my crossfade shortcut, listen and adjust where needed. Luckily the drummers in my world got a lot better recently and play very usable tracks (knocking on wood!).
For bass, guitar and vocals I used to cut/slip until I discovered that the warp algorithms have become pretty awesome - if not abused- some Cubase versions ago. Often I record multichannel stuff to multichannel tracks (like an LCR track for mic/mic/di of an acoustic guitar) to have the chance to warp them with intact phase relations.