Hi all,
There’s something I’m missing or can’t get the concept of. I’m sorry if this has been descused but I couldn’t find one particular thing in the topics I’ve read. The thing is:
I’ve recorded live drums for a whole album, traced the hitpoints and quantized the drums to the grid as I like them but…
It’s a 14 song speed metal album and you can imagine how many hitpoints (working hours) are we talking about. For the sake of phase issues, when adding samples (to the kick especially), I’ve checked every hitpoint to be exactly on the sample. Everything is recorded in one project and all the slices are making the project so heavy that it’s almost unuseble. I can bounce the tracks after quantizing but all the hitpoints disapear and I cannot export midi tracks afterwards without doing the process againg. I try to export midi before the bounce but I cannot access more than one slice at a time.
Is there a way to do it without retracing the hitpoints again after bouncing? Am I missing something? I tried reading the manual and everything but still cannot answer this question…
Any help is highly appreciated
Without getting into the actual topic of those hitpoints etc., would it not ease the situation if you started by cutting it up into 14 separate projects? (using the Edit menu>Range>“Delete Time” function)
It would definitely ease the project but still the issue would remain. It takes forever to trace double kick drums and I would still have no idea how to export midi tracks without retracing.
When I’m doing something like this (not as in-depth as you by the sound of it!) I use warp time to set the tempo map to match the drum hits then I can use snap or quantize on the midi. Perhaps if you do this then you will not need the hitpoints anymore because you’ll know that the beats of the tempo will exactly match the drums and so you can bounce the sliced audio. Also, perhaps consider using track versions to duplicate before bouncing, that way you can always go back to the raw slices should you need to.
Thanks Mike!
I appreciate it! The thing is that I need to tighten up the drums to the grid not the other way around.
Track Versions is a great tool indeed. I save the unbounced tracks but still cannot export the midi tracks for the real drums. I guess retracing is inevitable in my case
Ok, yeah, I do both… First I ‘quantize’ the drums closer to the grid to tidy them up, then I match the grid to the drums. But it definitely helps me to warp the tempo because I can then use quantize and visual cues to line things up later which speeds up what I’m doing. Note that you can also use Track Versions on the tempo map as well, maybe this will help you too?
Anyway, its been a while since I used the hitpoint/warping features so I’ve been taking this opportunity to have a play and get some practice! But, I don’t really understand precisely what you’re doing, perhaps you could explain what your aim and what you’re having trouble with then we could give you better assistance? Is it that you can’t create midi data from hitpoints in multiple events in one go? We may be able to tease out a feature request? I think there’s plenty of room for enhancement in the hitpoint and warping area.
I would definitely advise that you don’t use one big project because Cubase slows down dramatically when you have loads of slices on a track (I edit live gigs and I have to bounce down after slicing otherwise the project become unusable).
I’ll definitely separate the songs in different projects for mixing. But while still tracking and editing it’s a lot easier to have all the tracks in one working space for the sake of jumping from one song to another and not tiring the musicians of waiting for projects to open and close.
About what I’m actually doing…
When I get the best drum takes of each part/song, I edit the parts together and start creating hitpoints to slice and tighten the drums to the click(grid). When they are sliced, quantized and crossfaded(gaps are filled) I want to export midis for kick, snare, toms. The problem is that I cannot do that because when I open vari audio I can only see the slice that I’ve opened and this way I’ll need to go through every slice and the faster way will be to draw them by myself. This is where bouncing comes in handy uniting all the hits in one track. But the problem is that bouncing removes the hitpoints and again to export midi from the freshly bounced track I have to retrace the hits losing another two hours per song cause the hit point detector doesn’t do well with hi speed bass drums, especially played with double pedal on one drum. As for snare and toms it’s Ok but for kuck I need to re-ajust hitpoint position to be exactly on the hit. Otherwise the real thing and the sample start making phase issues.
Would be ABSOLUTELY great if Cubase could save the hit points after a bounce or at least give an oportuniti to export the midi data from all the hits at once before that.
Thanks for the help, Mike!
Really appreciate it!!!
Vasko
Yeah, I thought it would be something like that, and you’re right that the hitpoint info becomes pretty useless for export once you’ve sliced some audio. So you could raise a feature request to Steinberg to ask them to clone the hitpoints when you bounce a selection of audio events. Or perhaps (or as well) even better to bring hitpoint->midi conversion out of the sample editor so we can use it on multiple events and audio parts - no reason not to.
Another idea which may work for you is to turn the hitpoints into MIDI before you slice the audio, then when you qauntize, select both the audio and the MIDI as well. Hopefully then they should then be kept together.
I’ll work around it until.