Pro tools 9 drum quantize

Manually: Edit the closest microphone to grid, snare drum-snaremic to grid, bassdrum-bassmic to grid. Watch out on tomgrooves. I don't phase align anything on the drum kit. As for timing adjustments, I usually go with a combination of Beat Detective and manually editing via tab to transient. Elastic Audio can be OK for really complicated fixes, but it's generally easier and faster to just punch the take in. Don't use the Rhythmic setting, though.

Polyphonic is the only mode that doesn't ruin the cymbals, IMO. And as mentioned, phase relationships can get a bit wonky. One trick I use a lot to make Beat Detective work a bit better - use triggers. You've got to set up for this before tracking, however, so it won't do you much good if the drums you're working on are already recorded.

I generally work through a song in chunks, like 8 bars or so at a time - this lets you see and correct any weirdness that happens before moving on to the next section. The essence of the trick I'll describe below is having Beat Detective analyze the track by only looking at the triggers but correct all the drum tracks together. Here's how to do it: 1 - Use triggers such as d-drum Red Shot triggers on each drum ignore the cymbals. These are small metal triggers that clamp on to the rims of the drums and have an XLR output.

The triggers are essentially terrible-sounding microphones that are touching the drum head. Run those triggers into whatever you need in order to get a decent level to ProTools - you may be able to just go straight into your PT interface on the setting, or you might need to hit a mic preamp first. You definitely want a healthy level, and they will sound like arse but will produce a nice, spiky, waveform with almost no bleed from other drums.

DON'T hit the "Separate" button just yet. It's been a while since I've done it, so I can't remember if you'll need to click somewhere in the waveform area after un-clutching and before hitting the "Separate" button in order to re-select all the tracks in the drum group.

Conform, Edit Smooth, and on to the next chunk. Since the trigger tracks are nice, spiky signals recorded from mics that are touching the drum heads, they come FIRST in time, before any of the actual mic signals which will be delayed based on the distance between the drum and the mic. These trigger tracks are also VERY isolated, with almost no bleed from other drums leaking into open tom mics or whatever.

If you need to, you can un-group the tracks and slip the trigger tracks a little bit to the left so they line up nicely and make Beat Detective react the way you want. I've used this technique a lot and it works great but does require some extra planning and recording a few more audio tracks than normal. Another huge bonus of recording the triggers is that you can use them to open up the gates on the tom tracks, if you're using gates to clean up those tracks - route the trigger to the side chain input of the gate and, boom, clean gates that don't chatter when adjacent drums are hit.

Of course, if you're using Slate Trigger or Drumagog then having the trigger tracks recorded as audio makes life much easier for that application as well - and, since you can un-group and slip the triggers to the left a tiny bit, you can get your gates and triggered samples to sit just how you want them.

Even in cases where we didn't record triggers as audio, I've had decent results by "making" my own trigger tracks from the acoustic drum mics by putting heavy processing on the close mics - massive surgical eq, sometimes even distortion, and heavy, short gating - to create new tracks alongside the drum mic tracks.

These new tracks want to resemble what the trigger tracks would have sounded like if we'd been smart enough to record them in the first place - spiky, short, with no bleed. These "after-the-fact" trigger tracks can be used just like the real trigger tracks, for opening gates, firing samples, and for the Beat Detective trick.

I started recording the audio output of the d-drum triggers so I'd have clean signals to fire samples from this was long before software tools like Drumagog and Slate Trigger existed - back in the days when we used actual hardware samplers like d-drum modules and Akai samplers to fire drums. I'd record the audio output of the clamp-on d-drum triggers, and when it came time to layer drum samples over the live kit I'd route the audio of the recorded trigger tracks back out to the d-drum brain, which would then trigger its internal sounds and send MIDI to the Akai samplers.

We actually used to do this in the days of analog tape, back in the s before ProTools even existed - we'd record the triggers, flip the tape so it was running backwards, route the trigger tracks to a digital delay with around ms of delay, and bounce them to new tracks. Now we'd route those "early triggers" back through delay lines with maybe 90ms of delay - that missing 10ms is to make up for any delay in the trigger brain and MIDI sample chain, and we'd adjust the delay lines until the triggered samples lined up with the live drums and didn't flam.

You can imagine the hassle we went through back then - six PCM delay lines or DeltaLab Effectrons in some cases - one for each drum trigger. Lots of patch bay action just to set that up. But you know what? It worked, and it worked really well. These days, you kids have it so easy!

Just record the triggers into ProTools, slip those tracks a few milliseconds early, then re-group the tracks and get to Beat Detective-ing, tom-gating, and Slate Trigger-ing - no need for six hardware digital delay units and an armload of patch cables. Why, back in MY day, I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

There have been reports on the Web of users successfully installing it under XP, but for review purposes I thought it fairer to use an approved system, so made a fresh installation of Windows 7 Home Premium on my Dell laptop.

In look and feel, Pro Tools 9 is exactly like version 8, and it's not until you investigate hidden corners of the Playback Engine and Hardware Setup dialogues that the new features become apparent.

The only major one that is actually new, rather than inherited from HD8, is the one most responsible for the current chilly temperature in Hades: support for the ASIO and Core Audio driver protocols.

Where an Avid interface such as the Mbox is connected, Pro Tools chooses it by default, and appears to work exactly as Pro Tools 8 did. On the Mac, these include an aggregate driver that is created automatically when Pro Tools 8 is installed. You don't have to do too much mucking about with ASIO devices to realise that Pro Tools' support is not yet as elegant as that of most rivals.

Switching to a different audio device requires the closing and reopening of your Session, as does making changes in your audio hardware's control panel software. Pro Tools also seems unable to dictate sample-rate changes to hardware, so I had to quit and make them in the control panel instead. The Playback Engine dialogue lets you set the buffer size, but only supports a comparatively limited range of options: 32, 64, , , , and If your interface doesn't offer any of these, Pro Tools will quit in a puff of indignation.

Of the interfaces I tested, this immediately ruled out the Rig Kontrol 2: its Windows drivers set buffer sizes in milliseconds rather than samples, and don't appear to have any compatible settings.

Unlike most interfaces, its control panel still allows you to change the buffer size even when it's in use by another application. This really freaked Pro Tools out, but even when both were correctly set to the same buffer size, all I could manage was occasional, horribly garbled audio output which, for once, wasn't down to my singing.

Thankfully, however, it was a different story with the Saffire Pro 40, which worked fine. Up to 32 inputs are supported in the basic Pro Tools 9.

I was able to keep the Saffire MixControl utility open at the same time as Pro Tools, allowing me to create monitor mixes and so forth, and all of the Pro 40's inputs and outputs were visible and audible! Moving faders and so on within MixControl didn't seem to upset Pro Tools, but more fundamental changes, such as switching to a different clock source, usually provoked the demand to close and reopen my Session.

Fairly regularly during the review period, I got this message even when I hadn't made any changes myself, so perhaps MixControl was doing something in the background that Pro Tools didn't like. There were also a couple of occasions when everything looked to be working but no sound emerged until I quit and relaunched Pro Tools. In general, however, it was stable enough to use and never fell over during recording, though it was not as reliable as Cubase is on my system.

I had less time to test things on the Mac, but encountered no problems in that period. If you care about this, Cubase, Sonar and most other DAWs let you enter an offset value in samples, and will automatically slip your recordings by this amount when placing them on the timeline. Pro Tools currently doesn't. For those considering a move from another DAW, it's also worth flagging up a point about how Pro Tools handles input monitoring.

Because you're hearing the input signal directly through said utility, you don't need to hear it again through your DAW; but when you hit play in your DAW, you do want to hear the track you've just recorded. In Pro Tools, by contrast, track arming and input monitoring are the same thing.

Unless, that is, you mute the track to which you're recording, or lower its fader — in which case you'll have to remember to unmute it on playback, then mute it again for the next take, and so on. This is a nuisance, especially when you're recording multiple inputs in which case it's worth making them into a Mix Group so you can mute and unmute them all with one click.

I've been whingeing about this in Pro Tools reviews ever since the launch of the original Mbox in , and in the context of Pro Tools 9 it's probably now my number one gripe. I'm not quite sure how this piece of received wisdom became so entrenched. Still, the Internet is a powerful medium, and delay compensation in native versions of Pro Tools was the number one feature request from users.

Avid have duly obliged, and Pro Tools 9 now features the delay compensation engine that was previously available only in HD. To be used as inserts in the mixer, hardware effects have to be attached to the same numbered inputs and outputs, and if you want their delays compensated for, you have to calculate them manually — there's no automated 'pinging' for delays as you find in some other DAWs. This was the case regardless of which audio interface I was using. At the time of writing, the latest version of the UAD2 software 5.

Like delay compensation, most of the other 'new' features in the basic Pro Tools 9 have been available in HD for quite a while. That doesn't make them any less of a big deal, though, and together they amount to a massive shot in the arm for Pro Tools as a native system.

All of them have been described in detail in previous SOS articles, so I won't go into detail, but here's an outline of what you can expect:. Beat Detective is an automated editing tool for knocking wayward drum performances into shape, and although it's quite long in the tooth now, I've yet to find a better alternative.

As it happens, just before the review period I had exactly such a performance that I wanted to conform to a rigid tempo grid. All of the Elastic Audio modes compromised the sound to an unacceptable extent, especially on floor toms.

Beat Detective in action. Here, I've just analysed the Snare track and hit 'Add Unique' to combine its triggers with those generated from the Kick track. This allows you to gather together a composite set of 'triggers' — say, from kick and snare drum tracks — and apply them to all your drum tracks simultaneously, thus preserving phase relationships between them.

For some reason, the first time I tried this in PT9 it wouldn't let me collect anything, but after that, it worked as expected. For more advanced video work, though, you'll want to add the Complete Production Toolkit 2, which enables HD features such as multiple up to 64!

Open a new session. The MIDI editor will open and the clip will show as highlighted:. It is easy to note how the first four notes of the passage are not aligned to the grid, which represents the human error of the player:.