Help wanted with adding drums to guitar tracks

Multiple options..
 
1. You can create a tempo map to follow the actual tempo of the music. Multiple ways of doing this too, I like to first get a reasonable idea of the song tempo, set that first so things are close. Then go through with the snap turned off, place the now time at known time locations (like the 1 beat of measures) and do a Project>Set Measure/Beat at Now or do a Shift+M. That will build you a tempo map. You can also show transients and use audiosnap and set the project temp from the clip. You can also drag the track to the timeline to create a tempo map, which uses melodyne to extract the tempo. All of these methods have their idiosyncrasies.  
 
2. The other option is to stretch the audio to a perfect tempo. Which requires setting the tempo to something close, then going through with audiosnap and stretch the audio to fit the grid. If you have the stand alone version of melodyne you can also do this in melodyne.
 
Both of these methods have their challenges, especially if the audio is not very tight. If you give me more details about which method you might like to try, I can help you get more specific about how to do that method.
 
I guess a 3rd method would be to get a real drummer to play the parts along with the music. But even that would be better done if you had the tempo set so the drummer could get a click track. Since I'm a drummer, I could probably do that for you but would have to hear the music to determine if it was something I could/would do. 
 
Thanks, gabo

danbottomburp
The first one please , i like the idea of me moving transients so it is perfect.

 
Well actually moving the transients so it is perfect is 2, which requires stretching the audio to align everything to the grid. But no biggie. 
 
Couple of questions. Do you own the stand alone version of melodyne? I can't remember if melo essentials (what comes with sonar platinum) can be used stand alone or not. I've had melo studio for a long time, which is the upgrade to the full version so I don't remember about essentials. 
 
If you have access to the stand alone version, you can use melodyne to modify your wav files to be in perfect time. First you have to get your tune set to the proper grid in melo, then you can simply set the song to a perfect tempo. Then export the wavs and import them into sonar at the tempo you set. 
 
Here's a great video of using melodyne to get the grid set to the music. This is in studio one, but it works the same for the stand alone version and inside sonar. I do it stand alone as it just seems easier to me. 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OADVEYXRq28
 
 
If you don't want to use melodyne, or can't due to essentials not providing all the necessary tools. Then you can do it using audiosnap and moving/stretching the transients. Here's how I generally do that. 
 
First, set you sonar file to a good average of the bpm of what you have. You can get the bpm many ways, there are web sites with "tap tempo" where you can play the song and tap the space bar and it will give you the tempo. Inside sonar, audiosnap will tell you the tempo as will other things. Be careful as many times they give you a multiple of the actual tempo (i.e. a 120BPM song might show up as 60, etc.) I also assume you're song is in 4/4 time, if not you need to set that correctly as well. TIP: It's actually better to have the project tempo just a beat or so faster than the actual song.
 
Next, align the start of the song, which typically starts on a beat 1 with a beat 1 on your timeline. I like to start songs on measure 2, beat 1 as I like to have one measure of silence at the beginning, but if you want to start it at the beginning of the project, measure 1, beat 1, that's ok as well. You'll probably need to disable snap and zoom in to get it accurately set on beat 1 of a measure (or whatever beat your song starts on). You'll also need to keep snap off for now.
 
Turn on transients and open the AS dialog. In the AS dialog, adjust the threshold to something reasonable, many times when doing this I just set it all the way to 100% so I can manually add/enable the transients at the right places, but that's up to you. You can manually add transients by doing an alt-left mouse click. You can disable/enable a transient by right clicking on it or using ctl-alt-D.
 
If it's bad out of alignment, you might want to make multiple passes.
 
What you're going to do is place a transient marker at the 2nd measure, beat 1 of the song. Then turn snap on and stretch that marker to beat 1 of the appropriate measure on the grid. Continue adding or enabling transients at beat 1 of every measure and stretching them to align them to the appropriate measure, beat 1 of the grid. You'll also want to have a marker at the beginning of the song as that will act as and "anchor" to prevent the start of the song from moving off the beat you set it to.
 
If the stretching gets out of hand, then maybe you have your tempo in your file set not close enough to the tempo of the actual recording. After you align the beginning of the song to a beat 1, you might go through the song to see how close it lines up to the grid and adjust/play with the tempo to get it as close as possible. It will make your life easier.
 
Once you get all the beat 1's aligned to the grid, or any time you want to take a break, you can do a "bounce to clips" to render that on the track. Then go back through the process again to see how close you are. If your song is really close to the grid to begin with, you might be able to just align every other measure or maybe just a few measures in the song to get things lined up. It all just depends on how well you maintained tempo when you played it. 
 
gabo