Hi,
 
I just finished a 3-day recording with 100s of takes of drum kit and percussion. I have about 2 weeks to edit and finalize them. I need your advice on best practices for Sonar X3: 
1. to pick the best takes
2. fix any timing issues
 
As for picking the best takes:
I have grouped drum kit mics tracks. So each take is not a take lane, but a group, so I don't see a wav form when the group is collapsed. How do I go about arranging the tracks so It is more intuitive and visually helpful when editing? 
 
As for fixing timing:
I have done percussion editing before, one big problem I had with Sonar was that Sonar's AS picked a very early point in transient of every hit, as some percussion have slow transients, and quantization did not make sense. and I had to pick each AS point manually, that was pretty painful. This time I don't have much time to do that. Is there a way to tell Sonar AS to pick the highest point of the transient? That could speed things up.
 
Many thanks.
 

hi, can you fill me in a little on how you mic'd the kit ?
and how you laid the tracks to sonar. I know you said grouped but im not totally understanding that.
if you have all kit pieces on separate tracks and also room mic's consider timing changes to reflect on these room mic's as well. IE if you start fixing timing issues with kick and snare, your room mic's will sound way out.
 
if they are all pre mixed to stereo tracks, it will be a bit harder but can still be done.

Hi, 
Drum kit got individual mic for kick, snare-hihat, tom1, tom2, tom3 and ride, plus 2 overheads.
Percussion (imagine a row of various toms played standing up) got L-R tight mics, L-R overheads, and 2 mics for bottom. 
All mic recorded into their individual mono tracks. 
Studio was using a different DAW. I imported the tracks (from OMF) into Sonar, and then put them track folders and grouped them as Drum Kit, and Percussion to be able to cut and move all together.
Performances are all well individually. But layered on top of each other, they don't sound that tight, I need to tighten them up a little. 
 

in that case I would use either Autosnap or Melodyne.
you can group (sounds like you already have) tracks together so editing one will also edit the corresponding track.
this is critical in fixing timing issues as you don't want to have the overheads out of phase / out of time with the individual kit pieces.
 
it also depends how far you want to go with it.
if you want to synch it to BPM tempo (which it sounds like you don't).
or just tighten things up.
have you used Autosnap or Melodyne before ?
 
 
Some problems can be fixed with simple editing. a missing or flat kick drum.
just copy/paste over the snipped weak kick.
more technical process can be tricky. if your unfamiliar with Autosnap, this is a helpful video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VR7WkHywTo
 
 
Also "Set measure beat at now" can help with synching your Drum tracks up the timeline with sonar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HPlejc2HkE
 
These videos were made By Karl Rose a user on this forum who makes videos for Steamworks.
Great stuff and very resourceful.

^^ good advice there.
 
One thing you'll discover really quickly is that SONAR's AS detection is... interesting. Sometimes the late or early transients can work out fine for what you're trying to do, but a lot of times it's either sloppy or just so much random stuff added in, you spend just as long moving transients around. I've discussed a bit about how to deal with that in THIS thread: http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3388204  And I'm sure you'd be able to apply that gating technique to percussion too if you're careful with your gate settings.
 
As far as choosing takes goes, I tend to set up track templates that include folders for when I record. EG: I'll set up all of my drum inputs (kick, snare, hats, etc.) inside a Drum Rec folder. I set that to be pre-armed to record, and then right-click on any one of the tracks and choose Save As Track Template.
 
When it comes time for another take, I archive the first folder and close it, then I right-click in a blank area of the track pane and Import Track Template, choosing Drum Rec. That gets me everything set up, all armed and ready within a few seconds. Repeat as necessary. Easy!
 
Choosing the takes is a case of having a fairly decent speed drive for your audio for a start. 
 
Set up your "master" folder where you'll be copying stuff into, making sure the track order matches your Drum Rec folder so you'll be able to drag stuff directly into it without having to shuffle anything around. Make sure you've unarchived each other take folder you've done, but have them muted. This will belt your disk since it's now muted instead of archived, taking the strain off, but it'll be faster to comp this way.
 
I'd go through each take, having a listen, maybe dropping markers as reminders of parts you like. When you have what you like, it's easy to left-drag select over each section and SHIFT+drag everything you selected all at once up to your master folder tracks. Eventually you'll have a full take in that master folder, and you'd go back and adjust slip edit times, etc.
 
If you were planning to quantize drums, do each section first with a bit of overlap. That way, when you put it all together, you'll be able to move the boundaries back to where you want, but you'll know just past your edit point will also be in time, so it'll be a simple edit.
 
This is all sort of annoying the first couple of times but you soon get VERY fast with it. I've done literally hundreds of songs this way and the sessions fly by. 

thanks for great advice.
 
gated guiding track might be the solution to problems with AS detection. I was also thinking of using Sonar 6 for drum quantization, as I don't remember AS being this bad in v6.
 
Would Transient Shaper after gating help enhance the transient detection further?
 
I'd prefer slicing into clips and AS the clips as opposed to stretching them. Would your gated guiding track method still work?
 
thanks

The problem with AS is it can't tell when a transient starts properly. If you just boost stuff with a transient shaper, you still have the same problem of the background noise confusing the detection algorithm. Gating really is the only solution for that.

Splitting is definitely worth a shot but I think with the proper offline rendering algorithm when you do the bounces to lock in the AS clips, you'd get a pretty transparent result anyway, but with none of the performance hit you get when you edit a million little split and AS enabled clips. Try it, though! :)

Thanks, that makes sense.
Is AS in Platinum better? Is it worth upgrading for AS only?
 

AS got better in the X series but was made slightly worse by Platinum, IMO. The detection probably got better overall but the noise rejection and transient start got worse.
 
But there's seriously so much other stuff which is fantastic in SPlat that it's a no brainer to upgrade. I have no doubt AS will be improved down the track, but in the meantime, I'm definitely getting my value for money elsewhere. The track routing and Aux tracks alone make things like drum submixes so much more convenient than it used to be!

When I recorded our last album with Sonar, I basically just exported the drums into a different DAW to do the drum alignment. There, I aligned each hit manually, but given that the method only requires about 3 seconds editing time for each beat, you can get a song done in half an hour. The routine was - given that all the tracks were grouped - middle-click just ahead of each transient to split the clips with automatic crossfading enabled, then drag the audio within the clip to move the main transient to the beat. Repeat for each beat. If you're really strapped for time, just do it for each measure, as that will mostly-correct the beats in between anyway.
 
I don't know how I'd reproduce that workflow in Sonar without it taking 3 or 4 times as long, sadly. A valiant Cakewalk employee once posted a workshop on drum editing and it looked like a nightmare in comparison. I certainly wouldn't trust Audiosnap for any of this process.
 
(The other DAW also showed a waveform for the group as a whole, which is a bonus.)