Cheers, guys!
Here's a couple of bonus tips that I've put to good use with Audiosnap:
SAMPLE LAYERING / REPLACING
Rather than bouncing your gated tracks down to a single guide track, use both of them as your Audio Pool. So you'd get your transients right on each track, then right click each one and choose Pool > Add Clip to Pool, and they'd both turn blue. Then go through my steps above for applying transient markers and quantizing, etc.
Now why would I want to do that, aside from having to go through the extra step of creating a unified guide track?
If you have transients on every hit, you can use those to create MIDI notes.
So after you've done all of the quantizing, etc. don't delete your guides just yet. Instead, select the track you want to convert to MIDI, and then on the Audiosnap Palette, hit the Copy As MIDI button (second one along at the top, next to the power button). Next, insert a new MIDI track. In that track, do Paste and you'll get a track of C3 notes that should line up with your audio transients from the track you copied from (be careful where your cursor is, it usually needs to be at 00:00:00 so it pastes at the right place).
This is great because now you have instant sample replacement or layering. Got a dull kick drum? No drama - copy the kick track transients to MIDI, and run that MIDI track into Session Drummer or even TTS-1 and you can have the kick played by the synth. It's especially great for layering on a snare track to add crack or to fatten things up a bit when you have a bit too much hi-hat bleed into the snare mic to turn the snare up any louder.
(Obviously delete the guides after you're all done with them, and bounce the tracks to new clips as I mentioned earlier.)
The small downside to this is that you have 2 guides rather than 1 to copy the pool transients from, so if a transient is quantized to the wrong spot, you have an extra track to select so everything is moving together. Not a big deal, and I definitely prefer to do it this way because of the extra flexibility you get.
EASY EDITS
When I get session guys in, it's rare that they bother learning the entire song (it's awesome when they do, mind you - MUCH less work for me!). Usually it's a case of going section by section, replicating a drum machine guide with their own human feel, and in a lot of cases we're lining up the replaced drums with pre-recorded instruments, so it needs to be locked into the grid with quantizing.
The good thing about that is if the session player is decent, the song can go down really fast because we don't need to worry about redoing entire takes because the groove is wrong in some section, or you want a cymbal accent in the break after Chorus 2 or whatever that's easy to forget when you're thinking about the entire song. Each part can be done exactly as the producer wants. The bad thing is that if the session guy rushes a fill or they're not quite in time with the click, connecting each section smoothly is a real PITA.
This is where Audiosnap comes in handy again. I typically edit each section as its own thing. I'll slip edit the takes before and after the section to extend them out past where I need, do the transient detections, quantizing, etc. for each section, then I'll slip edit back the other way so the ends are inside the section. I repeat that for each section until it's all quantized, then I'll go through the boundaries of each part and slip edit to wherever I want them to join. The big plus side of this is that since it's already quantized, it's all now perfectly in time so each part fits together like a glove. Bounce to tracks at the end and you're set!
You can do the sample replacement / reinforcement trick with this as well too, but with one important caveat: if you do Copy to MIDI over several sections on a track, there's a bug in SONAR at the moment (which I've reported) that makes the note go up a semitone on each split, so you just need to be mindful that you'll need to shift everything down to the single note so you can send that to the correct instrument on your softsynth.
Really useful stuff, and even with the bundled stuff that comes with SONAR, you can get some amazing sounding drum tracks using these techniques.