The Zen of Audiosnap

Here is a song written by a good friend of mine that “we” recorded many years ago (the soundclick link is at the bottom).  When we recorded it, it was recorded live (as a 4 piece band) in my basement most likely using a first generation Event Electronic’s Layla and a pre-Sonar version of CW.  The recording was made 16/44 using 8 channels.  The 2 guitar cabinets and bass cabinet were close mic’ed, a live scratch vocal take and 4 mic’s on the drums.  After the fact we overdubbed lead and harmony vocals … and that was it for the mix at the time.

I don’t know what I was thinking at that point in time when I set up to record the drums and, as a matter of fact I have several basement recordings, from that era with the same general mic configuration and routing on the drum set.  Without going into a lot of detail my playing was reasonably solid but the recordings were problematic.  For example, the 2 overheads were (at the board) mixed down to 1 channel resulting in phasing issues and there were “overs” on the snare track amongst other issues.

So moving ahead to today, I imported the old tracks 24/48, found the average tempo of the song and charted out what I originally played on the drums.

I set up a 4 channel mix with 2 overheads, a mic on the snare and a mic in the bass drum and recorded a drum track to the click only … NO MUSIC.  The chart was recorded start to finish without stopping.  So, what I had was a drum track for the song that was really tight to the click (not perfect … but if you want perfect, hire Steve Gadd) done in one take.

Enter audiosnap:

I took the 4 new tracks and copied them into a new project along with a mono mix-down of the drum tracks from the original recording.  The following procedure out of context and after the fact sounds straight forward but I invested MANY hours into it and now when I close my eyes all I see are the pool lines that emanate from the transient markers.

The transients in the original drum track were assigned to the pool.

The new drum tracks were split into three shorter segments (the beginning the middle and the end of the song) … many reasons for doing this.

Then the transients in the new drum tracks were very carefully either enabled or disabled depending upon their relationship to a nearby pool marker (the pool marker is what I am calling the line dropping down from the transients in the original drum track).

I did this for each segment and then quantized each segment to the pool markers and then rejoined the segments by “bouncing to clip”.

Some general comments about the whole procedure … I literally evaluated each and every single transient in the original and new tracks to make sure that their location made sense wrt to what was played.  The choice of resolution is not just a trial and error thing … you really need to understand how the transients are going to shift wrt to the pool markers as a function of resolution to make it sound natural.  The whole procedure was mind numbing to say the least but, the amazing thing is that I can now take a drum track that was recorded with a live band WITHOUT a click, and take a drum track that was recorded many years later and completely out of context (no music but to a click) … line them up in Sonar and they sound like one single drum track.
 
"Because of You" ... w/ drums replaced:
http://www.soundclick.com/player/single_player.cfm?songid=11549307&q=hi&newref=1
 
sorry … edited several times for grammar and coherence

A lot of users get frustrated with AS (and V-Vocal, for similar reasons) because they've been suckered by the marketing hype into assuming it's a one-click automated process. Truth is, these tools are editing aids, not magic processes. They require attention to detail - and a lot of practice - to get good results. Thanks for sharing your experience, quantum.

Great job Dave.

Things like audiosnap should be banned. The music industry is already destroyed enough, let's not make it worse. It's gone downhill in proportion to the ability of people who never put in the time to learn to play to sound like they can. Be men and have the balls to put out there what you can actually do.

Not a comment to the original poster, just a general comment.

It's necessary because people who can't play music think that that shouldn't be a limitation on being a musician, which is one of the problems. It's because of tools like Autosnap and Autotune that sucking actually isn't a limitation on being a musician these days, or pretending to be. I'm sure it's great for people who want to take money from people who can't play and making them sound like they can. It's not good for the music business or music itself.

we should also ban conolution reverbs and reverb in general.  if you want to sound like you are in hall, you should only olay in hall.  In fact, let's ban all processing  and require all recordings be live, unprocessed stereo takes.  if the levels were off when it wss played, people should hear that.  Let's remove valves from brass instruments.  Real players adjust pitch with just embochure!

Seriously though, did someone wake up to a hot cup of crotchety soup?

"It's necessary because people who can't play music think that that shouldn't be a limitation on being a musician, which is one of the problems. It's because of tools like Autosnap and Autotune that sucking actually isn't a limitation on being a musician these days, or pretending to be. I'm sure it's great for people who want to take money from people who can't play and making them sound like they can. It's not good for the music business or music itself. "

How do you know what everyone thinks?  With that skill you should go into high stakes gambling or espionage.  Many who use these tools are world class musicians on par with any who have ever lived.  The OP does not seem like a slouch and still finds these tools useful.  ANyone who has ever used audio snap knows that it is certainly not some magic tool that will make a lousy drummer sound good.  The same gfoes for autotune.  If you can't sing, autotune will not fix it.  Autotune is used more as an effect in pop music than the process it was originally meant to be, a method of taking slightly off tune notes and correcting them in post rather than doing a whole new take for one slightly off note or two.  Again, it does not work if the person is not even in thre ballpark. Instruments (voice included) are affected by an infinite amount of factors which cause them to drift slightly  Very few acoustic instruments, especially voice maintain 100% pitch accuracy throughout the course of a recording session. Autotune as an effect will pass in time just likke every other fad.  Peter Frampton helped make the talkbox popular but he obviously could do more than just use that.  He used it as simply one tool in his arsenal.

There are more talented musicians and singers than any point in history simply because more people than ever have access.  Yes, that means a lot more garabage too, but don't throw the baby out with the bath. The state of the music industry has nothing to do with which fad is hot at the moment anyway.  Long before autiontune, there was cheezy, lowest common denominatro pop and there always will be. No amount of kvetching is going to make classical music or whatever genre you have deemed to be so great the new pop. You can search youtube and find endless examples of remarkably talented people of all ages.  Just because they are not pop stars does not mean they don't exist.  That is more of a reflection of our socities consumer habits than the state of music.

Sigh... This has been over a hundred times before. There are things that *enhance* a great performance, and there are things that *create* a performance out of a substandard performance. Everyone should know the difference. The whole 'if you go an inch you've gone a mile' argument is silly. Using artificial reverb is NOT, at all, remotely, like fixing the timing and fixing the pitch and fixing the dynamics on a fine scale, things that are completely common place now.

And there are not more talented musicians and singers than ever before. The number of really great musicians hasn't changed. Some of them can now make music without comitting to a professional career. But, at the same time, there are vast numbers of people putting out music that they can't actually perform because they put more time into learning how to massage their crap than learning how to really write and perform. And they are saturating the market and heavily dilluting the value of the work of real musicians almost worthless.

If it was about really talented musicans and singers then there wouldn't be a market for products like auto-tune or Audio Snap.

And of course at the profiessional level those tools are being used to create music that is inhumanly perfected, so that real, human music has begun to sound amateurish. That's a pretty sick phenomenon, IMO, and is just another nail in the coffin of the music world.

"If it was about really talented musicans and singers then there wouldn't be a market for products like auto-tune or Audio Snap. "

you do lknow thta marketing and image trum;ed talent i nthe world of pop music long before the digitsl age? I don't know about you, but growing up, I went to church wit hat least a dozen people who could sing circles around the most popular stars of that particular era.  If autotune was banned today that would still not change.  You are attacking the symptom instead of the disease.  I'm curious how much experience you have with audiosnap, because it is far from this instant talent tool you see mto think it is.  The amount of work it takes to get the results you want are not likely to be accomplished by someone who does not have a decent amount of skill to begin with.  There is no magic software that makes you sound like you can play when you can't.  Even poular whipping boys of the old man "they dont make good music anymore" crowd like rappers hire musicians when they need actual music in their songs.

i find it hypocritical that you seem to conveniently draw the line at the things you use.  I would like to hear some examples of someone creating a great performance out of a substandard one.  I have heard mediocre performances given somewha tbetter timing but nothing that took something from bad to great.  In fact, the worse you are as a musician, the more robotic and amatuerish the final result usually sounds when these tools are ppalied.  You are simply spouting bitter rhetoric withotu any evidence to back it up.  my statement about there being more talented musicians than ever before was based on raw numbers and not ratio. It's simple math.  if there are more people with access to play it will increase the amount of good players as well as bad. My son's school orchestra program does not sound any worse than when i was his age.  You see mto imply that somehow having more tools equates to mandatory drop in skill instead of simply an optional enhancement.   Do you think the OP's use of audiosnap made him less of a musician or decreased his ability one bit?

Queen ambush @ d4

Pok'e Mon marathon on CN

Maybe smoke some crack

John T


If some music sounds good - bearing in mind that music is made up of, like sound - but it was made using "cheats", as you call them, does that mean it's not good? Like good sounding bad sound? I'm not sure I can see how that works.

You're not supposed to see it, you're supposed to "hear" it.

I don't care..if it moves me...it be good!!

I can personally vouch that if you can't sing autotune won't help.

I also get fed up with Sonar sometimes. I can play a perfect take and Sonar usually manages to alter the timing here and there and make me sound average.... so it works both ways.

I'm actually great and the software makes me sound crap.

I have absolutely no interest in mediocre music. But I think there are lots of ways to make really great music, and plenty of them aren't much to do with instrumental virtuosity.

Also... kind of question begging, this "music has no value" thing. Does it have no value? I hadn't noticed that.

Whatever. I've stated my opinion. Feel free to disagree. I'm just on the record as stating that the use of these tools does not serve music. It's a little hard for me to see music as a vehicle for honest expression when the music itself is so dishonestly made. If everyone put a big disclaimer on their songs/albums stating how much they cheated making it, I'd not have any complaints. But we all know that ain't how it works.