The fastest way to quantize multitrack drums in SONAR without stretching audio? Questions
Hello guys! Sorry for any English language/grammar mistakes, I'm from Poland. Recently I have a lot of drum recordings to edit and I want to ask which method you use to edit drum timing? I'm talking about editing every kick/snare/tom hit (sometimes even hi hat and some cymbals from overhead tracks) to the grid so it's perfeectly in time. I know it's pretty easy and simple in Pro Tools using Beat Detective but I have no idea how to achieve the same results in sonar. I'm dealing with a lot of fast double kick rock and metal drummers and it's crucial to have everything very tight timing-wise and also I tend to spend way too much time editing drums to achieve best possible quality.
The way I use daily is grouping all of the drums tracks together and slip edit (zoom in and alt+LMB just before the transient and scroll further), then I select all of the clips I have split and quantize them to proper rhythm value for example 1/16 first 8 bars and 1/32 for drum fills or triplet 1/32 when they happen and fade the clips (2ms and 80ms max gap) in the quantization command menu. Then I check if it's quantized properly and if there are not any audio artifacts or clicks/pops. Then I adjust fades properly or move the notes manually when they should be. Next I bounce this edited section and start to edit next section etc. If I don't bounce it Sonar will soon start to lag a LOT when hundreads of fades are sitting next to each other.
It works great but it's too time-consuming!
The method I tried to learn recently is using AudioSnap (select transient markers from kick, snare and toms and apply the position of every marker to overhead tracks, then split beats into clips and quantize but I have some issues with it!
First of all, the transient markers are not where they should be and it splits clips somewhere in the middle of each transient instead before them but it's not the biggest problem because I can manually fix this pretty fast. The problem is that the start of each transient isn't the same distance from the grid line after quantization! It makes quantization useless because it's still not in time completely and it sounds wrong as well.
The second, even bigger problem I face is that I don't know what to do when I have the drum beat where snare, kick drum and toms are playing together (well.. almost together, because each transient is slightly or less slightly off each other) and Audiosnap will split this "one -hit of 3 drum elements" into 3 ultra-short clips which shouldn't be moved because that would completely damage the recording. If I quantize this section they all will snap to the same place and it's just a mess with clicks and pops and transients are damaged.
How can I make the Audiosnap "see" only the first transient from the group of elements (snare, toms, kick) and split drum tracks only in one place even when it's seeing multiple transients very close next to each other? Something like a "resolution setting" (or something like that.. for example 1/8, 1/4, 1/16 etc.) for "split beats into clips" in Audiosnap so it chooses the first happening transient (every eight note as example) and ignores other transients which are very close to it so the phase relationships are maintained and this issue doesn't exist anymore? Is it even possible? Or is there any other way around it (without using manual slip-editing) which I don't know about yet? Can anybody help me with that??? Thank you in advance!
Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 x64, Intel i5 6600K CPU, 16GB RAM DDR4 Corsair, 512GB SSD Crucial, 2TB Hard Drive Seagate, Apollo Twin Duo