Tracking drum kits in Sonar

I'm looking for the best tracking solution. Right now I think it's PT11 and with the addition of multi track Beat Detective it's hard to think of better.

FastBikerBoy

Razorwit


Hi folks,
I've been tracking drums more and more lately and I'm running into a few challenges that I was hoping to get some input on...maybe see how other folks are doing things and thus try and help out my workflow.

To start with, here's a common drum kit setup for me: 13 mics: Kick in and out, Snare top and bottom, hat, toms 1-3, stereo OH, stereo room and mono room. Mic's all feed discrete preamps and then arrive at my Lynx Aurora 16.

Here are the challenges I'm finding:

1 - Track grouping. I know that I can group track controls and, by using quick groups, I can group most things in multiple tracks, but I keep finding myself wanting to group entire tracks on a long term (non "quick") basis. For example, once I've panned the 2 overhead tracks I'd really like to be able to group the entirety of both tracks so that anything I do to one also happens to the other. Same for the stereo room mics. Are folks here just using quick groups or is there some other mechanism that is common?
 

Grouping. Like quick grouping only permanent. Set up as many as you want as complex as you want. Right click over the control and  Select "Group"..... There are a whole load set up already but new ones can be created as you wish. The group manager allows you to edit them and set up some complex arrangements, such as increasing the volume as you pan a track or panning one right as the other goes left. Imagination is the limitation here.

2 - Lane editing. I'm not a giant fan of Sonar lanes in their current format, but that aside, one thing I'd really love to do is edits across multiple tracks on a common layer. For example, let's say I have 10 takes of drums spread across 13 tracks with each take on a layer. I keep wishing there was a way to make it so that slip edits I perform on layer 1 on the "kickdrum-in" track would happen to every other layer 1 on every track in the folder (Cubase does this pretty well within folders and PT uses playlists). When you folks do edits, is there a mechanism you use to keep edits in sync across multiple tracks within takes? I've been more or less doing this with clip grouping, but doing it on a per-lane basis has some advantages.

 
Clip  Grouping is the answer here. It can be done at record time by making sure "Group Clips across tracks" is checked in the record options. To create a clip group after the event select the required clips, right click and select "Create Selection group from Selected Clips".
 
Once the clip group is set up, editing one clip will perform the same edit on all others. This works great with lanes/layers. I use it all the time especially when comping.

 
3. Disk performance and drum takes. One thing I've noticed with Sonar is that when I do multiple drum takes it REALLY degrades my computers performance. I have a theory about why: If I have 13 mics and do 10 takes of drums I'm ending up with 10 lanes on 13 tracks and all of them are streaming at any given moment, even when I only have one lane solo'd. That means that even though only 13 lanes are audible, 130 lanes are streaming from disk. This inevitably leads to dropouts and such. Again, the cause I've outlined is only a theory, but the outcome (dropouts) are certainly happening when I get high layer counts and go away when I've archived tracks with lots of lanes.

When I track drums in PT or Cubase this works great, I think because each has a mechanism to keep the amount of streaming data to a manageable level. For example, in Cubase you can have only one layer on any track playing at any given moment. PT, again, uses playlists to accomplish roughly the same thing. While I REALLY don't want to see Sonar go the direction of Cubase in terms of 1 voice at any time on a track (it annoys the crap out of me in many cases), it may be nice to somehow limit the amount of streaming data on a track...maybe an "exclusive layer" toggle so that we could put the track into one-voice-at-a-time mode when we wanted?

In any case, other than creating new tracks and archiving old every 5 takes or so, how do you folks do this? Or does it even happen to other people?
 

I don't normally use many more than 10 mics on a kit at a time but do track other instruments/vocals at the same time using multiple takes. I can't say I've ever hit a limit where drop outs or such problems happen. It's worth checking your I/O buffers. They will have a big effect on how well audio is written/read from disk. Find those in Preferences--->Audio--->Sync and caching. There is no "correct" setting. It's a matter of trial and error to find what works best for you. Too large will cause as many problems as too small.

 
4. Finally, more of a feature request. I generally really like Sonar's track/bus/output organization, where all tracks are grouped on the left, buses next and outputs furthest right. That said, I also sometimes wish I could have a bus in the track section of the console. For example, it would be nice to have the kick-in and kick-out tracks feeding a bus track that was right next to them in the track section of the console, but then have that bus feed a drum bus in the current bus section of the console. One way to do this would be to make console sections configurable (so you could have as many as you wanted) and then toggle where you'd like any particular track, bus or output to live. This way if you want things to remain as is, you can have it that way, and if you want to move stuff around or create more sections you can do that also. Hmm...maybe I'll head over to the ol' FR page...
 

To a certain extent this already exists using the inspector. In channel strip mode, the track will be the left hand strip and the down stream buss or currently selected send the right hand strip.Change tracks/busses by clicking on them in the Track View. A little more flexibility wouldn't go amiss though.  
 
HTH