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

"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 both the pool marker as a function of resolution to make it sound natural."



This is the step that separates the kiddies from the grown ups.

Good job!!!


best regards,
mike

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.

+1

While time is short for many of us, attention to transient placements is an art I'm continuing to learn.  Your song, with its drum samples, demo's such excellence!

Great job Dave.

I think the drums on your song turned out really well! The "Mixing with Sonar X1" Groove3 tutorial opened my eyes to using Audiosnap with something other than drums. Eli Krantzberg used it to align the backing vocals of the song in the video. It wasn't hard to do and I had never seen any place else (though there most certainly could be) where someone used Audiosnap in this way.

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.

 Well,  everyone is entitled to their own opinion , I have to totally disagree with with the above. I think every modern DAW has something like Audio snap and has become a nessasary skill to learn for producers. Pretty much the same thing that was going on with the old razor blade and tape no?  I think if you want a 100% honest audio representation a live show is your only real choice.


Great job Dave, you taught me something here bro. I tried deleting some tranients that just didn't seem right on a synth track and that helped out a lot. Thanks

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.

I'm with you Dean. We should start a bonfire and throw every synths and VSTi into it. People should man up and hire real (UNION?) musicians for all their home studio projects. And if I ever do a Van Morrison cover I'm gonna hire Van to come to my house and sing it. Because it has to be right, roight?