I too do this many times and agree there needs to be a lot of work done on this workflow. I also agree with Lord Tim about gating the guide track and also thank him for the detailed info.
I thought I might also add a few random tips that I sometimes use that might help someone.
- I find that quantizing without splitting works pretty well if you have very minor adjustments to make. If you have larger or more difficult problems it causes problems for me, so splitting becomes necessary.
- If you split and have lots of splits, yes saving and working with the data becomes really slow. As you put things back together they are not as slow any more. It would be nice to be able to select a section and work on it, but AS ONLY works on the entire track. So to work on a section, you have to split it somewhere (say at the end of the 1st verse) and copy that to another track. Then you can split/work on that section and "bounce to clips" to put them back together. Then copy that back to the original track, select the next section and do the same.
- I also sometimes use melodyne to quantize. Even Melo essential does a much better job of this than sonar. However, since you don't have multitrack, you have to align everything in a track to the grid, then do the same for other tracks to maintain alignment. If you have a pretty accurate track, this actually works better for me than doing it with audiosnap.
- Sometimes I'll use both. Split a group of tracks at beats 2 and 4 ONLY and align those to the grid on 2/4. This gets everything pretty close, but the beats in between are some times a bit off. Now bring those into melodyne one track at a time and quantize. Render those and bounce to create clean tracks.
- Drum replacer can also act like a gate. Use DR to replace a kick track and it eliminates all the bleed just like a gate does.
- If you're not going to keep the track in the final, then don't worry about pops/clicks. Sometimes the final intent of my work is to create midi tracks from the part and trigger AD2. If I'm doing this, say for a kick track, then I can work on the original kick and not worry about the artifacts associated with splitting or moving around hits as they won't wind up triggering a note anyway.
- Another thing I've posted about that I wish would be changed is the behavior of grouping when you use AS to split. If you have all your tracks in a group, split them with AS, the result is that all the clips are still in one large group. What we really need is for each vertical slice of clips to be in a separate group as that's the way we want to work with them. If you split manually that's what happens. So if I'm going to only split on the 2/4 snare hits and maybe a few other place, then I sometimes create a group of the tracks and split them manually with the split tool. It's time consuming, but more accurate and everything winds up in the correct grouping structure.
That's a short list of the top of my head. I'm also considering purchasing the studio version of melodyne 4 which does multitrack. Their method of working with "blobs" is better than the idea of working with transients. However, at the moment we would still be using it stand alone to edit multitrack drums and exporting/importing the finished tracks to sonar.
gabo