(not true Speed) comping - how do you do it?

I'm really having problems comping. Always have had. Another session today, and another frustrating couple of hours getting on top of it. Little things always go wrong and it just never seems to work properly for me. So I would really like to know how other people go about this.
 
Firstly, I'm talking about multiple take lanes. Let's just pick vocals. I will usually record 2 or 3 takes of the entire song first with the singer, so three lanes of full audio. Then go back, have a listen, pick on some of the areas where I want more choice, says bridges and chorus's and outro, and add those by using looping. Maybe 12 take lanes all up, with 9 of those only parts of the song. Then, I go back, loop and listen to each segment, swiping what I want, from beginning to end, then back to the start, zoom in, turn snap off, and go forward to each clip selected, moving the fade points to the exact positions required, zoom back out, and flatten the comp. I will usually save this a number of times along the way.
 
But what I am often finding is, in the created comp, at some of the clip points, there may be more than one clip, with one hidden underneath, so two clips playing, not one. Go back and look at the lanes, only one clip unmuted. I assume it's to do with when I am actually swiping clips for selection, and it's when I change my mind and swipe something else instead, or make one longer, or shorter. I have no other ideas as to how it comes about, but it happens a lot, and other unexpected results too. I've had to at times, copy the audio from the take lanes, to fresh tracks, just to get control over them.
 
Does anyone else either have these problems, or know a way to stop it from happening. It's not destructive, always a fix, but can be frustrating and time consuming. What bugs me most is, I really don't know what, if anything, I do wrong to make this happen.
 
cheers. Dave.

Agree, some of it's random. If you leave in snap to, and just do one pass selecting, there are no issues. But if you go back, even in snap to, and change anything, results are unpredictable, either leaving slivers, or entire clips buried 1 and 2 deep, or parts muted. I just can't seem to grasp a flawless procedure that will give me guaranteed results. Bar recording every take into a new track, I can't find an answer.
 
 
edit - just let me add, I'm not whining about this. I can work around it. I'm trying to find if someone has another way for me to try.

Also if you are more of a "mousecentric" type person and still want to use Speedcomping I'm pretty sure you can just click on the lower half of the clips while Speedcomp/Looping is engaged and get the same results.
 
It's the "Swiping" to promote that's giving you the slivers. That swiping should only be done once per section. Not every time you want to promote a take section.
 
Hopefully that makes sense/helps.
 
Cheers.
 

If I'm understanding you correctly you mean you sometimes want to "heal" your previous splits/swipes (like you created two sections then realized that you'd rather keep both sections from the same take in place or choose new split points within the section).
 
You can "heal" comping splits by multi selecting the different clips (select one clip, hold Ctrl or Shift to select the next clip and/or just Shift to select the last clip in a series of clip). Once all the clips in the section you want "healed" are selected hold Ctrl and click in the lower half of one of the selected clips. All splits will be healed and the entire section promoted.
 
Of course you can just swipe over the section again but to avoid "slivers" you have to extend the swipe beyond it's original boundaries which of course means you have reset the start/end splits and readjust and X-Fades.
 
Cheers.

BTW... I think the reason "slivers" occur when reswiping even with Snap enabled is due to the Auto generated X-Fades incurred by the Comping tool.
 
Essentially when you make a split at a specific point (let's say at a measure) the middle of the X-Fade occurs at the Snap point (in this example at the measure point). So both clips extend very slightly beyond the measure/Snap point to create the X-Fade (the earlier clip goes past the Snap point and the following clip slightly ahead of it).
 
By reswiping at that exact point you are now creating a split at the very start/end of the two overlapping clips thus causing those tiny slivers.
 
At least logicially that's what would occur unless the Bakers had the foresight to program in a failsafe for such a maneuver. I don't think they did though.
 
Also when we start getting down to such tiny clips very strange things start happening in Sonar. I've had lots of problems with slivers in the past so they need to be avoided at ALL costs. Very annoying.
 
Cheers.

I hadn't thought of the fades in that way. I just assumed that each new swipe would cancel the old. But I've always known it's something to do with those changes, so that makes sense. OK and noted. I will have a trial later today and see how it works it. Can't be worse than yesterdays effort. That went completely pair shaped.........

Similar issues.
 
Speed comping on free form vocalizations where individual takes do -not- line up nicely is about the only thing I can do to get Sonar to crash. Seems like Undo/Redo is trying to juggle all these edits/slivers and there is a point where there seems to be too many in play at once. Doesn't happen until after I get up to full speed and forget to save the last batch of edits.
 
The slivers can be pretty painful when picking out individual phrases across multiple take lanes. Won't let you drag a new edit selection past existing slivers. Have tried switching to the Edit tool instead of the Smart tool, but just feels like thin ice when I go there. Probably a worst case use case, not sure what the solution might be. Perhaps a user setting for a "healing" zone in musical durations that would automatically bounce the slivers to the edit segment just created?
 
'Hidden' clips seem to occur when adding extra takes to existing takes after some other edit/activity. Seems to add the first new take onto the last existing take. Might have something to do with where you start and if there's actually data in the last take lane at the new start point? A possible workaround might be to add an extra take lane before recording new takes? (just a thought.)    
 
Despite the thorns, still a pretty useful feature. 
 

Beepster
You can "heal" comping splits by multi selecting the different clips (select one clip, hold Ctrl or Shift to select the next clip and/or just Shift to select the last clip in a series of clip). Once all the clips in the section you want "healed" are selected hold Ctrl and click in the lower half of one of the selected clips. All splits will be healed and the entire section promoted.

 
I've been searching the forums for a solution to the "healing" splits issue with comping. This sounds like a simple approach, but I can't get it to work. I follow the steps as described, but when I Ctrl-click with the comping tool nothing happens. Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. . . .

brundlefly
If a gap develops between clips at any point due to moving individual segments independently, the split can no longer be healed. Otherwise, I'm not aware of any problems with it.

Thanks for the clue. I created a test project to try this out and did get the split healing to work most of the time. Interestingly, when I found a split between two adjacent segments that wouldn't heal, I edited the takes to split one of the segments into a third segment. Then when I tried it with all three segments selected the two splits healed, including the one that wouldn't heal the first time.

I do speed comping more or less by the book, but with one tweak. Sometimes I can't decide which take I like, or there may be a repeated phrase where there are two good versions in the same space but I'm not sure there's a better one later on. So, I shift+drag the "alternate" take to a separate track below the track being comped...it's like a "savings account" for takes I might want to use later. 
 
I almost never use the option to heal. After identifying the "winning" Take Lane clips, I'm more likely to add little fade in or fade out curves to prevent clicks and such. Then I bounce it all together.
 
However be aware that I'm super into "don't look back." I render things almost immediately to final clips, whether it's a Melodyne clip, something with a Clip FX, a clip with clip envelopes, etc.