Pro Tools 11 - #20 - Elastic Audio pt.2 - Rhythmic; Quantizing Live Drums Video Lecture | Pro tools Tutorial: Basics to Expert - Video & Sound Editing

hello this is music tech help guy
welcome to episode 20 of my Pro Tools 11
video tutorial series in this episode
we're gonna continue looking at elastic
audio and we're gonna specifically take
a look at the rhythmic mode and using
rhythmic mode to quantize live drums now
the rhythmic mode can be used for really
anything that's percussive it works well
with drum loops it works well even with
like really like percussive sounding
guitar and the difference between
rhythmic and polyphonic and monophonic
is that rhythmic preserves the transient
material better so whereas like
polyphonic and monophonic will sort of
stretch or compress and no equally
rhythmic will preserve the transient
like the the hit of the drum and then
stretch out the tail in order to set the
drums in time while producing still hard
hitting drums that don't have their
their transient blurred or their attack
blurred so what I've got here is some
live drums it's pretty typical I'm gonna
kick in mic snare top bottom even a
snare side mic to Tom's
hi-hat mic accent mic on the ride cymbal
we put a condenser mic in the ISO booth
and left the door open just to get some
to the tone of the ISO room a stereo
pair of overheads and a stereo pair of
ribbon mics in the room just to pick up
the room a bit and we ended up with a
pretty decent sound so let me play a
little bit of that for you
that's no mixing involved other than me
just you know let set in the levels
there's no plugins or anything like that
no processing on it at all so so one of
the things I like to do with drums is I
always like to cut the drums and other
instruments on two separate days because
I like to do the drums and then use
elastic audio to set the drums to the
grid to make sure that they're perfectly
in time and the same thing sort of goes
like what I said in the previous episode
would you do you depending on the style
of music or that the genre of music you
may or may not want the drums to be
perfectly set to the grid you may want
them to have a little bit of ebb and
flow for this this is sort of like a pop
country song pop pop rock bluesy country
song it I want everything to be
perfectly to the grid so before I bring
in my other musicians before I bring in
the bass player and the guitar player
and the singer and all that I want to
have the drums set to time so that
everyone's playing to the drummer it's
going to end up with a better result
that way because if the drummer's a
little bit off everyone's going to be a
little bit off so to do this we can't
just individually quantize each track
like we did with monophonic and
polyphonic we actually just put all of
these in a group and then edit them as a
group so I'm gonna do is just click on
the top track hold shift click on the
bottom hit command G or ctrl G and a PC
I'm going to create a new group I'm
going to call this the drum group I'll
just call it drums there we go
hit OK make sure the group is on over
here and not only will editing functions
with your regular edit tools work on all
of these now elastic audio will work on
all of them now so it's really cool so
i'm gonna do is i'm going to go to
little oil can icon here choose rhythmic
this time this may take a second because
it's gonna have to individually analyze
each one of these you can see they're
starting to pop back to blue now but
when they're in gray like this they're
being analyzed for transients and this
this process is not going to be nearly
as easy as the previous video was
because there's gonna be a lot of notes
that we're at to go in and it
intentionally ignore certain transients
just because we don't want say an
individual hi-hat note to be locked to
the grid we want the hard transients
locked to the grid so basically your
kick your scenario times so there's two
schools of thought here one school of
thought is use the kick and the snare
tracks as a reference like your kick in
and your snare top track as a reference
for what you're gonna set to the grid or
you can use like the overhead track I'm
gonna try both I'm gonna pull the
overhead track up here just so I can see
everything because it's it's these hard
notes are the ones I want to be right on
the grid stuff in between here doesn't
necessarily have to be perfectly under
grid because if I try to set it on the
grid it's actually gonna you know
degrade the quality of the audio so we
wanna we want this to sound as as
perfect as possible without any digital
artifacts so first things first let's
change our grid to an eighth note just
so we can have a smaller eighth note set
or a smaller grid setting as you can see
he is a bit off the grid at points not
too bad he sounds pretty good but you
can see he falls pretty far off the grid
and some other spots there's one
particular spot where he played like a
little snare just a quick little snare
wasn't even really a film it was just a
set of eighth notes
yeah like right there you know things
like that we may have to come in and
manually quantize because there are some
spots where after we quantize this it
may not be perfect you know there are
some spots where the drum the note might
have quantized to the wrong direction it
to the wrong note and we'll have to go
back and manually edit them so here's
generally the way I work I'm gonna go to
analysis view and what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna go through this and I'm gonna
look at the overheads and I'm gonna look
at the other tracks particularly the
overheads the kick in and the snare and
I'm going to look for any notes like any
analysis markers like this that don't
need to be there and I'm gonna delete
them because in the end it's it's going
to actually cause us more problems than
it solves
trying to quantize those notes so I'm
just gonna go through this whole thing
and I'm just gonna look for those like
here and there maybe no you know there
may be notes in there that are being
played but they're just not they're not
important enough to be locked to the
grid like something like this this is
like a hi-hat note that's fine it's not
really too big too big of a deal it's
the ones like this or you see like
multiple repetitions in a row and some
of these I can tell are probably like
ghost notes on the snare drum where he's
like sort of hit the snare hard and they
sort of rattled against it softly those
don't need to be quantized that's just
gonna degrade the audio so we're gonna
do a little bit of work now to save us a
lot of work later and I should just
mention while I'm doing this I mean this
is a pretty standard practice now in pop
music and rock music back in the day I
mean you just had to keep playing the
take until you got it perfectly right
and even then it you know there's I can
think of hundreds and hundreds of
recordings from the 80s and the 70s
where you know the drums weren't
perfectly in time and that's fine you
know if you're going for a looser feel
you know like with the reggae example if
showed in the last video that that very
well may sound end up sounding better in
the long run than trying to do this
because sometimes if you over quantize
the drums can sort of lose their groove
you know there's a feel to it and
sometimes when you like over quantize it
starts to sound like MIDI drums or
programmed drums rather than a real
drummer so there are some ways we can
sort of combat that where you can
intentionally quantize but not quantize
100% if we have a moment I may show you
that in this video if not I'll go over
it and once we get over more deep into
MIDI later on so I'm just again just
going through anything that's not really
on a hard transient or like a noticeable
transy especially again these little
ghost notes are gonna are gonna kill me
there we go we're gonna lock all this in
time how far are we all right so we're
not even halfway through so just for the
sake of this video I'm just gonna stop
there when I start stop and measure
20-ish okay so yeah you'd want to take a
few minutes go through the whole thing
and do it I'm just did they're deleting
any of the notes that don't need to be
quantized so now that I've gotten rid of
my unnecessary analysis markers I can go
to warp view and when I quantize this
I'm gonna get a better result in my
quantization so looking at the grid
because I was on a on an eighth note it
looks like we've generally have notes
that are mostly on eighth notes now
there's a few spots where there's some
sixteenths in here to those we're gonna
come back and manually quantize I always
like to quantize to a larger value that
I actually need because especially with
drums if you again get in the habit of
quantizing every single little sixteenth
note that's out there you're just gonna
lose the feel and you're gonna lose the
groove of the drums so I'm just gonna go
to option zero by the way if you want to
do this manually you can go to event
event operations quantize or just hit
option zero
I'm going to quantize to an eighth note
and I'm gonna hit apply and you can see
everything snaps to the grid so let's
give this a listen and see what it
sounds like
now you hear like how there's some
hesitation after those those ghost notes
now it's because of this marker right
here so you may find yourself going
through you may find yourself going
through and deleting some markers that
are actually causing the music to sound
a bit behind in this case that are
actually no it sounds like the ghost
notes actually rushing and it's all
because of this little marker right here
so I'm just looking at the snare track
and looking for these ghost notes and
I'm just going through and every single
time I see a ghost note I'm deleting the
marker that's in front of it so this is
I probably should have when we were an
analysis view before I probably should
have seen that and decided to just take
it out so like I said this takes quite a
bit of work but the end result is
totally worth it to have a drum track
that is metronomic ly in time that the
guitarist can play through the bass
player can play too
and have you know basically perfect
timing what I am going to do with these
tom fills those I'm going to manually
set them to sixteenth note so let me
just set the grid to a sixteenth note
use my grabber tool grab these and lock
those right in place there we go so
let's have a listen
there was that that fill that we had
before I can actually take that second
note and pull it in if I want to and
again just so you can hear the before
and after here's the after we remove all
of our warp markers by right-clicking
and pressing R warp marker this is the
before just it sounds sort of disjunct
and here's the after so we can fix
little things like that now some people
swear with drums just to basically
quantize the down beats you can
certainly do that again you have to ask
yourself what sort of feel do you want
this to have you want it to be a little
bit more loose or does it need to be
really tight this being sort of like a
pop rock country song I want to be
perfectly in time it's just I want it to
be super uber radio friendly if this is
like a jazz tune or like some you know
like a you know like an alternative rock
tune or something that's just a little
more loose like reggae you may choose to
do no flex there no elastic audio or
less elastic audio maybe just quantizing
the downbeats like the whole notes and
that's it now just like I did in the
previous episode generally when I'm all
done and I'm happy with the result I'll
generally will go back to waveform view
right click and then Arnott right-click
excuse me I'll do shift option 3 to
consolidate one thing I didn't show you
in the previous episode is if you turn
off elastic audio while you're using it
while one of your clips has the little
oil can icon on it if you say none it'll
ask you do you want to commit your edits
or do you want to revert to the original
if you say revert it's going to take out
all those edits we just made and go back
to the original file if you say commit
it's gonna rerender all of these files
into a new into a new clip it's gonna
take a moment there we go and then now
all of those edits we made are rendered
into the file alright so I hope you guys
enjoyed the video and thanks for
watching