Pro Tools 11 - #24 - Using Beat Detective to Correct Drum Timing Video Lecture | Pro tools Tutorial: Basics to Expert - Video & Sound Editing

hello this is music tech help guy
welcome to episode 24 of my Pro Tools 11
video tutorial series in this episode
I'm gonna show you guys how to correct
drum timings with beat detective
and what beat detective is is it's a
function that can create trigger points
in your waveform to detect where your
transient heavy material is and then you
can go and chop up your whole recording
into little pieces quantize those little
pieces to the grid and then smooth out
all the editing and fill the gaps in
between those clips now in a previous
episode I showed you how to work with
multitrack drums like this with rhythmic
mode and correcting timing that way
that's one way that you can do it but
generally using rhythmic mode for
elastic with elastic audio can generate
some not so nice sounding artifacts from
from stretching and compressing the
waveform that works okay if you have
something that doesn't have a whole lot
of mistakes in there or is just barely
barely off the grid or is very simple
with a recording like this or the drums
are a bit more complex the beat
detective is gonna work better because
it doesn't create as much artifacting as
elastic audio does so just so you can
hear what I've got going on here it's
just live drums we got kick in kick out
snare top snare bottom Tom won Tom to a
floor Tom a stereo pair of room mics and
a stereo pair of overheads no hi-hat mic
this with the drum sound just by
themselves
now just by themselves they sound pretty
good they don't sound like they're
really out of time but as we get further
into the song you'll see the drummer
gets a little bit behind the beat here
and here there's a lot of spots or he's
behind in some spots or ease ahead so we
really want to correct those timings
because we want the other instruments to
be as close to the grid as possible
generally the way you do this is you you
fix the timing in the drums and then you
record everything to the drums what I
have just to demonstrate how the drums
are they sound okay but they're not
really tight is I have a scratch guitar
part up here that was actually put
perfectly in time with elastic audio and
you'll be able to hear how the guitar
and the drums aren't really super tight
with each other
so it's not bad it's just that
especially on the fills you can hear how
the the drums are sort of drifting out
of time with the guitar so let me the
guitar for now the first thing we want
to do is we want to put the drums in a
group if you haven't done so I'll show
you how you don't know how to I'll show
you how you just click on the top track
of the drums hold shift click on the
bottom track of the drums hit command G
and we'll just give this a name call it
drums and now this allows us to edit all
of the tracks at the same time where all
the drum tracks at the same time the
second thing you want to do is you want
to use elastic ours is not elastic audio
we already use a beat detective in small
chunk so we don't want to use it we
don't want to apply beat detective to
the entire song we want to work in
smaller chunks so we can better see what
we're doing so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
find like an open area like this where
there's basically just crash cymbals no
other drums hit tab the tab over to the
next transient and if you don't have tab
to transient on make sure you turn that
on and hit B to separate so we're gonna
time correct all of this first and then
move on to the rest of it alright so
first I'm gonna just double click on
that selection I'm going to go up to
event beat detective or you can hit
command 8 on your number pad the first
thing we need to do is we need to detect
first of all actually need to capture
the selection then detect the different
trigger points different transients now
we're not going to we're not actually
going to go through all of the
operations in beat detective just the
ones that pertain to this so we're gonna
click on clip separation and we're gonna
do is we're gonna go over to this
selection module here and we're gonna
say capture selection first though we
need to know what the smallest note
resolution in the song is meaning what
is the fastest individual drum beat or
hit that is played I can see with my
grid at sixteen sixteenth note that
pretty much sixteenth notes are the
fastest thing
that are happening all the way through a
way to sort of gauge this is to start
something like an eighth note and if you
see things off of the grid like here
it's in between two grid lines and
between two grid lines bump it up to the
next one and if you still see things
like that bump it up to the next one
until you just see things that are
essentially right on the grid so that's
what we have is our fastest value is
sixteenth notes if you're working with
something that has triplets in it two
you can hit the little three and it'll
analyze for triplets all right double
click on that hit capture selection I
think you did it there you go and that
we're gonna do is we're gonna go over to
the detection area and we are going to
analyze this what this does is it
analyzes the whole selection for whoops
I'm just screwed it up you know keep
double keep it selected there it's gonna
analyze this for trigger points and once
this is done we should be able to
separate all these individual drum hits
into little Clips so what we're going to
do now is pull up the sensitivity slider
here and you'll see this little purple
lines start to pop up these are our
trigger points so we really want to do
is we want to make sure that we don't
have too many of them because we may
have some erroneous ones but not too few
of them we want to make sure that pretty
much all of our big hits our kicks our
snares our Tom's are taken care of as
well as some other things like the
hi-hat and the overheads are taken care
of so I'm just gonna scroll through here
and make sure that everything looks like
it's taken care of we may stuff to do
some manual editing later just to clean
it up but this is like you know this
gets most of the work done for us all
right cool so now we're gonna do is
we're gonna separate these into
individual Clips so you separate now
I've got a whole bunch of little Clips
alright now what we're gonna do is we're
gonna use the clip conform function to
snap all these clips to the closest
their closest spot on the grid
if you accidentally deselected your
selection make sure that you in grid
mode drag over the exact selection like
to the bar
to the beat that you had before because
if you don't it won't properly snap
these to the grid so for me I selected
from basically beat six of bar one to
bar beat one of measure 27 I have to
make sure that I have that selected
exactly that what you do is you hit
conform and you'll see all of your beats
your individual hits snap to the their
closest spot on the grid so we're gonna
listen to this it's probably not gonna
sound that great it's gonna sound really
choppy because there's gaps and spaces
between all these clips right now but
we're gonna fix that so let's listen to
this first just to make sure everything
sounds like it's in time and one way you
can guarantee it's an hour sort of
double check that it's in time is turn
the click track on turn a click track on
and see if it sounds like it's perfectly
on the grid okay so everything's
perfectly a time doesn't sound so great
because there's gaps in between all of
our of our notes so let's go ahead and
drag over all this again we're gonna do
is we're gonna fill those gaps Pro Tools
has the ability to artificially fill and
crossfade the material in between the
gaps so again we'll go back up to our
beat detective window we're gonna go to
the Edit smoothing function this time
we're gonna go to fill gaps and
crossfade and you can choose a crossfade
length I'm gonna go with 5 milliseconds
that's just fine and then he hit smooth
now what it does is it fills in those
gaps and crossfades
what I recommend you do is listen to it
first and then consolidate I'm just skip
the listening first and just consolidate
it shift
and three consolidates it and now all of
our drum hits should be perfectly on the
grid
now sometimes here's a perfect example
right here sometimes it doesn't quite
get it right as you can see most of
these are right on the grid but this
one's just a little bit off so there are
some spots we may have to go in and just
sort of like manually edit the clip and
just sort of manually quantize it to the
grid if you really want to be that that
OCD about it you don't necessarily have
to you can sort of let that be like a
natural ebb and flow to the song if you
want just have some notes they're
slightly off the grid just to give it
more of a human feel but let's listen to
this from the drum fill here and see
what it sounds like I can see I can
definitely hear some minor artifacting
in there but it's a lot better than what
a rhythmic mode would have done for us
the elastic audio let's listen to one
more time with the guitar in there and
see if this sounds a little tighter
cool
yeah I mean it sounds a lot better it
sounds a lot more in time the only
downside is there was a couple spots in
there where I definitely heard like the
hi-hat getting split at the wrong point
and then it sounds like the the hi-hat
is glitching so again there are some
artifact some artifacts and there you
have to take care of manually really all
you have to do is just solo out the
drums listen to the drums straight
through after you're done doing this and
going copy and paste other things in its
place where the artifacts are or try to
find a way to clean it up so like I said
it takes more time I think to do than
than rhythmic but I think in the end as
long as you are very critical about what
you're hearing and you're critical about
your editing this will end up turning
out better with less artifacting than
elastic audio all right so I hope you
enjoyed the video and thanks for
watching