Beat Detective Hints

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

abechap024

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 8, 2009
Messages
2,303
Location
Provo, UT
Hello,
I just recorded a band last weekend and then this weekend is mix time. Its sounding fine, except for a few inconsistent 1/16th kick drum rolls. The Genre is Metal so It needs to be super tight. Of course my first option was to bust out Beat Detective and go to town. I tried this and for some reason I can't get it to work as well (It has been a while since I really sat down with it) I don't have pro tools in front of me all this week.
So I was wondering if anyone could explain a little tips on how to do it...

I am very curious on how people use the drum performance to make a beat map and then tighten up the performance that way.

Thanks
AC
 
I'm not sure if this is much of a help, but I do that sort of thing manually.  I'd make an edit group of the drums and use the kick as the main track for the edit.  Separate the region at every kick hit, then position them on or around the grid manually.  Then use the edit smoothing feature of Beat Detective to clean it up. 

It's time consuming, but I like being able to maintain the living feel of a performance.  That may not apply to metal, though.
 
That does seem like a good option. I find that Beat detective is great but for some performances it takes me so much time to try and get it to do what I want.

Plus I'm used to doing Repetitive tasks ::)

Cheers,
AC
 
Manual editing in PT's is the way to go.  Like Miko said above, I geek out even more chopping every hit and aligning to the grid.  Beware tho if PTs was not your souce of metronome you'll have a hard time getting things in place.  Usually I use the tab to transient and cut things as close to the actual transient sometimes you'll have to zoom in and heal and recut if the tab isnt getting it close enough.  I can then start at around 20 seconds in and start working backwards in time, when I get to the beginning I move to 40 seconds and so on, seems to be easier this way.  Then you have to drag back the waveforms so there are no empty spaces and do an auto crossfade over all of the edits.  Takes forever but works like a charm.
 
Did you record to a click?  If so, I've had luck with quantizing in elastic and warp markers.  So, put all your drum tracks in a mix/edit group and put them all in rhythmic elastic.  Go to warp view for all of them as well.  Highlight all of the tracks in the section you want to fix, and hit quantize under event operations - I have note on, preserve duration, and select quantize grid to fit the hits (you said 1/16th).  Once that's done, if you zoom in, you'll see it added all the warp markers.  This isn't really 100% so, you'll need to adjust some.  If your grid is on bar/beat (if you recorded to that click), you can now grab those warp markers that didn't come out right and move them exactly on beat.

Since that's a little manual and tedious, I like to do maybe 4-6 measures at a time.  Also, if you find it moving around stuff outside the area you've selected, maybe drop a warp marker just before and after the selection before you do the quantize.  That'll keep it from adjusting anything else.

Good luck!  This is a pain in the ass :)

  Brian
 
Awesome :) I'm excited to get on it this weekend.

pucho812 said:
do it by ear, I always say...  you can get fast with it and for the extra metal feel have it trigger some   samples as well.

Of course! We went through and recorded a bunch of samples from the Kit and they sounded much more natural than any other samples we auditioned. I'll probably quietly slip a couple different flavors under the kick and snare this weekend  ;D

 
abechap024 said:
Awesome :) I'm excited to get on it this weekend.

pucho812 said:
do it by ear, I always say...  you can get fast with it and for the extra metal feel have it trigger some   samples as well.

Of course! We went through and recorded a bunch of samples from the Kit and they sounded much more natural than any other samples we auditioned. I'll probably quietly slip a couple different flavors under the kick and snare this weekend  ;D

well once you get your grid set up and so forth easy to add an extra track with samples all lined up.
 
MikoKensington said:
It's time consuming, but I like being able to maintain the living feel of a performance.  That may not apply to metal, though.

Miko's method is about the only way I've been able to make this type of thing work. I've done a few bands with live drummer plus drum machine, and if it isn't spot-on, then it just sounds sloppy.

I grouped the live drums, sliced it all manually on every kick & snare, quantised to grid, and then fixed & shuffled by ear the bits that aren't quite working.

There's a function in the edit which fills gaps from the front of the slice to the end of the previous slice - that's a big help before you cross fade. I found that quite late on.

You'll still get some double hits, which you'll need to fix.

Then you can mix in drum replacer, beatbox, or whatever.
 
Here's a trick... Beat detective works by detecting amplitude (and I imagine slew rate) to find transients. If you have compressed rooms/OH mics that have significant level compared to your close mics, then beat detective will erroneously detect transients in the room mics instead of the close mics. This will cause all sorts of weird stuff to happen to the groove. Keeping this in mind, I try to track distant mics a little bit lower than I normally would. You could also use the audiosuite gain to control level as well. Technically, there is a way to just detect the close mics with BD, but I haven't figured it out yet...

ian
 
Ian MacGregor said:
Technically, there is a way to just detect the close mics with BD, but I haven't figured it out yet...

Assuming you have multitrack beat detective - Create a group with all of the drums you want to edit.  Create another group with just kick & snare.  Select the kick/snare group, open up beat detective, and let it add the markers.  Now, select the group with all the drums, and click on one of the tracks in the arrangement (any one will do, it just has to be something other than the kick or the snare).  Now all the tracks in the arrangement window will be highlighted and it will now apply the kick & snare markers to all of the tracks.  Seperate.  Quantize to 90 - 95% or so (depending on how tight to the grid you want), crossfade, rinse, repeat.

I always work in smaller sections though.  Depending on the complexity of the song, sometimes that will be cutting the song into 4 sections for rock, or 400 sections for 32nd blast beat metalcore type stuff.

Also, beat detective works best when the hits you're trying to quantize are before the grid marker, not after.  So if you have a section you're trying to quantize, see if the drummer is ahead of the grid or lagging behind.  If he's lagging behind, drag the section a hair in front of grid.  It will auto quantize with mucher higher accuracy.  For rock stuff I usually only have to spend a couple minutes per section fixing beat detective screw ups using this method.
 
ruckus328 said:
Ian MacGregor said:
Technically, there is a way to just detect the close mics with BD, but I haven't figured it out yet...

Assuming you have multitrack beat detective - Create a group with all of the drums you want to edit.  Create another group with just kick & snare.  Select the kick/snare group....

You sir, are a gentleman and a saint. Thank you... I literally use BD almost every day during my engineering gig and this will make me look like a rock star. Again... thanks!!

ian
 
Hey All thanks for all the tips,
It helped me a lot when doing this project. Still have about half to go next weekend. But to share a few things I picked up along the way, maybe will help another person getting into Beat detective.

Basically after cursing, and great gnashing of teeth I came to the conclusion that Beat detective is probably one of the amazing and powerful tools ever made for the manipulation of audio.

I came to this work-flow to tighten up drums that have been recorded with or without a click track :

    I use beat detective to make a tempo map, working bar by bar telling beat detective were the downbeat of each bar begins. (usually with the kick in these songs) maximizing the "Tempo" bar above the waveforms shows a nice little window were one can easily slide the tempo markers back and for. Beware! when you do this you must consolidate all your audio regions first otherwise you pieces will slide around! PLus I found that getting the whole song laid out, then going back and making dang sure the beat marker is right snug with the correct downbeat will help the quality and ease the actual conforming process will turn out.

    Then working the whole song I analyze the kick track for hits, going through and making sure there are no extra hits and all the hits are covered. After I'm happy I add all the hits to the collection option
Then I do the same thing for the Snare track. Doing this saves TONS of time in the longs run...

    Then working section by section using the "collection" option. I slice up all the audio from the drums then conform. At first I was using 100% but have found that ~55% sounds much much better. Tightens up the audio without making it sound....awkward. Then certain parts don't be afraid to change the percentage around. I am amazed on how powerful eve 30% can be! Sometimes 80% is just the ticket.

Well Hope this post isn't too tedious. I'm no expert at Beat Detective, but just some humble tips that I found worked for this project. I am very happy that I spent the past 4 days locked in a room using the software. Its Fantastic!

Thanks All.
AC

 
ruckus328 said:
Assuming you have multitrack beat detective - Create a group with all of the drums you want to edit.  Create another group with just kick & snare.  Select the kick/snare group, open up beat detective, and let it add the markers.  Now, select the group with all the drums, and click on one of the tracks in the arrangement (any one will do, it just has to be something other than the kick or the snare).  Now all the tracks in the arrangement window will be highlighted and it will now apply the kick & snare markers to all of the tracks.  Seperate.  Quantize to 90 - 95% or so (depending on how tight to the grid you want), crossfade, rinse, repeat.

I don't actually create a second group for the kick and snare, but rather just suspend groups and hold shift while I highlight the kick and snare tracks, and do the analyzing with these.  Then I unsuspend the drum group and highlight the whole drum group to separate, etc.

Work one section (verse, choruse, etc.) at a time.  If you try to do the whole song at once you'll wind up 1/6th note off 3/4 of the way through the tune and pull your hair out trying to get it all back in time). 

I usually do fills manually. 

NEVER try to edit off the timing of room mics... they are many milliseconds behind the close mics.  All editing should be timed off the close mics.

When you're done with the 'smooth' feature, solo the drum tracks and listen, critically, through the whole song, manually fixing any 'pops' that the smoothing left behind (oftentimes the smoothing's crossfade occurs over a transient, and it still comes through as annoying pops, so manually fix these).  When you're certain you're done, consolidate each drum track to a single, new file, so you don't freak out your system trying to grab all those bits an pieces from all over your drive (the fades are new audio files written in different sectors of your hard drive, yet stuck in between every beat of a multitrack drum session.... it taxes your system, so make single files instead).

Also, BEFORE I begin editing drum tracks I make a duplicate set of virtual tracks (another layer 'underneath), and then I work on the copy.  That way, if, at some later point I discover a bad edit, I can drop to the previous layer with the original take(s) and re-edit to fix the issue.

JC
 
I've been using the "analyze only the close mics" technique on a couple records I've been engineering and it works SO. MUCH. BETTER. I can't believe that I haven't discovered or been told about this trick in the past 6-8 years or so that I've been editing drums...    :'(

ian
 
I've been using Elastic Audio a lot more than Beat Detective over the last 12 months. I tend to just move the kick and snare to the beat, usually on a 8th note grid. It seems to give more natural results to me and doesn't sound as mechanical.
 
TornadoTed said:
I've been using Elastic Audio a lot more than Beat Detective over the last 12 months. I tend to just move the kick and snare to the beat, usually on a 8th note grid. It seems to give more natural results to me and doesn't sound as mechanical.
You don't hear the weird phase effects from the time stretching? I only tried elastic on multitrack drums once back on PT v7 and it sounded terrible, I use it all the time for loops.
 
You have to make sure when stretching/moving any multi-mic setups tracks that you keep all the tracks grouped to they don't start flanging and phasing...
 
But that was the problem I heard with elastic audio, even with everything grouped and moving together the time-stretching made some weird phase artifacts.
 
I can hear the artifacts when in Rythmic mode so I X-Form render the Elastic Audio at the end of the day, just leave it running as it takes so long. There are still slight artifacts if big moves are involved but small moves are acceptable to me.
 
Back
Top