RE: Editing “busy” Drums in Reaper

[GunpointMetal]

TLDR - anybody have any insights for editing busy live drums that will maintain the integrity of the room/OH and allow for tight grid editing? If you’re suggestion is “keep it natural” please keep it to yourself.

So I’m working on a project doing drum editing for someone else to mix and the drums are all live recorded including a room mic. There was nothing muting the kick in the OH/room mics (no blanket/pad over the front of the kick) along with the drummer being pretty savage on the kick, meaning the kick is loud in the OH/room. The performances are pretty good, but this project is looking for a super tight modern deathcore/death metal sound and I’m having a really hard time cleaning up the timing on busy kick/snare blast beat parts. Usually if I’m recording for this kind of project I’ll just throw a pad up for the kick or at least muffle the front of the kick heavily so I can edit it separately from the rest of the drums. If I was going to be mixing this I’d probably just throw out the room mic track to avoid any editing issues, but since I’m not I don’t wanna mess with the tracks in that way. Anyone doing extensive editing with reaper for stuff like this have any thoughts on how to do this? I’ve been doing it by hand with slip editing, but some of the blasty stuff can’t really be chopped up without the cymbals getting weird. I tried using stretch markers on the fast stuff, but it throws the cymbals into washy nonsense. I’m kinda going nuts with this and almost want to retrack the drums, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

 

[DudeManBrother]

Maybe you can high pass and notch the kick out of the OH track? Stretch markers, nudging, and slip editing is all I can think of, which you’re already doing. Maybe EQing the kick out of the overheads will give you enough wiggle room to edit the kick mic independently, or to create a midi trigger map for kick samples, if the snare bleeds into the kick mic too much.

 

[GunpointMetal]

Maybe you can high pass and notch the kick out of the OH track? Stretch markers, nudging, and slip editing is all I can think of, which you’re already doing. Maybe EQing the kick out of the overheads will give you enough wiggle room to edit the kick mic independently, or to create a midi trigger map for kick samples, if the snare bleeds into the kick mic too much.

I think I’m just gonna talk to the guy mixing it and throw out the room mic track. Notching the kick out of that would render the track useless.

 

[DudeManBrother]

I’m sure he can send the individual tracks to a reverb and mimic a room mic anyways.

 

[decoy205]

If someone else is mixing it, I wouldn’t remove anything. Let them decide. It’s a lot harder to add stuff back in then it is to take it away. If he/she doesn’t like the track they can just drop the fader. At the very least like the Dude man brother said they can use it as a reference to create a “room”Sound with reverb.

 

[GunpointMetal]

If someone else is mixing it, I wouldn’t remove anything. Let them decide. It’s a lot harder to add stuff back in then it is to take it away. If he/she doesn’t like the track they can just drop the fader. At the very least like the Dude man brother said they can use it as a reference to create a “room”Sound with reverb.

That's why I'll converse with the mixer ahead of time. I don't know what mic was used, or how it was set up, for the room mic, but every kick hit sounds like the rest of the kit is ducked on that instrument. Thanks guys!

 

[Drew]

"Just keep it natural, bro."


Hmm. My inclination would be to do exactly what's being suggested here, high-pass the room mic pretty aggressively to minimize issues and then slip-edit, but it sounds like you've tried that with no success. So, couple outside-the-box suggestions.

1) Duplicate the kick track, then route the copy to nowhere, but use it to trigger a side-chain compressor on the room mic to clamp the volume WAY down whenever the unedited kick track hits. Then, edit your original track.
2) Actually... The tight, modern metal drum sound really is pretty much just close mics on everything. Mute the track. Timing issues aside, is anything missing in the performance without it?
3) aren't there people out there who edit drum performances for a living? Does your budget allow you to hire an expert?

Ok, I lied - I could only think of one outside the box solution, one inside-the-box solution, and one inside-someone-else's-box solution.

That said, if you'd be comfortable sharing maybe 4-8 bars of this, I'd be curious to give it a try myself and see if there's anything that occurs to me when I start experimenting...? Not my genre at ALL, but you never know.

 

[GunpointMetal]

"Just keep it natural, bro."


Hmm. My inclination would be to do exactly what's being suggested here, high-pass the room mic pretty aggressively to minimize issues and then slip-edit, but it sounds like you've tried that with no success. So, couple outside-the-box suggestions.

1) Duplicate the kick track, then route the copy to nowhere, but use it to trigger a side-chain compressor on the room mic to clamp the volume WAY down whenever the unedited kick track hits. Then, edit your original track.

I didn't consider this as I worried I'd be taking too much out of the room mic, but I think I'll give it a try.

2) Actually... The tight, modern metal drum sound really is pretty much just close mics on everything. Mute the track. Timing issues aside, is anything missing in the performance without it?

I really didn't understand why there was a room mic anyways, knowing the desired final sound. There are a few dropped kick hits on a couple of parts where the drummer is attempting 16nd note triplets at ~ 130bpm.

3) aren't there people out there who edit drum performances for a living? Does your budget allow you to hire an expert?

I am the guy that the project can afford (because I'm the guitar player, hahahaha).
In the past I've done everything from the demo-final mix stages including drum tracking, and we've always done it with pads, e-kit, and live cymbals. Nothing against our drummer, as he is a beast, and I've never felt like he wasn't keeping up when play, it's just the expectation for this type of sound is more or less programmed drums, so even a 5ms rush or drag is noticeable, or if one foot follows the other just a little to close/far, you can really hear it when the kick is replaced and loud AF in the mix. This time around I wasn't available at the same time as tracking so the bassist (who is a real professional live sound engineer) and the drummer handled tracking duties and they wanted to do the full live kit for....reasons, I guess. I don't think either of them felt really comfortable in a "producer" role and neither wanted to criticize the other, so some of the performances where I would have said "That was excellent, lets do it again" or had the drummer track cymbals and shells on different takes to keep things clean, didn't happen.

 

[Drew]

Another thought - given that a room mic is unusual for the genre, and would - even with a perfect performance - likely be less useful for the faster blastbeat sections than the slower ones... A combination of either side-chain compression or high passing, and liberal volume automation, dropping the level of the room mic way back during the blastbeats but pulling it up to add ambiance during the slower sections?

 

[migstopheles]

drop the track, do your edits, and if you really want a room track then you can always reamp with the edited shell mics + overheads

 

[thrashinbatman]

Definitely drop the room mic and recreate one with a verb. I frequently do that either because I'm tracking in a sub-par room or I don't have the inputs to include one, and if you use the right verb it'll sound more than good enough. With the way I EQ OHs the kick tends to disappear, especially in the mix. With some aggressive low-end EQ (which for extreme metal you're probably already doing anyway), the kick will be a faint tapping in the background and won't get in the way of the edited kick track.

 

[newamerikangospel]

Given your statements about wanting programmed drum sound, why are you soending time making real things sound fake? I would suggest, given your wants for this, to use the played pieces as a midi performance creator.

Or

Group the tracks minus room, dynamic split transient markers, and then edit to what you want. Augment the real drums with a sample library for room sounds.

 

[newamerikangospel]

Edit, just realized I dug this up from several pages back. My apologies for anyone offended.

 

[GunpointMetal]

Given your statements about wanting programmed drum sound, why are you soending time making real things sound fake? I would suggest, given your wants for this, to use the played pieces as a midi performance creator.

Or

Group the tracks minus room, dynamic split transient markers, and then edit to what you want. Augment the real drums with a sample library for room sounds.

I prefer to do a hybrid approach with live cymbals and e-kit pads for the shells, but bands are democracies and 3/4 of us are old-school and think we should be recording real drums. I'm not really opposed to doing all live drums, but I wasn't able to sit in on the tracking (because my OTHER band had shit going on) and leaving the drummer and bass player to their own devices, they weren't as picky on the performance as I would have been. Some stuff that I would have gotten a few more takes of, or split the takes into cymbals and shells got left a little loose. Retracking isn't an option at this point. I pretty much fixed everything I needed to with the slip editing thing, but there are a few fills that I had to leave alone because they're fast and kick/toms/snare all run over each other a little bit, meaning splitting to correct the toms might introduce extra transients in the snare or kick track, or vice versa. I'm pretty happy with what it got turned into, was just a little frustrated at the beginning because of what was left to clean up instead of getting tighter tracks. I'm really trying to bring these guys into 2020 with the recording thing as far as doing it on a budget and getting the best sound for the genre. It's been an adventure getting them to work with me on writing with the DAW so we can demo tracks as we go and learn parts easier on our own, but they wanna "jam" and learn the songs in our once a week rehearsal, which is a total time waster AFAIC, but its getting there.

 

[Drew]

When everything's said and done I'd be curious to hear clips./

 

[GunpointMetal]

When everything's said and done I'd be curious to hear clips./

This is from our mini release last spring. Same basic setup and process as this time around, just a few better mics on the kit. Kick is sample replaced. I was engineering the drum tracking and was able to get the performances I wanted, so editing was a much simpler task. This current session probably won't see release until April or May.

 

[Drew]

Will listen tonight! I'll probably find it not my sort of thing at ALL, but worth checking out anyway. \m/

 

[GunpointMetal]

It's pretty much straight-up pummeling deathcore/beatdown. Some synths, some slams, way too many breakdowns, lol.

 

[Drew]

It's pretty much straight-up pummeling deathcore/beatdown. Some synths, some slams, way too many breakdowns, lol.

Yup. I'll hate it. Still, I'll give it a spin!

 

[newamerikangospel]

"Way Too Many Breakdowns" should be the title of your next release