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How To: Up Multitrack Audio Drum Parts & Quantize Them

Multitrack recording offers the most versatility in post-production, which encompasses all of the steps after recording a song. With the ready availability of digital editing, quantizing drums -- aligning them with a predetermined beat -- is simple, if painstaking. Putting each drum on its own track provides the mixing engineer with the greatest flexibility. The ultimate goal of quantizing multitrack drums is to produce a realistic sound while seamlessly ironing out performance problems to create the illusion of a continuous natural performance.

Instructions

    • 1

      Upload your drum tracks to your multitrack digital audio workstation, if the tracks were not recorded in the workstation. Mute any overhead mics and channels that feature the entire kit. Each drum component must be isolated.

    • 2

      Set your project's tempo, without stretching the drum audio, to the desired speed so that your note grid is can serve as a time reference. Adjust the editing window to your preference; a window that is several bars wide is easy to work with.

    • 3

      Open your bass drum track. Find a beat that has a particularly good sound. The waveform of the drum has a steep, triangular shape. Highlight the beat from the flat start of the sound to the point of the triangle. Copy this section of the waveform and paste it to a new audio track, aligning the flat face of the waveform with the first beat of the first bar.

    • 4

      Copy this beat, then paste it on the third beat of the same bar. Go back to the original track and find a bass drum note that is not as hard. Repeat the copy procedure and paste the beat aligned with the eighth note after beat two. In conventional measures:beats:ticks time, this note is located at 1:2:060.

    • 5

      Copy this entire bar, and paste it to subsequent bars, aligning its start with the first beat of each measure, to create a perfectly quantized bass drum beat in a standard rock pattern. Repeat this process for each of the other drum elements.

Recording Music

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