Masters Program - Lesson 6 - Posted on 2015-02-23 by Collin McCombs

Lesson 6 consisted of finalizing the drum and bass performances. This is extremely important because without a solid foundation the rest of the song will not flow correctly. The first thing I did was listen to all the drum and bass takes and picked the best ones. Unfortunately even the best drum performance we had needed a lot of cleaning up. To do this I used Beat Detective to quantize the drums, but I also still wanted a live feel. Aaron showed me a method where you create two groups within the drum tracks. The first one is a kick and snare group, and the other is the rest of the drum tracks. Once that was done highlight the first four bars of the kick and snare group for analyzation to separate the clips. The trick here is not to have a marker on every transient. After you are comfortable with the analysis then hit “Shift+;” to have the same analysis from the kick and snare group go to the rest of the drum tracks. The next step is to actually separate the region into clips. After that you must then conform all the separated clips to the grid. Once this is done you will notice little spaces in between the clips. Thats why Beat Detective has a cool feature called edit smoothing. This will fill all the little spaces with audio and create crossfades. I did this until all the drum tracks were on beat. The bass part we had just needed minor adjustments that I cleaned up with Elastic Audio. 

- Collin McCombs