Drumagog with ambience mics - How in Cubase?

[ChaNce144]

Hi, a conceptual question that I need answered.

Let's say I have a normal set of drum tracks, snare, kick, toms, hihat, and two room mics. I have a track for each, and a single stereo track for the room mics.

Now, let's say that there are a few mistakes on the drum track, say a snare is out of place here and there, and there is a kick mistake. I can do a bit of stretching and editing here and there on the individual tracks, but what about the ambient/room track? Does anyone have any tricks to make edits to the ambient track that match the individual tracks? Im using Cubase 3sx. I have read that Protools can do this sort of editing across tracks, is this possible in Cubase?

What would you do? Thanks in advance for the help.

[John Suitcase]

In Cubase, just select all the tracks, and do your edit. If you're pasting in another hit, from another part of the song, say, make sure you have the top track selected, your cursor at the spot you want to put the copied bit, then paste. It'll paste each track onto the next track. Now, I usually would cut the original track, and move the handles (sizing) so that I can crossfade the new tracks in and out of the 'master' tracks. Use a crossfade that fades in very quickly, and out a little slower.

I'm sure this sounds confusing, but try it and you'll see what I'm talking about. I edit live drum tracks with room mics all the time, works great.

[Cabbage]

If you put all your drumracks in a folder track, then editing the folder track will edit all the contained tracks. You don't have a whole lot of tracks, but what you can do is this:

1. Put all drum tracks in a folder track.
2. Put copies of one or two (for example kick and/or snare) above the folder track containing all tracks (including the originals of the copies above).
3. Make cuts in the copied tracks where you want to cut all the drum tracks. For example if you want to move a snare, make one cut at the hit and one cut right before the next hit (not only snare). Make all the cuts you need.
4. Turn snap on (you obviously did not have it on during step 3), and set the snap mode to "event" (drop-down to the right of the snap button in the toolbar).
5. Now it should be easy to manually transfer the cuts that you just made onto the folder track itself. Just use the scissors on the folder track.
6. Move the different parts of the folder track that you just created to their correct positions. All the drum tracks contained in the folder will follow.
7. Make crossfades to smooth out the transitions.

This method works really well if the drummer has played to a click. Then you can use the detect silence function to make the cuts in the copied tracks, transfer the cuts to the folder track, select all events in the folder track and press "q" to quantize the whole thing.

It sounds a lot more complex than it really is once you get a hold of the idea. There is/was a thurough description of this method on Nuendo.com, but I cannot find it now.

Problem I am having is that the solo/mute functionality in Cubase/Nuendo sometimes get confused when using lots of folder tracks. I use Cubase 4.

Good luck! But don't get carried away, something that is glued to the grid does not sound very good to my ears.

Petter