So about Drum Quantizing in Cubase 4

[andygomez]

Sure there is Look into hitpoints and warp or crate audio events from hitpoints

[drewrevolution]

ok thank you very much!
i am definitely going to get on that ASAP because i have a major deadline to meet and would rather quantize myself than send it to another studio to be quantized.

anyone else have suggestions?

[redroom]

Club Cubase Nashville HOME

read the tips and tricks section

[kt66]

A guy by the name of Dan Korneff had created a couple of PDF documents about quantizing drums in Nuendo that were excellent and much better than the Club Cubase method (though similar). He does not appear to have them up on his site anymore, so PM me if you would like a copy of them. FWIW - I believe Dan used to use Beat Detective and found that doing things "manually" in Nuendo gave him better results. Once you get the hang of it, it does not take long and you can fine tune things quite easily.

Unless something has drastically changed with hitpoints recently, I would not bother attempting to use it for multitrack drums.

[drewrevolution]

i got all the way to where everything is split in my drum folder, but when i hit quantize...even when its just for one track of one section of a song....the program locks up..

im running a G4 Dual 1.25 w/ 1GB ram?

Not enough? What should I do?

[slaves666]

I tried to use the document found on Cubase Nashville, but I cannot crossfade after. I get "no overlapping" error. It works ok, but to know if its useable, I need to hear it complete.

[redroom]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

i got all the way to where everything is split in my drum folder, but when i hit quantize...even when its just for one track of one section of a song....the program locks up..

im running a G4 Dual 1.25 w/ 1GB ram?

Not enough? What should I do?

Your machine is way underpowered for this task and also its totally borderline for running Cubase 4.

[drewrevolution]

even doing small sections on one track it locks up though

[Brendan]

You could do small sections at a time.

[kt66]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

Ok that's EXACTLY what I needed to know.
Would you say the processor is more important than the ram?

For example, which would you suggest...

1.) Apple G5 Dual 2.0 w/ 4GB Ram

OR

2.) Apple Mac Pro Quad 3.35 w/ 2GB Ram

Option number 2 by far! 2 GB is plenty of RAM for this type of operation and the Core 2 Intel processor will run circles around the old G5.

I know you will probably hate me asking this, but ever think of switching to a PC?

[Brendan]

I can't say. It works on XP. I could fully edit and crossfade 3:00 of 10 tracks of drums on my home computer, a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4. It would be really sluggish, but it would work. I have no experience with Cubase on Mac.

[miqer]

There is a bit about the whole warp and audio slicing, quantizing in Cubase in the last "sound on sound", explaining step by step... I think, or was it last months? I don't have them anymore.

[drewrevolution]

nah i dont hate you for advising a possible switch to a PC, because i'm very much thinking it.


i have a friend who is apparently working on a Dual 1.25 w/ 1GB Ram and it's running Nuendo fine on his.

he suggested that it was my cubase being the problem.


sucks, i have a deadline to meet and these things have to be quantized by next Wednesday

[kt66]

Which version of Nuendo is he using? I have seen several complaints about N4 being sluggish (the GUI/meters etc.) on Mac where N3 was fine. Cubase 4 and Nuendo 4 are essentially the same thing for this application.

If you do decide to move to a PC you can build a blazingly fast system for very little money. An Intel DP35DPM board with a Q6600 or Q6700 processor, 2 GB ram, and a couple of Seagate SATA-2 drives etc. will absolutely rock with C4/N4. If you are not into building something, there are several vendors that offer this type of system for a reasonable amount that is not a great deal more that the parts would cost you.

Whatever you decide, I would highly recommend you get a faster machine if you want to do multitrack drum editing and not pull your hair out....

[redroom]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

nah i dont hate you for advising a possible switch to a PC, because i'm very much thinking it.


i have a friend who is apparently working on a Dual 1.25 w/ 1GB Ram and it's running Nuendo fine on his.

he suggested that it was my cubase being the problem.


sucks, i have a deadline to meet and these things have to be quantized by next Wednesday

Okay Ive gotta be quick on this got lots to do at the mo

Put a gate on your kick and snare tracks and export each one as a mono audio file and re-import into you project.Now either hitpoint and slice or strip silence sometimes one method will work better than the other.

Make a folder track and put your drum tracks in there along with your split kik and snare tracks at the top.

Now you can select snap to events and select the drum tracks and chop away where the kik and snare splits are.I have a macro that can do this but you have to lock any other audio tracks as they may get chopped up as well when using the macro.

When you have finished chopping you drums up hold sift and select all the drum tracks that are to be quantized and hit alt & A this will select all the events on your drum tracks.Now select your quantize amount and run the quantize command to
quantize the drums.

Now switch to view lanes and then select a track of drums and hit alt & a to select all
the events on that track and then go to the audio menu advanced and delete overlaps.Do this for the rest of the drum tracks and do not delete overlaps on th tacks all together as there is a bug that limits the amount of overlaps that Cubase can delete in one go.

Now you have deleted you overlaps switch back to lnes off view and then shift and select all your audio tracks and then alt & A to slect all the events on those tracks and hit the crossfade command.Once the crossfades are done you can play around with your crossfades bewtenn 6ms to 12ms and maybe even adjust the start of all the crossfades etc.

Last thing there is no need to quantize the Splt kik snare tracks!



I hope this helps

I can do the whole process in about 30 minutes

[drewrevolution]

thanks for the help guys...i'm gonna try some things out tonight.

i have a G5 dual 2.0 w/ 1.5 GB ram that im not using...
im thinking about loading cubase 4 onto that and seeing if it cuts down the sluggishness at all.

[drewrevolution]

but just to clarify...

the general consensus is that my computer isn't powerful enough?
i've heard that its Cubase and i've heard that its my computer.

[redroom]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

but just to clarify...

the general consensus is that my computer isn't powerful enough?
i've heard that its Cubase and i've heard that its my computer.

At Higher buffers yoru machine will do well

I have a Dual 2.5 ramed up and it works great with Cubase 4.1

[diatonic]

...

[drewrevolution]

its weird...

for some reason my G5 wont allow more than 2GB of ram. that doesnt make any sense to me since i've seen G5s w/ 4+GB of ram.

oh well. i'll be there testing things out tonight.

My G4 has a Duende running into it...it was on the 2-bus when i was trying to edit the drums. i wonder if maybe that added to the sluggishness?

[redroom]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

its weird...

for some reason my G5 wont allow more than 2GB of ram. that doesnt make any sense to me since i've seen G5s w/ 4+GB of ram.

oh well. i'll be there testing things out tonight.

My G4 has a Duende running into it...it was on the 2-bus when i was trying to edit the drums. i wonder if maybe that added to the sluggishness?

A G5 is gonna be much better for the task than a G4 however when chopping up drum sluggishness is to be expected but once your done you can make the trakcs into parts or do a bounce.

[Brendan]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

My G4 has a Duende running into it...it was on the 2-bus when i was trying to edit the drums. i wonder if maybe that added to the sluggishness?

The processor would have been working harder to process the ADC. The Duende probably has substantial latency. I'd def have it disabled in that situation.

If you need a buss comp or eq for editing (I like it for bringing up detail) then try using one with little to no latency and which is light on the processor.

[drewrevolution]

so basically, i split everything up...i selected ONE kick drum hit on one track...probably about .5 seconds long....hit quantize -- and the program locks up EVERY TIME. i can't hit quantize for anything in the drum folder after i've done all the splits or Cubase locks up.


yeah...i'm screwed!!! do i have a bug in cubase 4? i dunno, but this sucks!!

[redroom]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

so basically, i split everything up...i selected ONE kick drum hit on one track...probably about .5 seconds long....hit quantize -- and the program locks up EVERY TIME. i can't hit quantize for anything in the drum folder after i've done all the splits or Cubase locks up.


yeah...i'm screwed!!! do i have a bug in cubase 4? i dunno, but this sucks!!

When you say Cubase locks up do you mean you see the pizza wheel because it maybe that the programme is busy and you should wait a little.

[drewrevolution]

yeah its the pizza wheel.

i just figured that it shouldn't take over 3 minutes to move one small hit to the left a few seconds. the file itself wasn't even a half of a second long.

[redroom]

Originally Posted by drewrevolution

yeah its the pizza wheel.

i just figured that it shouldn't take over 3 minutes to move one small hit to the left a few seconds. the file itself wasn't even a half of a second long.

So you no when I do things liek heavy drum editing I normally do not have much going on in the way of plug ins and I wack up my buffers.Anyway I think you should run some maintanance scripts Download Oynx whihc is free and run the scripts with it.If you have no idea what Im on about then you should not really be using Mac OSX.

[drewrevolution]

i know exactly what you're talking about. will do


i had thrown the drum tracks into a new session by themselves with no plugins
and w/ the click track mapped out.
buffer setting at 2048. still froze

[slaves666]

My question was ignored so I'll ask again.........

When I select my cut up tracks, I cannot crossfade. I get the no overlapping material to crossfade error. Whats the solution?

[frankie c]

Wanna laugh? I got Cubase SX3 running on a quad pc...My old ATARI 1040st running Notator, ROASTED cubase back in the 90s...swings like crazy!!!

I don't understand why we cant get that midi timing back...