Beat Detective

[Rufuss Sewell]

Here is how I quantize multi-tracked live drums in Logic:

This is an intense process that takes a lot of time and patience. It's also easy to mess up your drum tracks if you do something wrong, so now would be a good time to make a backup.

1. Decide which tracks will be the reference for the quantize. I usually use kick, snare and toms.

2. Copy those reference tracks onto new tracks.

3. Strip silence those tracks and remove any notes you don't want to use as a reference. For example, if a kick and snare happen at the same time, pick the one that is slightly earlier. I also choose a division like 8th notes and remove any 16th or 32 notes. If necessary faster sections can be handled on their own later.

4. Hit the key command for "make markers from regions." for each of the reference tracks.

5. Now that you have the markers you can erase the reference tracks.

6. Make an edit group for all of your drum tracks.

7. Use the key command "cut at SPL" moving from one marker to the next cutting at every marker across all drum tracks. Now your drums will be sliced at the transients you selected from your reference tracks. This takes a very long time and Logic will kill your CPU with this unless you select 1 level of undo. (this phase would be made INCREDIBLY easier if there were a key command for "cut regions at ALL markers")

8. Quantize the audio to your preferred resolution by selecting all of the regions and opening the Event editor. Press and hold the "Q" button and select your resolution. All regions are now quantized.

9. Tie regions by length change. (This phase would sound better and make the rest of the process much easier if there were a "tie regions by time stretch" key command that kept coherent phase.)

10. Trim back all regions to overlap by an appropriate amount. This amount will be obvious because there will be some early notes that are flammed or doubled. Pull back the regions to cover these up.

11. Crossfade all regions about 20ms.

12. Check for errors or things that sound bad and fix them individually. With a pretty tight drummer you might be done. With a lame drummer you'll probably still have all night to go with this phase.

Now you should have perfectly timed multitrack live drums with no phase issues. Other methods can be done, but usually end up with some phase problems due to how Logic uses anchors. If you strip silence the actual tracks rather than the reference tracks for example, everything will get out of phase when you quantize. Also make sure that when you edit your tracks, you're doing the same thing to every track.

I do this all the time with perfect results. Takes longer than Beat Detective though basically because there is no "Cut regions at all markers" key command and this step takes forever. For me the left arrow is "next marker" and the number 8 is "cut at SPL." I can often be found pressing those two buttons back and forth for hours. Pretty silly.
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[JDunkley]

Wow, thats much more detail than ive found anywhere else. The issue of Phase problems hadnt even occured to me thank you very much. Ill be trying that later on tonight!!

[Rufuss Sewell]

Yeah, there was an SOS article a few years back that described a similar method, but suggested that you strip silence the real tracks. Unfortunately when you do this Logic places anchors at the transients and not necessarily at the beginning of the region, even when you set no pre attack and uncheck "search for zero crossing." This seems to me like some kind of bug, but either way, it's bad programming. Strip silence is supposedly removing audio precisely at the transient, so why would it place an anchor anywhere but at the beginning of the region? Anyway, then you would select the region and make the cut, but unfortunately Logic cuts at the beginning of the region and not at the anchor. Of course the quantize function quantizes strip silenced regions at the anchor and normal regions at the beginning of the region. The end result is rampant crazy out-of-phase-ness.

I spent months pulling my hair out over this. Finally with enough research, trial and error, I came up with this method, and it works perfectly if you're willing to spend the time.