April 5, 2024 • 29 mins
This week we delve deep into the intricate art of retaining the groove while editing MIDI and audio for timing perfection. Join hosts Chris and Jody as they unveil invaluable techniques to maintain the rhythmic feel and musicality of your recordings, even amidst meticulous editing processes.
Discover how to seamlessly edit MIDI performances without sacrificing the natural feel and groove that makes them special. From quantization strategies to humanization techniques, we explore methods to enhance timing while preserving the organic essence of your music.
But that's not all – we also dive into the world of audio editing, where precision meets musicality. Learn how to tighten up audio recordings while preserving the groove, using advanced editing tools and thoughtful approaches to maintain the energy and flow of your tracks.
Whether you're working with MIDI or audio, this episode offers practical insights and expert tips to elevate your editing skills while honoring the rhythmic integrity of your music. Don't miss out on this essential guide to retaining the groove in your recordings – tune in now to Inside the Recording Studio and take your editing prowess to new heights!
Groove retention, MIDI editing, Audio editing, Timing perfection, Rhythmic feel
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
>> Hello, and welcome to another episode of Inside the recording studio.
I am Jody Whitesides, and with me as always is Mr. Chris Hellstrom.
How are you today, Chris?
I'm fantastic, Jody. How are you?
I'm not quite as fantastic as you maybe,
(00:32):
Alright, yeah, you're a little stuttery there. Probably a hint to what we're about to talk about and...
but I'm doing all right too.
That's right.
Because what are we talking about today?
Groove editing for grid purposes.
Yeah, how much to slam to the grid or not to slam to the grid and how do we make some of those decisions?
That's right.
(00:54):
At least in our minds. This is something I think a lot of people
Yes.
struggle with and it's easy to see why I believe see why is there a big hint to why I think but
But this is also something that you came across and we both felt that this would be a good
subject for a podcast in that you have done a massive undertaking of a lot of
(01:18):
remixing and stuff
Should you time correct everything Jody? You answer yes or no
Get ready to pull up a glass.
Oh. Yeah.
It depends.
[silence]
Take a shot.
Take a shot because it depends on the source material and what your goal and accomplishment
is in terms of what are you doing it for?
(01:43):
That's how I would ask the question.
how I'm asking the question of myself in going through all of this remixing is, do I wish
to go George Lucas and put things in that I didn't have the wherewithal to do originally
or the capability of doing originally?
Wait, was that a Star Wars reference?
Ke?And it was. That was a Star Wars reference.
I think it was.
(02:04):
(laughs)
The answer then becomes,
should you really slam everything to the grid?
And I think we can both safely say that in most cases, no.
You shouldn't necessarily do that.
eagle and
I mean, I think there are certain stylistic things
seven and a half years ago.
where that kinda needs to be.
Let's say that you're doing like EDM or something.
(02:24):
You're probably more inclined to do it
in that sort of musical situation
as opposed to a jazz quartet or something.
Sometimes that might be appropriate.
Let's say in your case here,
when you're doing more of a pop rock thing,
and I guess we'll start from the ground up
and start talking about drums.
(02:45):
Yes.
'Cause you had some pretty cool drummers playing on this.
Well, I've had quite a few good drummers across all the albums of things that I have done, which has been a fortunate reality for me.
You do the best with what you got.
It's awesome that you can
be friends with somebody and be able to go into the studio and make sure that not only do they sound good when they're
(03:05):
doing it, or at least you're hoping everything's sounding good.
You do the best with what you got at the time.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, the drummers that I played with with the exception of one
Didn't really have a problem so much with timing, which is great
That doesn't mean little slip-ups don't occur because they're human as are we and if you're human
(03:28):
it's
extremely hard to be
perfectly on the grid without any faltering in the playing
saying.
This is a relatively new phenomenon obviously with the advent of recording to a DAW
which is really the only...
with beat detective and time correction in that regard.
(03:48):
Sure, because we actually see it and it's visually, "Oh look at that, you're a little bit off here."
Sure.
But if you're just listening to it, you wouldn't notice.
Sure, you could be playing to a click track and you can notice that it's severely drifting at a time
even if you're not recording into a DAW.
But it is something I think more people are concerned with now.
(04:11):
Before a die it would be more like, "Oh, this drummer has a hard time keeping time or whatever."
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Probably not get called back very often because of it.
[ Pause ]
It's those decisions that we have to make.
So when you're working with a drummer, let's say on this last project,
(silence)
Well, here's the difficulty that I am setting up
where do you stand that when you're listening to the performance initially?
(04:34):
Do you have a mindset of I'm going to see where it needs to be time corrected?
And if so, where and how hard?
Or do you just listen and go, that sounds a little bit weird to me.
That sounds a little bit off.
I'm going to pull that back in time.
Okay.
in terms of doing this.
(04:56):
This last album, which is the last of all the ones
Okay. I'm sorry to interrupt you there, Jerry, but the loop's
that I'm working on, was written using loops.
And those loops have certain timing discrepancies in them.
I didn't chop them up and time correct them.
All the parts were recorded to clicks and these loops
(05:19):
prior to the drummer stepping into a booth
and doing the recording.
Mostly drums and percussion.
that you're talking about and they were written to a loop, were these sort of like drum loops
or were they just more like percussive or other loops that ended up being integral to the arrangement?
(05:39):
Okay.
No, I'm not, but if there was like a keyboard line or something that was...
I don't tend to use musical loops very often.
It's extremely rare.
- Right, yeah, I don't do that.
But these were all rhythmic drummer air quote things.
Yeah, drummer bass type things
Thanks.
and whether they were straight up drums
[Silence]
or they had some kind of weird sonic quality to them,
(06:03):
they were still drum related or rhythmically related.
[ Silence ]
Thus, the drummers that have been used
across these projects all had to work
on playing to these things,
which makes it difficult, not an easy thing to do,
especially if the groove is constantly changing in a sense
(06:26):
with loops changing from one part to another,
it makes it a difficult process.
In the matter of time and technology
What timeframe are we talking about?
at the time they were done,
it's more difficult to have done it then than it is now
in terms of time correcting the drummers.
When did this album initially get released?
(06:47):
what, 2008, '78, somewhere in that range?
Yeah, okay.
So it's not extremely late, it's not extremely early.
You gotta be objective now, right? Yeah.
There was decent technology,
it just wasn't where it is now,
obviously almost 20 years later.
It's a lot better now than it was then.
Part of it is detaching myself from it.
(07:08):
'Cause when I originally did it, it's like,
this is this, it's not changing ever.
And I do remember, yeah, now I can be more objective
Thank you.
about it and one of the songs,
Thank you.
which is actually one of my favorites,
[ Silence ]
the groove on it, even if playing it live,
changed by a quarter of a BPM,
made the song completely fall apart to me.
(07:31):
And I still believe that with that song,
but now at least I can manipulate
what the live drums are doing
so it doesn't sound as flammy and as loose
as I let it be in the original release.
[Silence]
I wanted it to be much more tight
and now it's possible to make it that.
(07:51):
The live drums and the loops, yep.
So when you're working with these tracks now, you said there you got some
flamming in the original one. I'm assuming that's in between the drums and right.
No. No, no, no, no, no. The recordings as done, I think that's it. And then the recording's
How do you go about fixing that? The obvious thing that I think most people would do,
They would, in whatever DAW you're in, mark the beats and just put them straight on the grid.
(08:16):
I'm understanding you're not doing that. You're using one as the reference.
So are you then manipulating the live drums into...
No, you're not doing that to the grid. You're doing it to like a groove template in the loop.
Is that the way that you're doing it or... Okay.
Also, this is still the V-drum at this point.
as done used overhead mics with live cymbals, live hi-hat.
(08:40):
The toms, the kick and the snare
were all using electronic kit pieces.
That this is the V-drum setup,
but with live cymbals and live hi-hats,
Okay.
which makes it easier and maybe a little harder
[ Silence ]
(09:00):
in that I have a nice stereo spectrum
of what those overhead mics picked up.
And I can manipulate the snare, the kick, and the toms
to be whatever sounds are more appropriate for the songs.
Now at the time, drum libraries were fairly awful,
(09:21):
not great, so I used sounds coming out of the V drums
for those particular kit pieces of the toms,
Right.
the kick, and the snare.
which made it easy in terms of like the playback.
And of course in the episode with Charlie Clouser,
we had mentioned the fact that the snare
was outputting information of where on the snare hood
(09:42):
it's hit.
The V-Drums automatically know that it's what they do,
but drum plugins, not so much.
Anyway.
Although we now know that Logic Drummer
actually reads that information.
If it is not the rim shot, it is the snare center hit.
It will read that information, which is great.
In terms of how that plays out sonically,
(10:03):
I originally recorded that left and right
as two mono outputs.
In the mix, I wanna do it as a stereo track
A second mod...
rather than dealing with stuff.
It also makes it easier to do the editing
without phase issues happening if it's a stereo track.
So the first thing I'm doing
as I'm going through these remixes,
I'm actually joining those two mono tracks
(10:24):
into a stereo file
so that they can be operated on as one.
[ Silence ]
Then I have the output of the loops on another track.
And I play just the loops along with just the drums.
And I'm using obviously the new drum sounds
for the kick, snare and toms.
(10:45):
And I'm manipulating those in the context of the song
so that I'm choosing better sounding snares,
better sounding kicks and better sounding toms
[BLANK_AUDIO]
along with the live hits that I have.
Now in the stereo track, you can hear the
of the snare hitting on the pad.
Hitting on the pad, yeah.
You can hear that hitting on the tom
[BLANK_AUDIO]
(11:06):
and you can hear it hitting on the kick.
But of course when it's played together
with the actual sound being triggered,
you don't hear the
that you would hear when you hear just the overheads,
Sure.
which is great.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I put all that together and I run that with the loop
And I'm listening for where is it getting out of whack?
(11:26):
Because it's very difficult for a human to play like a computer.
[laughs]
Some guys can do it fairly well, but they can't do it perfectly.
Thank you.
Bless their souls.
Thank you.
All of these guys, Christopher Alice, Paul, Donny, Andy, all these guys were great drummers
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
and super awesome for being willing to play to clicks for one and two playing to loops
[ Silence ]
(11:49):
as another.
It's not often that drummers are probably asked to do that
and all of these guys were very much willing to do that,
which is awesome.
But now in doing that with these remixes,
some of the stuff that made it feel slightly off
in the actual release can now be tweaked.
So what I'm doing is I'm running the overhead track
(12:13):
and turning on flex time in Logic,
I'm going to try to get a little bit of a sense of humor.
which automatically sets up marker points.
[ Silence ]
And if I don't turn on actual quantizing,
it doesn't actually highlight any of those markers.
And I can go in and I can listen
and I can also represent the loop itself
(12:36):
visually in the region.
[ Silence ]
And I can kind of comparatively listen.
If I hear something off,
I can see how far ahead or how far behind.
[ Pause ]
'Cause I can hear the push and pull of it,
but how far and how much should I be moving it
is all a sonic thing that I have to listen for.
So when I find a spot,
I will mark off the beginning of the section,
(12:59):
whether it's a verse or a chorus, a pre-chorus,
a bridge, a solo, whatever,
so that it doesn't move from that point,
because everything else before or after that
really should be staying fairly steady.
[Silence]
And then I mark the other end of the section,
and then I work on that section individually
if there's something off.
And I try to find the smallest point
of where it's getting off
(13:20):
so that I can put markers before and after that
to not affect everything else around it.
Yes.
What you're describing is that you're not going like beat by beat and kind of correcting everything.
more like you're noticing where something is kind of out and tweaking as needed from an audio
I'm not going to be able to do that.
perspective where it noticeably isn't as tight as you would like it to be. Right.
(13:40):
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
Right. Because that's...
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
Sure, yeah. But I mean, here's an issue and sort of like the topic for this whole episode, I think,
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
(14:01):
Yes.
is the temptation, I think, is for most people again, is to just go in and quantize everything
Yes.
and have it to the grid. And it's not like that doesn't have its advantages at some point.
(silence)
[Silence]
Sometimes the listener also expects that and can kind of feel that. But I'm reminded of a story
(14:27):
here is that a good friend of mine was a session drummer and he would be called to apply his feel
right and he would often say that yeah you got called because they liked his feel or whatever
Mm hmm.
(laughs)
but then they would put beat detective on it once he left and slam it to the grid so the question
to me is like well what the fuck they call you in the first place right because you're going to just
(14:50):
Maybe to record the drums fast, if you notice.
slam right why he's a great drummer but you can lose so much with that so you
Right.
Mm hmm.
Yes, so to continue with the process on that, the idea here is that once I've got those
were describing to me how you would create these like groove templates also
in a logic and kind of quantizing to that as opposed to yeah go ahead
(15:11):
yeah
corrections made so that things line up a little tighter, that obviously pulls the snare,
the kick, the toms that hit slightly off from where the MIDI notes are.
So now I have to make a groove template of that overhead track.
(15:31):
And then I have to apply that groove template to the MIDI.
That's a fairly easy thing to do.
[ Silence ]
And of course you mentioned just slamming a guy to a grid.
That's the cheap, easy way out.
I could have done the same thing and then I could have probably quantized the loops as
well so that everything was on the grid.
That would destroy the feel of what was originally intended in the recording to me.
(15:55):
Right?
Now, once I've made that groove template
from having done the edits,
things aren't slamming as much as I initially had,
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I have to still go back and listen to
are those hits hitting correctly?
'Cause occasionally the groove template
will still not quite quantize it where it should be,
(16:17):
Why, yeah, errors happen in the analyzation of the files and whatever.
which is weird.
I don't know why that is.
It's just something that happens.
It's the mathematical things of what it does.
Yeah, so you still have to listen
[BLANK_AUDIO]
and you still have to mess around with things,
which is all well and good.
On one particular song, the drummer was pushing a bit
(16:37):
and he was pulling a bit in different sections.
On purpose, right?
So that's on purpose, which is, that's what you should do.
Yeah, right.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I mean, that's all of how you create tension
and release in music along with the melodic aspect
of things is the pushing and pulling of time.
Thus, I have to be very conscious of in this section,
>> Yeah.
no matter what I do,
I can't go right to the grid with it.
(16:59):
I have to pull it back off the beat a little bit,
or I have to push it forward of the beat a little bit
to make sure that it doesn't lose the groove value
that was being intended by the drummer,
and still get it to lock up in certain spots
Yeah.
with the loop that was there,
because the loop was essentially doing the same thing.
(17:21):
the drummer was following that vibe.
That's an important thing to be distinctive about.
And it's not easy, it's time consuming.
It took, it's taking sometimes on average four hours
per track to do these edits for that.
And that's, ah.
But it sounds great.
It's a lot.
But it's where, yeah, it pays off in the end, right?
All the other instruments,
(17:41):
And then now of course you have a groove track and you can apply the same type of processing
for the other instrument tracks, right?
guitars, bass, keys, what have you.
Although in applying that to certain other instruments,
and we'll kind of gloss over that in relation to this,
at least I will,
Yeah.
you still have to go listen to that instrument
(18:04):
because it might pull two notes in two different directions
[Silence]
and completely screw up
what the playing had intended there as well.
So you still have to correct the quantizing
of other instruments, which again leads to,
You're using your ears and making sure that it sounds right
and the groove is retained.
(18:25):
Yeah.
Yeah. And of course you're mentioning all of these with being recorded with MIDI essentially through the V-drums and everything.
The same thing applies obviously if you get a live kit.
So it's just a different problem.
You
But the timing thing is the most important part.
You
You
Um, yeah, that's a good question. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
When it comes to taking kit pieces and applying to time,
(18:49):
[BLANK_AUDIO]
let's say that you have, it's not a remixing situation,
but you have a drum track performed by live drummer,
ideally all separated out on the different kit pieces.
Yep.
Where do you place most of your focus?
On what kit pieces do you focus primarily on the time?
(19:09):
These should all be phase locked,
so you're adjusting everything equally
or you end up with a mess when it comes to phasing.
But do you start with just kick and then,
I look at the underlying groove.
or do you focus on the snare?
What do you tend to do?
A lot of things these days, obviously 4-4.
[ Pause ]
And a lot of it is kick on one and three,
(19:32):
snare on two and four.
That's the general reality of now things change over time.
[ Pause ]
There are other times when things can be off beat
or what have you, but I tend to focus on
where is the crux of the groove?
And then the crux of the section of the song.
So for sections, I'm looking for the downbeat
(19:55):
or where the section changes with a crash
and possibly a kick as well.
So those will line up pretty much to define
where the section starts and ends.
Here's one, basically, yeah.
Then inside, yeah, to the one
Wherever it is, right? Yeah.
or wherever that would happen to be.
With the rest of it, I'm quantizing as a whole.
You mean that you can see this is where the kick is?
And fortunately with the live overheads,
(20:16):
you can see pretty much everything in the overheads
as it should be.
You see the kick, you can see the snare,
Right, sure. Yeah. Yeah.
you can see the crashes and such.
Yeah.
I don't worry so much about the hi-hats
[Silence]
unless something is completely mis-hit on that.
And it happens once in a great while,
so you have to pay attention to the hi-hat feel as well.
(20:37):
I do recall one song in doing this
where the live drummer was absolutely awful.
It took 80 takes.
And then I had to make sure that those 80 takes made sense
from one piece to another.
And then I had to time correct those 80 takes,
not time correct all 80 takes,
but you make take folders, you make the entire song
(laughs)
and then you stem it out and then you time correct it.
Then you lose all objectivity in this, yeah.
(21:00):
It was a pain in the ass.
Then you lose all objectivity, yes.
[ Pause ]
But in doing that, that drummer was so bad
that some of the time corrections
in between the hit of his hi-hat or his crash
and his actual hit of his kick
would cause things to be compressed or expanded so much
[silence]
to get to the proper location of where it needed to be
that it caused glitching and weird anomalies in the sound,
(21:24):
which then have to be covered up using samples.
Most of it was live on, this is not one of my songs,
it was something, a song that I worked on
and they really wanted it to be a certain feel
and the drummer just didn't have the wherewithal
to be able to pull this off.
So can you do it?
And that drummer was?
No, I'm kidding.
No, I don't wanna add them, it's not nice.
No.
(laughing)
But the idea there is that you can do this
[ Silence ]
(21:44):
to get to a point, but if you make timing corrections
that are way absurd, you're gonna have to figure out ways
to get around the artifacts that occur.
Now fortunately for the things that I'm working on,
I don't have that issue.
They're so slight for most of them
that it just feels tighter and you don't even hear
the fact that it's been time corrected
in terms of any kind of artifacts or glitching.
(22:08):
But the bigger thing at the end of all of this is,
Yeah, right.
if it's not a song that's meant to be four on the floor,
dance has to be perfect all the time,
don't assume that everything needs to be specifically
right on the grid.
Just don't assume that.
Take something as, it's an absurd comparison, but it makes the point.
(22:29):
Like again, at the top I mentioned like an EDM track compared to like a loose jazz thing.
Uh-huh.
Yep.
Well, the EDM is probably going to be very, very similar in BPM count at the end of the
track as a downbeat of one.
The Jazz track is not because it's going to have like, it's going to travel and go
No.
Yes.
(22:51):
somewhere.
It's going to speed up and might slow down.
It's going to end up in a completely different place, right?
And as energy builds, it might be as much as like 10 to 15 BPM different, right?
Mm hmm. Yes, there's a big difference there.
And sure, you can program that, but that's hard.
It's better to keep the natural feel of the drummer in most cases.
So going on the grid there would just ruin things, wouldn't it really?
(23:14):
Having said that though, these examples that you bring up, we need to make the distinction
of is this a drummer that plays with the feel and the push and pull versus just being out
of time?
Yeah, right.
and the drummer that I mentioned that I had to correct
in absurd amounts, that's just not a good drummer
(23:36):
and required other aspects of things.
(sighs)
I've found in my experience when I do this, and let's say that there's some time manipulation
Mm-hmm.
going on, okay?
I tend to focus primarily on the kick and see where that lines up on the bar.
[Silence]
If that starts drifting too much after like one or two bars, you pull that into time a
(24:02):
little bit right there and then just to kind of retain that feel.
Things like hi-hat and stuff should fall into place pretty quickly if you're dealing with
live drums and you have that all the way through.
But again, I don't go like super anal and try to time correct every hi-hat stroke.
If it's a part that's flubbed, chances are there's a better take somewhere else in the
(24:24):
a song that you can just kind of fly that in. I don't go with the grid thing either.
Mm-hmm.
[Silence]
I want to touch briefly before we round off today about other instruments as well as we're
dealing with this because you obviously had different instrumentation in this song. We've
Mm-hmm.
[Silence]
kind of talked about the percussion, the rhythmic loop type of thing. So I think that that is well
(24:45):
covered. What about guitars or keys or anything like that? How anal do you get with that?
lot.
Same.
[ Silence ]
I look at them after the drums are done,
I then pull in the bass
so that I understand where the bass is pushing
and pulling on the groove of the drums
having been time corrected.
(25:07):
So I have to look at all the where
the little time corrections occurred
and see what happens with that.
Then once I've done the bass and the drums,
I move on to the guitars,
I move on to the other instruments
and finally with the vocals at the end.
Because all of it will eventually need
to be massaged a little bit.
It's not like turn off flex time and hit quantize and everything is fine and dandy.
But I don't immediately turn on beat mapping and then.
(25:27):
Right.
Oh, yeah.
One thing that I find interesting as well is when you have things like guitar or bass
that you're trying to massage into place against the drums, the temptation can be as well as
like trying to do this with your eyes.
So you're trying to like line up transients.
(25:49):
In my experience, that can almost make more harm than good, right?
Oh, yeah.
Because you can get all sorts of like phase cancellation and stuff, especially between
like kick and bass and those type of things, because they tend to live in the same frequency
range, right?
But also things where bass and guitar are doing a similar figure.
Chances are.
I have to listen to that.
(26:11):
It takes a little bit for them to be severely out of time, but to pull them exactly into
time again is probably not going to give you the results that you're looking for.
No, you're not off your rocker, but we should move on to our Friday finds.
You share that as well? So that's good. I'm not completely off by rocker here then.
Yeah.
(26:31):
And new pieces, well it's not new pieces, it's a new piece of software for me
Chris, what have you got this week?
Mm-hmm.
that I was turned on to that I use to great effect these days and it's something called keyboard maestro.
Mm-hmm.
If you remember in on the Mac there used to be something called the automator.
(26:52):
They still have it.
Would you yeah wait you could automate tasks and this thing is freaking fantastic if you need to
(silence)
[silence]
do like repetitive stuff like renaming oh I don't know let's say 90 tracks with a certain syntax
and you got to do that several times in a session, you can automate that.
(27:16):
So you hit a button and boom, it does whatever you want.
So very, very cool. Keyboard Meister.
Just do the search for Keyboard Meister.
It's a cheap piece of software because it's going to save you a bunch of time.
That is my find for this Friday.
And Jody, what do you have?
I'm going with a floor pedal for guitar players or just anybody in general that likes to use
[silence]
(27:36):
foot pedals.
It is the wannabe by Beatronics.
It is a distortion pedal that has the values of a Klon and a blues breaker pedal within
it.
What an excellent name! [laughs]
It has right the wannabe by Beatronics.
[silence]
(27:57):
It has three knobs for each section,
three knobs for the Klon,
three knobs for the Blues Breaker,
[silence]
and then it has switches in between
that allows you to route the signal
or mesh the two of them together.
So you can start with the input of the Blues Breaker
and go to the tone factor of the Klon
to the distortion of something else,
(28:18):
or you can do the opposite.
There's a lot of different combinations that you can do.
Thus, I'm going with the Wannabe
from Btronics for this week.
While we've got your attention, we ask that you go to InsideTheRecordingStudio.com and
Nice.
[ Pause ]
sign up for our mailing list.
You'll need to be on our email list in order to be eligible for any giveaways, and we'll
make sure that you don't miss any future episodes of this insanely cool podcast.
(28:43):
Send us an email at Goldstar@InsideTheRecordingStudio.com with the word "grid," and you'll get something
[ Silence ]
cool back in your inbox.
If you have a topic or suggestion for Chris and I to explain in a future episode, contact
us at the contact page and we'll put it into consideration for a future episode.
With that, I'll say, see you next week.
Thank you very much.
(29:03):
>> Have a great day, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
(
>> Hello, and welcome to another episode of Inside the recording studio.
I am Jody Whitesides, and with me as always is Mr. Chris Hellstrom.
How are you today, Chris?
I'm fantastic, Jody. How are you?
I'm not quite as fantastic as you maybe,
(00:32):
Alright, yeah, you're a little stuttery there. Probably a hint to what we're about to talk about and...
but I'm doing all right too.
That's right.
Because what are we talking about today?
Groove editing for grid purposes.
Yeah, how much to slam to the grid or not to slam to the grid and how do we make some of those decisions?
That's right.
(00:54):
At least in our minds. This is something I think a lot of people
Yes.
struggle with and it's easy to see why I believe see why is there a big hint to why I think but
But this is also something that you came across and we both felt that this would be a good
subject for a podcast in that you have done a massive undertaking of a lot of
(01:18):
remixing and stuff
Should you time correct everything Jody? You answer yes or no
Get ready to pull up a glass.
Oh. Yeah.
It depends.
[silence]
Take a shot.
Take a shot because it depends on the source material and what your goal and accomplishment
is in terms of what are you doing it for?
(01:43):
That's how I would ask the question.
how I'm asking the question of myself in going through all of this remixing is, do I wish
to go George Lucas and put things in that I didn't have the wherewithal to do originally
or the capability of doing originally?
Wait, was that a Star Wars reference?
Ke?And it was. That was a Star Wars reference.
I think it was.
(02:04):
(laughs)
The answer then becomes,
should you really slam everything to the grid?
And I think we can both safely say that in most cases, no.
You shouldn't necessarily do that.
eagle and
I mean, I think there are certain stylistic things
seven and a half years ago.
where that kinda needs to be.
Let's say that you're doing like EDM or something.
(02:24):
You're probably more inclined to do it
in that sort of musical situation
as opposed to a jazz quartet or something.
Sometimes that might be appropriate.
Let's say in your case here,
when you're doing more of a pop rock thing,
and I guess we'll start from the ground up
and start talking about drums.
(02:45):
Yes.
'Cause you had some pretty cool drummers playing on this.
Well, I've had quite a few good drummers across all the albums of things that I have done, which has been a fortunate reality for me.
You do the best with what you got.
It's awesome that you can
be friends with somebody and be able to go into the studio and make sure that not only do they sound good when they're
(03:05):
doing it, or at least you're hoping everything's sounding good.
You do the best with what you got at the time.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, the drummers that I played with with the exception of one
Didn't really have a problem so much with timing, which is great
That doesn't mean little slip-ups don't occur because they're human as are we and if you're human
(03:28):
it's
extremely hard to be
perfectly on the grid without any faltering in the playing
saying.
This is a relatively new phenomenon obviously with the advent of recording to a DAW
which is really the only...
with beat detective and time correction in that regard.
(03:48):
Sure, because we actually see it and it's visually, "Oh look at that, you're a little bit off here."
Sure.
But if you're just listening to it, you wouldn't notice.
Sure, you could be playing to a click track and you can notice that it's severely drifting at a time
even if you're not recording into a DAW.
But it is something I think more people are concerned with now.
(04:11):
Before a die it would be more like, "Oh, this drummer has a hard time keeping time or whatever."
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Probably not get called back very often because of it.
[ Pause ]
It's those decisions that we have to make.
So when you're working with a drummer, let's say on this last project,
(silence)
Well, here's the difficulty that I am setting up
where do you stand that when you're listening to the performance initially?
(04:34):
Do you have a mindset of I'm going to see where it needs to be time corrected?
And if so, where and how hard?
Or do you just listen and go, that sounds a little bit weird to me.
That sounds a little bit off.
I'm going to pull that back in time.
Okay.
in terms of doing this.
(04:56):
This last album, which is the last of all the ones
Okay. I'm sorry to interrupt you there, Jerry, but the loop's
that I'm working on, was written using loops.
And those loops have certain timing discrepancies in them.
I didn't chop them up and time correct them.
All the parts were recorded to clicks and these loops
(05:19):
prior to the drummer stepping into a booth
and doing the recording.
Mostly drums and percussion.
that you're talking about and they were written to a loop, were these sort of like drum loops
or were they just more like percussive or other loops that ended up being integral to the arrangement?
(05:39):
Okay.
No, I'm not, but if there was like a keyboard line or something that was...
I don't tend to use musical loops very often.
It's extremely rare.
- Right, yeah, I don't do that.
But these were all rhythmic drummer air quote things.
Yeah, drummer bass type things
Thanks.
and whether they were straight up drums
[Silence]
or they had some kind of weird sonic quality to them,
(06:03):
they were still drum related or rhythmically related.
[ Silence ]
Thus, the drummers that have been used
across these projects all had to work
on playing to these things,
which makes it difficult, not an easy thing to do,
especially if the groove is constantly changing in a sense
(06:26):
with loops changing from one part to another,
it makes it a difficult process.
In the matter of time and technology
What timeframe are we talking about?
at the time they were done,
it's more difficult to have done it then than it is now
in terms of time correcting the drummers.
When did this album initially get released?
(06:47):
what, 2008, '78, somewhere in that range?
Yeah, okay.
So it's not extremely late, it's not extremely early.
You gotta be objective now, right? Yeah.
There was decent technology,
it just wasn't where it is now,
obviously almost 20 years later.
It's a lot better now than it was then.
Part of it is detaching myself from it.
(07:08):
'Cause when I originally did it, it's like,
this is this, it's not changing ever.
And I do remember, yeah, now I can be more objective
Thank you.
about it and one of the songs,
Thank you.
which is actually one of my favorites,
[ Silence ]
the groove on it, even if playing it live,
changed by a quarter of a BPM,
made the song completely fall apart to me.
(07:31):
And I still believe that with that song,
but now at least I can manipulate
what the live drums are doing
so it doesn't sound as flammy and as loose
as I let it be in the original release.
[Silence]
I wanted it to be much more tight
and now it's possible to make it that.
(07:51):
The live drums and the loops, yep.
So when you're working with these tracks now, you said there you got some
flamming in the original one. I'm assuming that's in between the drums and right.
No. No, no, no, no, no. The recordings as done, I think that's it. And then the recording's
How do you go about fixing that? The obvious thing that I think most people would do,
They would, in whatever DAW you're in, mark the beats and just put them straight on the grid.
(08:16):
I'm understanding you're not doing that. You're using one as the reference.
So are you then manipulating the live drums into...
No, you're not doing that to the grid. You're doing it to like a groove template in the loop.
Is that the way that you're doing it or... Okay.
Also, this is still the V-drum at this point.
as done used overhead mics with live cymbals, live hi-hat.
(08:40):
The toms, the kick and the snare
were all using electronic kit pieces.
That this is the V-drum setup,
but with live cymbals and live hi-hats,
Okay.
which makes it easier and maybe a little harder
[ Silence ]
(09:00):
in that I have a nice stereo spectrum
of what those overhead mics picked up.
And I can manipulate the snare, the kick, and the toms
to be whatever sounds are more appropriate for the songs.
Now at the time, drum libraries were fairly awful,
(09:21):
not great, so I used sounds coming out of the V drums
for those particular kit pieces of the toms,
Right.
the kick, and the snare.
which made it easy in terms of like the playback.
And of course in the episode with Charlie Clouser,
we had mentioned the fact that the snare
was outputting information of where on the snare hood
(09:42):
it's hit.
The V-Drums automatically know that it's what they do,
but drum plugins, not so much.
Anyway.
Although we now know that Logic Drummer
actually reads that information.
If it is not the rim shot, it is the snare center hit.
It will read that information, which is great.
In terms of how that plays out sonically,
(10:03):
I originally recorded that left and right
as two mono outputs.
In the mix, I wanna do it as a stereo track
A second mod...
rather than dealing with stuff.
It also makes it easier to do the editing
without phase issues happening if it's a stereo track.
So the first thing I'm doing
as I'm going through these remixes,
I'm actually joining those two mono tracks
(10:24):
into a stereo file
so that they can be operated on as one.
[ Silence ]
Then I have the output of the loops on another track.
And I play just the loops along with just the drums.
And I'm using obviously the new drum sounds
for the kick, snare and toms.
(10:45):
And I'm manipulating those in the context of the song
so that I'm choosing better sounding snares,
better sounding kicks and better sounding toms
[BLANK_AUDIO]
along with the live hits that I have.
Now in the stereo track, you can hear the
of the snare hitting on the pad.
Hitting on the pad, yeah.
You can hear that hitting on the tom
[BLANK_AUDIO]
(11:06):
and you can hear it hitting on the kick.
But of course when it's played together
with the actual sound being triggered,
you don't hear the
that you would hear when you hear just the overheads,
Sure.
which is great.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I put all that together and I run that with the loop
And I'm listening for where is it getting out of whack?
(11:26):
Because it's very difficult for a human to play like a computer.
[laughs]
Some guys can do it fairly well, but they can't do it perfectly.
Thank you.
Bless their souls.
Thank you.
All of these guys, Christopher Alice, Paul, Donny, Andy, all these guys were great drummers
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
and super awesome for being willing to play to clicks for one and two playing to loops
[ Silence ]
(11:49):
as another.
It's not often that drummers are probably asked to do that
and all of these guys were very much willing to do that,
which is awesome.
But now in doing that with these remixes,
some of the stuff that made it feel slightly off
in the actual release can now be tweaked.
So what I'm doing is I'm running the overhead track
(12:13):
and turning on flex time in Logic,
I'm going to try to get a little bit of a sense of humor.
which automatically sets up marker points.
[ Silence ]
And if I don't turn on actual quantizing,
it doesn't actually highlight any of those markers.
And I can go in and I can listen
and I can also represent the loop itself
(12:36):
visually in the region.
[ Silence ]
And I can kind of comparatively listen.
If I hear something off,
I can see how far ahead or how far behind.
[ Pause ]
'Cause I can hear the push and pull of it,
but how far and how much should I be moving it
is all a sonic thing that I have to listen for.
So when I find a spot,
I will mark off the beginning of the section,
(12:59):
whether it's a verse or a chorus, a pre-chorus,
a bridge, a solo, whatever,
so that it doesn't move from that point,
because everything else before or after that
really should be staying fairly steady.
[Silence]
And then I mark the other end of the section,
and then I work on that section individually
if there's something off.
And I try to find the smallest point
of where it's getting off
(13:20):
so that I can put markers before and after that
to not affect everything else around it.
Yes.
What you're describing is that you're not going like beat by beat and kind of correcting everything.
more like you're noticing where something is kind of out and tweaking as needed from an audio
I'm not going to be able to do that.
perspective where it noticeably isn't as tight as you would like it to be. Right.
(13:40):
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
Right. Because that's...
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
Sure, yeah. But I mean, here's an issue and sort of like the topic for this whole episode, I think,
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm going to be able to do that.
(14:01):
Yes.
is the temptation, I think, is for most people again, is to just go in and quantize everything
Yes.
and have it to the grid. And it's not like that doesn't have its advantages at some point.
(silence)
[Silence]
Sometimes the listener also expects that and can kind of feel that. But I'm reminded of a story
(14:27):
here is that a good friend of mine was a session drummer and he would be called to apply his feel
right and he would often say that yeah you got called because they liked his feel or whatever
Mm hmm.
(laughs)
but then they would put beat detective on it once he left and slam it to the grid so the question
to me is like well what the fuck they call you in the first place right because you're going to just
(14:50):
Maybe to record the drums fast, if you notice.
slam right why he's a great drummer but you can lose so much with that so you
Right.
Mm hmm.
Yes, so to continue with the process on that, the idea here is that once I've got those
were describing to me how you would create these like groove templates also
in a logic and kind of quantizing to that as opposed to yeah go ahead
(15:11):
yeah
corrections made so that things line up a little tighter, that obviously pulls the snare,
the kick, the toms that hit slightly off from where the MIDI notes are.
So now I have to make a groove template of that overhead track.
(15:31):
And then I have to apply that groove template to the MIDI.
That's a fairly easy thing to do.
[ Silence ]
And of course you mentioned just slamming a guy to a grid.
That's the cheap, easy way out.
I could have done the same thing and then I could have probably quantized the loops as
well so that everything was on the grid.
That would destroy the feel of what was originally intended in the recording to me.
(15:55):
Right?
Now, once I've made that groove template
from having done the edits,
things aren't slamming as much as I initially had,
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I have to still go back and listen to
are those hits hitting correctly?
'Cause occasionally the groove template
will still not quite quantize it where it should be,
(16:17):
Why, yeah, errors happen in the analyzation of the files and whatever.
which is weird.
I don't know why that is.
It's just something that happens.
It's the mathematical things of what it does.
Yeah, so you still have to listen
[BLANK_AUDIO]
and you still have to mess around with things,
which is all well and good.
On one particular song, the drummer was pushing a bit
(16:37):
and he was pulling a bit in different sections.
On purpose, right?
So that's on purpose, which is, that's what you should do.
Yeah, right.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I mean, that's all of how you create tension
and release in music along with the melodic aspect
of things is the pushing and pulling of time.
Thus, I have to be very conscious of in this section,
>> Yeah.
no matter what I do,
I can't go right to the grid with it.
(16:59):
I have to pull it back off the beat a little bit,
or I have to push it forward of the beat a little bit
to make sure that it doesn't lose the groove value
that was being intended by the drummer,
and still get it to lock up in certain spots
Yeah.
with the loop that was there,
because the loop was essentially doing the same thing.
(17:21):
the drummer was following that vibe.
That's an important thing to be distinctive about.
And it's not easy, it's time consuming.
It took, it's taking sometimes on average four hours
per track to do these edits for that.
And that's, ah.
But it sounds great.
It's a lot.
But it's where, yeah, it pays off in the end, right?
All the other instruments,
(17:41):
And then now of course you have a groove track and you can apply the same type of processing
for the other instrument tracks, right?
guitars, bass, keys, what have you.
Although in applying that to certain other instruments,
and we'll kind of gloss over that in relation to this,
at least I will,
Yeah.
you still have to go listen to that instrument
(18:04):
because it might pull two notes in two different directions
[Silence]
and completely screw up
what the playing had intended there as well.
So you still have to correct the quantizing
of other instruments, which again leads to,
You're using your ears and making sure that it sounds right
and the groove is retained.
(18:25):
Yeah.
Yeah. And of course you're mentioning all of these with being recorded with MIDI essentially through the V-drums and everything.
The same thing applies obviously if you get a live kit.
So it's just a different problem.
You
But the timing thing is the most important part.
You
You
Um, yeah, that's a good question. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
When it comes to taking kit pieces and applying to time,
(18:49):
[BLANK_AUDIO]
let's say that you have, it's not a remixing situation,
but you have a drum track performed by live drummer,
ideally all separated out on the different kit pieces.
Yep.
Where do you place most of your focus?
On what kit pieces do you focus primarily on the time?
(19:09):
These should all be phase locked,
so you're adjusting everything equally
or you end up with a mess when it comes to phasing.
But do you start with just kick and then,
I look at the underlying groove.
or do you focus on the snare?
What do you tend to do?
A lot of things these days, obviously 4-4.
[ Pause ]
And a lot of it is kick on one and three,
(19:32):
snare on two and four.
That's the general reality of now things change over time.
[ Pause ]
There are other times when things can be off beat
or what have you, but I tend to focus on
where is the crux of the groove?
And then the crux of the section of the song.
So for sections, I'm looking for the downbeat
(19:55):
or where the section changes with a crash
and possibly a kick as well.
So those will line up pretty much to define
where the section starts and ends.
Here's one, basically, yeah.
Then inside, yeah, to the one
Wherever it is, right? Yeah.
or wherever that would happen to be.
With the rest of it, I'm quantizing as a whole.
You mean that you can see this is where the kick is?
And fortunately with the live overheads,
(20:16):
you can see pretty much everything in the overheads
as it should be.
You see the kick, you can see the snare,
Right, sure. Yeah. Yeah.
you can see the crashes and such.
Yeah.
I don't worry so much about the hi-hats
[Silence]
unless something is completely mis-hit on that.
And it happens once in a great while,
so you have to pay attention to the hi-hat feel as well.
(20:37):
I do recall one song in doing this
where the live drummer was absolutely awful.
It took 80 takes.
And then I had to make sure that those 80 takes made sense
from one piece to another.
And then I had to time correct those 80 takes,
not time correct all 80 takes,
but you make take folders, you make the entire song
(laughs)
and then you stem it out and then you time correct it.
Then you lose all objectivity in this, yeah.
(21:00):
It was a pain in the ass.
Then you lose all objectivity, yes.
[ Pause ]
But in doing that, that drummer was so bad
that some of the time corrections
in between the hit of his hi-hat or his crash
and his actual hit of his kick
would cause things to be compressed or expanded so much
[silence]
to get to the proper location of where it needed to be
that it caused glitching and weird anomalies in the sound,
(21:24):
which then have to be covered up using samples.
Most of it was live on, this is not one of my songs,
it was something, a song that I worked on
and they really wanted it to be a certain feel
and the drummer just didn't have the wherewithal
to be able to pull this off.
So can you do it?
And that drummer was?
No, I'm kidding.
No, I don't wanna add them, it's not nice.
No.
(laughing)
But the idea there is that you can do this
[ Silence ]
(21:44):
to get to a point, but if you make timing corrections
that are way absurd, you're gonna have to figure out ways
to get around the artifacts that occur.
Now fortunately for the things that I'm working on,
I don't have that issue.
They're so slight for most of them
that it just feels tighter and you don't even hear
the fact that it's been time corrected
in terms of any kind of artifacts or glitching.
(22:08):
But the bigger thing at the end of all of this is,
Yeah, right.
if it's not a song that's meant to be four on the floor,
dance has to be perfect all the time,
don't assume that everything needs to be specifically
right on the grid.
Just don't assume that.
Take something as, it's an absurd comparison, but it makes the point.
(22:29):
Like again, at the top I mentioned like an EDM track compared to like a loose jazz thing.
Uh-huh.
Yep.
Well, the EDM is probably going to be very, very similar in BPM count at the end of the
track as a downbeat of one.
The Jazz track is not because it's going to have like, it's going to travel and go
No.
Yes.
(22:51):
somewhere.
It's going to speed up and might slow down.
It's going to end up in a completely different place, right?
And as energy builds, it might be as much as like 10 to 15 BPM different, right?
Mm hmm. Yes, there's a big difference there.
And sure, you can program that, but that's hard.
It's better to keep the natural feel of the drummer in most cases.
So going on the grid there would just ruin things, wouldn't it really?
(23:14):
Having said that though, these examples that you bring up, we need to make the distinction
of is this a drummer that plays with the feel and the push and pull versus just being out
of time?
Yeah, right.
and the drummer that I mentioned that I had to correct
in absurd amounts, that's just not a good drummer
(23:36):
and required other aspects of things.
(sighs)
I've found in my experience when I do this, and let's say that there's some time manipulation
Mm-hmm.
going on, okay?
I tend to focus primarily on the kick and see where that lines up on the bar.
[Silence]
If that starts drifting too much after like one or two bars, you pull that into time a
(24:02):
little bit right there and then just to kind of retain that feel.
Things like hi-hat and stuff should fall into place pretty quickly if you're dealing with
live drums and you have that all the way through.
But again, I don't go like super anal and try to time correct every hi-hat stroke.
If it's a part that's flubbed, chances are there's a better take somewhere else in the
(24:24):
a song that you can just kind of fly that in. I don't go with the grid thing either.
Mm-hmm.
[Silence]
I want to touch briefly before we round off today about other instruments as well as we're
dealing with this because you obviously had different instrumentation in this song. We've
Mm-hmm.
[Silence]
kind of talked about the percussion, the rhythmic loop type of thing. So I think that that is well
(24:45):
covered. What about guitars or keys or anything like that? How anal do you get with that?
lot.
Same.
[ Silence ]
I look at them after the drums are done,
I then pull in the bass
so that I understand where the bass is pushing
and pulling on the groove of the drums
having been time corrected.
(25:07):
So I have to look at all the where
the little time corrections occurred
and see what happens with that.
Then once I've done the bass and the drums,
I move on to the guitars,
I move on to the other instruments
and finally with the vocals at the end.
Because all of it will eventually need
to be massaged a little bit.
It's not like turn off flex time and hit quantize and everything is fine and dandy.
But I don't immediately turn on beat mapping and then.
(25:27):
Right.
Oh, yeah.
One thing that I find interesting as well is when you have things like guitar or bass
that you're trying to massage into place against the drums, the temptation can be as well as
like trying to do this with your eyes.
So you're trying to like line up transients.
(25:49):
In my experience, that can almost make more harm than good, right?
Oh, yeah.
Because you can get all sorts of like phase cancellation and stuff, especially between
like kick and bass and those type of things, because they tend to live in the same frequency
range, right?
But also things where bass and guitar are doing a similar figure.
Chances are.
I have to listen to that.
(26:11):
It takes a little bit for them to be severely out of time, but to pull them exactly into
time again is probably not going to give you the results that you're looking for.
No, you're not off your rocker, but we should move on to our Friday finds.
You share that as well? So that's good. I'm not completely off by rocker here then.
Yeah.
(26:31):
And new pieces, well it's not new pieces, it's a new piece of software for me
Chris, what have you got this week?
Mm-hmm.
that I was turned on to that I use to great effect these days and it's something called keyboard maestro.
Mm-hmm.
If you remember in on the Mac there used to be something called the automator.
(26:52):
They still have it.
Would you yeah wait you could automate tasks and this thing is freaking fantastic if you need to
(silence)
[silence]
do like repetitive stuff like renaming oh I don't know let's say 90 tracks with a certain syntax
and you got to do that several times in a session, you can automate that.
(27:16):
So you hit a button and boom, it does whatever you want.
So very, very cool. Keyboard Meister.
Just do the search for Keyboard Meister.
It's a cheap piece of software because it's going to save you a bunch of time.
That is my find for this Friday.
And Jody, what do you have?
I'm going with a floor pedal for guitar players or just anybody in general that likes to use
[silence]
(27:36):
foot pedals.
It is the wannabe by Beatronics.
It is a distortion pedal that has the values of a Klon and a blues breaker pedal within
it.
What an excellent name! [laughs]
It has right the wannabe by Beatronics.
[silence]
(27:57):
It has three knobs for each section,
three knobs for the Klon,
three knobs for the Blues Breaker,
[silence]
and then it has switches in between
that allows you to route the signal
or mesh the two of them together.
So you can start with the input of the Blues Breaker
and go to the tone factor of the Klon
to the distortion of something else,
(28:18):
or you can do the opposite.
There's a lot of different combinations that you can do.
Thus, I'm going with the Wannabe
from Btronics for this week.
While we've got your attention, we ask that you go to InsideTheRecordingStudio.com and
Nice.
[ Pause ]
sign up for our mailing list.
You'll need to be on our email list in order to be eligible for any giveaways, and we'll
make sure that you don't miss any future episodes of this insanely cool podcast.
(28:43):
Send us an email at Goldstar@InsideTheRecordingStudio.com with the word "grid," and you'll get something
[ Silence ]
cool back in your inbox.
If you have a topic or suggestion for Chris and I to explain in a future episode, contact
us at the contact page and we'll put it into consideration for a future episode.
With that, I'll say, see you next week.
Thank you very much.
(29:03):
>> Have a great day, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
(
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