Cockos Reaper Tips & Techniques
Technique : Reaper Notes
In the first of this two-part series on drum
editing in Reaper, we look at getting your transients to land perfectly
on the grid.
In
the first of this two-part series, we’re going to go through the steps
of editing a multi-miked drum kit so that the drums conform to the grid.
Basically, we’re quantising a live drum performance to be in perfect
time. There are many reasons for wanting to do this. You might have
a sloppy drummer who doesn’t play very tightly or in time; you might be
adding the drums to pre-recorded parts that were played to a click; or
you might be locking the performance to other electronic elements like
loops, samples or programming that you need to stay in sync.
To
begin, determine which tracks you’ll want to detect transients from. In
other words, what hits are going to land right on the grid and be
timing references? Will it be simply kick and snare, or will you also
include hi-hats and ride? Using hi-hats (or rides) may be more accurate
but may also create a more robotic feel, and I usually find I can get
away with just using the kick and snare, allowing the hi-hats to roam
freely in the spaces. There may also be tom hits or fills that you’re
going to want on the grid.
Well Suited
Once
you have a good idea of what you’ll be placing on the grid, it’s time
to adjust preferences and options. One of the best things about Reaper
is how customisable it is, but that also means that each Reaper system
can behave quite differently. It’s important that you’re using the right
preferences and options so that your system responds correctly to the
technique we’ll be using here.
Go to
Preferences, and under Project/Media Item Defaults, un-tick ‘Create
automatic fade-in/fade-out for new items’ and ‘Overlap and crossfade
items when splitting’. Under the Options menu, un-tick ‘Auto-crossfade
media items when editing’ and ‘Trim content behind media items when
editing’. The ‘Trim content’ option makes it impossible to put multiple
items on top of one another without replacing (or trimming) the first
one. I normally leave this option on, but you’ll see in the following
steps why it’s beneficial to turn it off for now.
Dummy Track
Next
create a new track or ‘dummy’ track. You’ll only be using this track to
copy the items you want to detect the transient information from. It
won’t actually be heard or used past the editing stage. The purpose of
doing this is to make it easier to see the transients from multiple
tracks all in the same place. You could do it directly on the individual
tracks that you have already, but then you’d have to deal with multiple
stages of splitting (one for kick, one for snare, and so on) and work
on items that have already been split. So it gets messy very quickly!
If
you’re going to use just the kick and snare track to detect transients,
you can copy-drag your kick and snare items to this dummy track. (On
the PC, hold down Control and drag. On the Mac, hold down Command and
drag.) You can do the same with the hi-hat or ride if necessary. For tom
hits that are used in fills (and used as a timing reference), separate
them into items just in the areas where they play and drag them to the
dummy track as well. If the drum part is complex, I encourage you to
work on small sections at a time: intro, verse, chorus, for example.
This way you can see and fix problems more effectively. If the process
is going smoothly, you can begin to work on bigger sections at a time.
Copying
the kick, snare and tom fills to a separate ‘Dummy’ track (grey), makes
it easier to split them when it’s time to use Dynamic Split. Choosing
‘Show overlapping media items in lanes’ will also help to make things
clearer.
When you have multiple items on the same track, it may be hard to see them all at the same time. To fix this:
Turn on ‘Show overlapping media items in lanes’ in the Options menu. You will now see each item in its own lane.
Solo
this track and make sure what you’re hearing is correct. (You should be
hearing just the items that you’ve copied to this track.)
Adjust
the levels of the items so that they’re similar. You can do this
visually or by ear. By performing this step, you will be making it
easier for Dynamic Split (used in the following steps) to split the
transients correctly, based on volume. For example, if the snare hits
were louder than the kick hits, it would be more likely to split the
snare hits, while ignoring some of the quieter kicks. Keeping them
closer in volume should mean that Dynamic Split considers them equally.
Adjust the item levels by grabbing and dragging down from the top of
each item, which creates a volume handle.
Select
all the items on the dummy track and ‘Glue’ them using the command from
the Items menu. You now have one media item with all of the transients
you’ll be detecting from.
Turn off ‘Show
overlapping media items in lanes’ and turn on ‘Trim content behind media
items when editing’. As mentioned previously, I prefer to work with
‘Trim content’ turned on so that any items that land on top of another
will replace (or trim) the items in those sections. This way we’re never
hearing two items on the same track playing simultaneously.
Better Together
You
now need to group all of the drum items on all of the tracks, including
the dummy item. This is important, because when you quantise
a multi-miked drum kit, you don’t want to be moving items separately
from track to track, as the spill will conflict between drums. In other
words, if you move the kick item separately from the snare item
(ungrouped), the kick spill from the snare item would no longer line up
with the actual kick item, causing phase issues and other weird
anomalies. It’s thus imperative to quantise all of the drum items
together, using Reaper’s item grouping.
Just
select all of the drum items, right-click and choose Group/Group items.
Then right-click the Item Grouping icon in the toolbar and make sure
that the ‘Selecting one item selects group’ option is turned off. This
allows you to select just the dummy item while keeping it grouped with
all of the other drum items for editing purposes.
Dynamic Split
The next step is to use Dynamic Split to break up the item based on the transients that have been detected:
Using
Dynamic Split and adjusting the Threshold in Transient Detection
Settings allows you to select the transients you want to Split into
separate Media Items.
Select just the dummy track’s item, go to
the View menu and choose Dynamic Split. This will open the Dynamic Split
items dialogue box.
Under the Split Points section, select the ‘At transients’ tick-box but de-select the ‘When gate opens/closes’ tick-boxes.
Select
(in the lower left) the ‘Set transient sensitivity’ button, which opens
another dialogue box where you can adjust the Threshold that sets what
Dynamic Split considers to be a transient.
Adjust this parameter (there are green lines to help) so that all the transients you need are above the horizontal lines.
Close
this window, go back to the Dynamic Split window and select the option
‘Split grouped items at times of selected splits’. This will split all
of the drum items (grouped) even though the dummy item was the only one
selected. Leave the Leading Pad and Trailing Pad parameter set to 0ms
with the Fade Pad off.
Hit the Split
button. This will separate the dummy track’s media item (glued) and the
drum items (grouped) at all of the transients. Confirm that it is
visually correct before moving on.
Prepare For Landing
Finally, it’s time to quantise the items so that the transients that have been detected land on the grid:
After the items are sliced or split at all of the desired transients, as a group, choose Quantise to place them on the grid.
Delete the dummy track.
Go
back to the Item Grouping icon in the toolbar and turn on the option
‘Selecting one item selects group’ by right-clicking its icon again.
Now, selecting any drum item will select its entire group. Note that,
because many pieces are created by splitting, you now have many separate
groups as well, one for each transient that groups the entire drum kit.
Select
all the drum items (one track will select them all), right-click, go to
‘Item Processing’ and choose ‘Quantise item positions to grid’, which
will open the Quantise dialogue box. Leave all the tick-boxes unticked
and choose the note value for quantisation: decide what the performance
contains (1/16ths, 1/8ths, for example) and hit Process.
At this point, all of the grouped hits should be right on the grid.
Listen
back to the drum recording. It should sound tight, but you may well
notice spaces in the performance where Reaper moved items but didn’t
fill the gaps. Next month, we’ll be looking at how to smoothly fill
those gaps. See you then! 0
