Drum Editing - Stretch Markers in REAPER

hi I'm Kenny Choi welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video I'm gonna show you drum editing using stretch markers in Reaper now there's a few advantages and disadvantages of using stretch markers to edit drums the big advantage to me is that you don't have to quantize everything as you'll see we can quantize certain sections the tops of bars just the kicks and snares at least some of the ghost notes and fills alone but the downside is that we are stretching the audio which requires a time stretching algorithm so in theory we are degrading the sound at least a bit how bad that is is up to you if you don't like the results that you get I would suggest using the non stretching method which involves cutting the items quantizing them and then trimming back and cross-fading on every split I'll show this method in a future video called ruminating without stretch markers but in this video we're going to use them so the multi micron project in front of us let's see what it sounds like it sounds pretty good but it's slightly out of time and we could hear this better if we play it against the clique with a metronome right here you could hear it's not perfect but we want to tighten that up so it's closer with the click so the first thing we want to do is group the drum tracks because we recorded it with many microphones we have a kick track a snare a snare bottom a pair of Tom's a pair of overheads a pair of room mics and a far room so all these tracks need to stay in sync so we're gonna start by grouping them so suck them all like this go to the menu under item and choose group group items we could also do it just by hitting the key G and see right over here that little button lets us know it's grouped but in order for them to behave like a group we have to turn this on over here item grouping now if we move one they all move together now we also need to right-click the toolbar and turn off selecting one item selects the group this is a very useful feature if you want to select one and have them all be selected but for this process we need to turn that off right-click it of here so now if we select one it doesn't select them all but they're still going to behave like a group so now we want to create stretch markers and to do this we first want to choose which transients to analyze again the benefit of using stretch markers we don't have to quantize everything so he could just quantize the kick the snare or the kick snare and overheads but for this performance we're just going to do the kick and snare and with the high hats or cymbals fold in between how the drummer played them which will keep some of the drummer's original feel let's start off with the snare well select it then we're gonna go to the View menu and choose dynamic split now this dialogue is normally used to split our items based on that transience but we're going to use it to create stretch markers so I'm going to turn on transients and leave off when gate opens and when gate closes we don't need that for this then we're going down over here to set the transient sensitivity let's move this out of the way and we could set out threshold to grabbed as the transience that we need in this case the snare hits I'm going to turn on this option right here display threshold in media items while this window is open so with this chosen we get these vertical lines right here so we adjust this up and down we can see where it's going to grab it's only gonna grab things that are higher than these lines so if we go too low it's gonna grow these high hat hits in between so just bring it up so just grabs the snare heads then we can close this and switch this from splitting selected items to writing stretch markers and if we choose this option right here right stretch markers it's just going to write stretch markers to the snare like this these are stretch marks but that's not gonna work for us we need to write stretch marks for all the tracks so we'll choose this option instead right stretch markers to selected items and add two grouped items so if we choose this instead right the stretch markers all the tracks now have them but there's still a problem we just have stretch mockers based on the snare hits we also want them based on the kicks so it's select the kick track and do the same thing what's open dynamic split but there's a problem with this it's gonna start all over again for the kick track it removed the snare based markers see they're gone but there is a way around this let's first duplicate the kick right here then we'll choose one of those kicks and open dynamics play set the transient sensitivity for the kick the threshold make sure we get all the kick hits right stretch markers and it wrote stretch markers for the kick hits but notice in this track the snares are gone but that's okay we duplicated it so now we could delete this track and we could still use this kick track because this wasn't the selected one we stole the snails stretch markers and the kick stretch markers on this kick track and now all the stretch markers line up for our kick hits and the snare hits but I am noticing it didn't create one in this snare hit right here so it's zoom in let's place one right here we can create one by clicking it hitting shift W and he created stretch marker right there and because the tracks are grouped that stretch marker is on all the tracks what zoom in on this first kick and make sure there's one there and there's not so let's add one and instead of using shift W we can just hold down modifiers and click it on PC it's all controlled on Mac it's option command hold them down and click and that also creates a stretch marker and now we have stretch markers for every single hit so now we have two different options we can either quantize it by hand by turning on the grid setting that grid but set it to eighth notes and I could shift it around manually read this one move it here so nearest downbeat and do the same with each one of them move to bar 3b to move this one to bar three beat three and so on but there is a much quicker way let's undo that and instead what select it right click it go to stretch markers stretch markers insulted items and snap to grid this is gonna snap all those stretch markers to the nearest grid in this case a grid is set to eighth notes but we can change it to whatever we need in the snap settings so let's choose it and our stretch mark is move to be in time so now let's hear that back against the click that sounds a lot better let's turn the click off now we should also listen back for any glitches or problems and we could zoom in to make sure each one is in the right spot that one is what's your back something sounds off right there let's delete some of stretch markers on the PC hold on alt on the Mac hold down option and just delete them to see what the problem is there's a fill under there playing sixteenth notes so quantized it to eighth notes we don't want that but this illustrates a great point we're only quantizing right here and right here the start of the film and the downbeat after the fill everything in between is pretty much how the drummer played it so a keeping some of the drummer's feel which is one of the benefits of stretch markers we don't have to quantize everything now if we did want to quantize the drum fill we could just zoom in and put a stretch marker right here another one right here one here and finally one here and we could either manually move it around like this well we can do it automatically by selecting it all the tracks quite a time selection just for this section right click go to stretch markers stretch markers in selected items within time selection that's why we created a time selection and then snap to grid and it's just quantized those four hits so they sound like this and again the beauty of stretch marks is we can remove some of those markers like the sixteenth notes this one and this one to retain some feel retain all that feel by removing these two as well so that's pretty much it that's straw meditating using stretch markers in Reaper I hope you learned something hope you can use it and I'll see you next time Thanks ah you

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 16,330

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Id: sJ0DpFjelaM

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2016