Audio Editing / Drum Editing
_ What’s Audio Editing?
It’s the process whereby we take the music that you’ve laboured over creating
and recording, and make it sound like it was played by a bunch of talentless robots
who hate you! Want to place an order now?
Thought not!
Audio Editing is one of the more contentious things that we can do to recorded music but it’s a powerful tool in the right place. No one gets too concerned over the fact that a singer will record several passes of a lead vocal and the takes will be comped into a “best of” final version or release. Likewise guitar players hide themselves away when no one but the assistant engineer is around and re-record 42 takes of the 3 note intro, yet the drummer who is the heartbeat of the music is expected to nail a multi part instrumental piece with double kicks at 220 BPM, and the bass player is supposed to lock in tighter than a shark’s bum!
I’ve had the pleasure of playing with some very good drummers who will record to a click and keep it rock solid. They sound great, and when you listen to them recorded you find that they don’t always play dead on the beat, their playing breathes with the music. Take one of these parts and force it to a dead-steady grid and hear it wither to meh! This is the thing that drummers fear when they say “don’t make me sound like Robert”, and in absolutely every single case where I have hard-quantized a drum part to a grid I have ended-up going back to the original played part and just fixed the odd beat (*). Getting back to high quality live timing is like walking into the sunlight! When editing is done well and sympathetically you don’t even notice the hours of work that go into it, the track just somehow locks solid and hits harder than it did.
What else do we edit? Get the drums right and then see what’s really needed – and do as little as is really necessary.
(*) If the drummer’s playing makes you feel sea-sick to listen to you then it’s still editable, but it will sound rubbish – in time but still rubbish and you should probably consider the sort of editing that puts someone else on the throne for the re-recording session!
Audio Editing is one of the more contentious things that we can do to recorded music but it’s a powerful tool in the right place. No one gets too concerned over the fact that a singer will record several passes of a lead vocal and the takes will be comped into a “best of” final version or release. Likewise guitar players hide themselves away when no one but the assistant engineer is around and re-record 42 takes of the 3 note intro, yet the drummer who is the heartbeat of the music is expected to nail a multi part instrumental piece with double kicks at 220 BPM, and the bass player is supposed to lock in tighter than a shark’s bum!
I’ve had the pleasure of playing with some very good drummers who will record to a click and keep it rock solid. They sound great, and when you listen to them recorded you find that they don’t always play dead on the beat, their playing breathes with the music. Take one of these parts and force it to a dead-steady grid and hear it wither to meh! This is the thing that drummers fear when they say “don’t make me sound like Robert”, and in absolutely every single case where I have hard-quantized a drum part to a grid I have ended-up going back to the original played part and just fixed the odd beat (*). Getting back to high quality live timing is like walking into the sunlight! When editing is done well and sympathetically you don’t even notice the hours of work that go into it, the track just somehow locks solid and hits harder than it did.
What else do we edit? Get the drums right and then see what’s really needed – and do as little as is really necessary.
(*) If the drummer’s playing makes you feel sea-sick to listen to you then it’s still editable, but it will sound rubbish – in time but still rubbish and you should probably consider the sort of editing that puts someone else on the throne for the re-recording session!
