Manually Leveling Drum Hits - What's the Best Workflow?

[cpsmusic]

Hi All,

I was tasked with a project recently in which the drum hits were very inconsistent. I know there are ways to make the hits more consistent using compression/limiting/clipping etc. however I'm interested in the most efficient way of doing this manually, that is, by editing each individual hit.

My approach was to split the track's event at transients and then manually set the gain of each event. This is slow!!! So I was thinking that I could use the normalization macro to do this however it seems that normalization is based on the whole file's loudest value rather than the value of individual events - is that right?

I'm thinking that to get around this, I could bounce each event to a new file, in which case the macro would then work as expected.

Just wondering how others are doing this (if anyone else is crazy enough to edit their drums in this way lol)?

Cheers!

 

[Navar]

it seems that normalization is based on the whole file's loudest value rather than the value of individual events - is that right?

Yes, that's what normalization is doing and that's why normalization is rarely a good idea while dealing with dynamic signals.

I'm thinking that to get around this, I could bounce each event to a new file, in which case the macro would then work as expected.

Just wondering how others are doing this (if anyone else is crazy enough to edit their drums in this way lol)?

I would not do this, it could kill the performance because you create complete even transients. And it's a mess too, you would have to create overlapping events to guarantee stable crossfades.
For this purpose I use the Soundradix Drum Leveler. There are other implementations too, Melda has one, but I did not like it that much. Maybe the Sonnox Gate has something too, I'm not quite sure. Augmenting with a sample of the same recording is sometimes a workaround. And maybe there is a way to do this with Melodyne, but I've never tried it.

 

[cpsmusic]

Yes, that's what normalization is doing and that's why normalization is rarely a good idea while dealing with dynamic signals.


I would not do this, it could kill the performance because you create complete even transients. And it's a mess too, you would have to create overlapping events to guarantee stable crossfades.
For this purpose I use the Soundradix Drum Leveler. There are other implementations too, Melda has one, but I did not like it that much. Maybe the Sonnox Gate has something too, I'm not quite sure. Augmenting with a sample of the same recording is sometimes a workaround. And maybe there is a way to do this with Melodyne, but I've never tried it.

I'm not leveling every hit, just bringing them all within a sensible range. I figured out that I can use Lukas Ruschitzka's scripts to bounce each event to a separate file, then I can select any events that need help and normalize them as required.

And I wouldn't worry about "killing the performance", the player doesn't have enough control for that!

Cheers!

 

[Navar]

And I wouldn't worry about "killing the performance", the player doesn't have enough control for that!

Than just re-trigger and replace it in my personal opinion or augment it with samples. If the player does not have enough control, the inconsistent sound will be more of a problem then the peaks of the transients.
Try it as you like maybe it works for you, but I personally never use normalization, I use the tools as written above for leveling a performance, they saved me tons of time. And also samples from the same recording session to replace the worst hits.

 

[SwitchBack]

This is a typical case of "how far do you want to go?".

Especially with a track per piece of drumkit it is easy to drag those to instrument tracks for quantizing (not quite to 100%) and levelling (not quite to 100%), then sample a few useful hits, and build a new track from that with the sound of the original drumkit.