Drums - Audio to midi

Teetonetal

a few years back I recorded some tracks and the only way to get drums was to play an ekit and record the headphone output. Now, I am not a good drummer. I would like to revisit the tracks, and use midi drums - ideally triggered from my original tracks. 

Is this even possible? If so how (reaper ideally)

richh

Probably easier to re-record now and take outputs to MIDI within Reaper.  If you can convert the audio to MIDI it certainly won't be easy.  If you still have an e-drum kit, it should be easy to record and go direct to MIDI, possibly recording the audio outs at the same time.

guitarfishbay

If it's on a stereo track it'll be a pain with anything.

I'm not familiar with Reaper but if I was doing this in Logic I'd probably do it by listening and copying by hand and line the play head up with audio transients and place Midi notes on a drum sampler track at the same place. This is assuming it's a part where it's easy to see what's going on. If the waveform looks like a brick then there's no point. I've never tried to do this on a whole drum track before though.

It won't take forever but it will be a PITA to reprogram. Neither Trigger nor Logic's in built drum doubler would do well with an entire drum track (but both work on individual shells). 

If you're capable of playing the parts again through Midi just do that for entry then edit the Midi. That's probably quickest

Teetonetal

urgh, I was hoping it would be a bit more doable than that. Sadly since we moved house I can't put the e-kit up anywhere, so it's gone to the band rehearsal room - that means I'm even worse now as I haven't played for a long time and recording it will be a total PITA

Maybe I will have to play in by hand through a keyboard.

Danny1969

I've been in this situation before and even it's a straight enough beat then extracting the kick and snare hits is relativity easy. If it's complex playing with lots of ghost notes and rolls  on the snare then it's not

To recapture your snare hits put a gate on the track and set the threshhold so it only opens on a snare hit ... as the snare is generally the loudest thing then that's generally easy, then set the output of that track to a spare bus, make a new track and set it's record input to the spare bus you outputted to. Then you will have a track of gated snare mush. Don't worry about the quality, your only using it to trigger new hits. Then you use something like Trigger to put a nice prestine snare sample everywhere there was a snare hit

Repeat on the kick drum as above but  setting the gate with a preceding low pass filter so the only thing with enough low energy to trigger it is the kick drum 

That will get you kick and snare, crashes can be generally be done manually. Hat and ride are more difficult but you might find the new pristine kick and snare sounds ok in the mix with the old drum track high passed around 200hz 

Teetonetal

Danny1969 said:

I've been in this situation before and even it's a straight enough beat then extracting the kick and snare hits is relativity easy. If it's complex playing with lots of ghost notes and rolls  on the snare then it's not

To recapture your snare hits put a gate on the track and set the threshhold so it only opens on a snare hit ... as the snare is generally the loudest thing then that's generally easy, then set the output of that track to a spare bus, make a new track and set it's record input to the spare bus you outputted to. Then you will have a track of gated snare mush. Don't worry about the quality, your only using it to trigger new hits. Then you use something like Trigger to put a nice prestine snare sample everywhere there was a snare hit

Repeat on the kick drum as above but  setting the gate with a preceding low pass filter so the only thing with enough low energy to trigger it is the kick drum 

That will get you kick and snare, crashes can be generally be done manually. Hat and ride are more difficult but you might find the new pristine kick and snare sounds ok in the mix with the old drum track high passed around 200hz 

Food for thought. Thanks

guitarfishbay

I personally wouldn't use Trigger for the sound replacement unless the source had the dynamics you wanted. Exporting to Midi would be preferable in that situation (as velocity could be edited), but if you're going to gate to do that you could just bounce and do it by hand to save the money.

Trigger is good but unless you're working with printed drum tracks regularly I'd save the money. I also have a super rare bug in my Trigger where every now and then some hits are miles off the grid, I've found for me I'm actually quicker setting Logics doubler to high sensitivity and deleting unnecessary hits as at least they're dead in time. Bear in mind only a tiny number of people have this bug with trigger. Bizarrely my triggering audio is fine it is just Midi export that sometimes is wonky.

Teetonetal

Listening to the track - I don't the drums are particularly difficult - I'm thinking I might transcribe it, then hand drum it in. It's quite relative and due to my limitations fairly easy - only the snare fills would give me grief.

timing is wonky in places. though.

Really need to the vocals and drums again.

In case anyone wants a listen to see if it's easily fixable. Sure the mix needs work - but I liek the song and the drums really bug me.

TheBigDipper

Interesting challenge. I'm not a drummer, so have no suggestion that involves drums or sticks. All I'd say is think how much time you might spend setting up an automated solution (as per gates/triggers, etc. - which is completely possible and innovative) as opposed to just programming the MIDI from scratch.  If it's 50 songs, then automation might be worthwhile. If it's 10, maybe not. 

Me, I'm not good enough with my DAW to do anything other than just reprogram and do a lot of copying and looping. My drum parts demonstrate that beautifully until/unless I get a proper drummer to do it again later! 

guitarfishbay

That won't take too long to program from scratch tbh.  Once you've got the Midi it'll be easy to fix the timing.

TheBigDipper

One other thought (untested, I'm just spouting off)...  I don't know if Reaper has the same sort of software drummer facility that Logic has. If it does, you might be able to get Dave the software drummer (or whoever) to generate a drum part automatically using the feature that gets it to follow another track. Usually you'd follow the bass or rhythm guitar, but why not follow the audio drum track you already have? It might deliver something usable as a starting point. 

duotone

TheBigDipper said:

One other thought (untested, I'm just spouting off)...  I don't know if Reaper has the same sort of software drummer facility that Logic has. If it does, you might be able to get Dave the software drummer (or whoever) to generate a drum part automatically using the feature that gets it to follow another track. Usually you'd follow the bass or rhythm guitar, but why not follow the audio drum track you already have? It might deliver something usable as a starting point. 

I must say I love the Drummer feature on GarageBand (on my ipad) just wondered if you know of any other software that also has this "software drummer"

ToneControl

http://www.avid.com/plugins/tl-drum-rehab

not sure if there are any non-Protools equivalents

Teetonetal

duotone said:

TheBigDipper said:

One other thought (untested, I'm just spouting off)...  I don't know if Reaper has the same sort of software drummer facility that Logic has. If it does, you might be able to get Dave the software drummer (or whoever) to generate a drum part automatically using the feature that gets it to follow another track. Usually you'd follow the bass or rhythm guitar, but why not follow the audio drum track you already have? It might deliver something usable as a starting point. 

I must say I love the Drummer feature on GarageBand (on my ipad) just wondered if you know of any other software that also has this "software drummer"

@Duotone Logic also has the same drummer as GarageBand, there is also a third party VST called JamStix by Rayzoon http://www.rayzoon.com/

It's a little different in that you load up one of your tracks with a plugin that then triggers the VST to play, with the VST itself hosted on a seprate track. It works and for repaer etc I'm not sure you have any other choices, but I think drummer is better choice for Logic as it's integrated.

duotone

@ToneControl Cheers, I should have said that I'm trying to learn with my first DAW Presonus, Studio One 

@Teetonetal Thanks, I think someone mentioned that one in an old thread I did ages ago, will look into it properly. 

stratman3142

Celemony Melodyne might be good for this. You can try the fully functional demo for 30 days.

http://www.celemony.com/en/trial

I recently got the Editor version, which is great for non-real time conversion of audio (i.e. my guitar) to midi, but I've not tried it on drums. It work well in Reaper or as Standalone.