Re: Isolating drums - toms
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jmh
I was also thinking of doing something like eqing the kick & snare (unlistenably) and sending them to a return and using that to key a levelizer on an output track but thought it would be more difficult - in retrospect, this would probably be better as you could listen to the end result before you wrote it to a file - and for that matter, listen to it sitting in the mix. I'm not sure if that is doable - but if not, there are other ways to accomplish similar things.
I think you would need a levelizer on the return to send to an a virtual buffer too.
But forget all of that (and this is a footnote to myself for any future attempts), here is a cleaner way:
4 levelizers:
1 on the snare. Send to virtual buffer A.
1 on the kick. Send to virtual buffer B.
2 levelizers on the troubled tom track,
the first keyed to A and a notch eqed for predominantly snare.
the second keyed to B and low passed for kick
Then set the tom compressors for a very low threshold and turn up the ratio as needed. This should attenuate the leaked kick and snare appreciably and attenuate those hits more in proportion to their loudness - which you can't do with the ducking method. Also the resulting artifacts will also be in proportion to the snare and kick hits, so should be more easily masked.
Edit: I was thinking that the two send tracks be gated to avoid minor triggering - but this is unnecessary, as turning up the appropriate tom threshold would accomplish this.
Fortunately there are other tom tracks in this world polluted with those other drums, so I daresay I will get a chance to try this...
Re: Isolating drums - toms
BTW, Long ago there was a thread that touched the difficulty of using two levelizers on one track. Someone responded with a way to make them look different, which I quickly forgot. If anyone remembers, thanks ahead...
Re: Isolating drums - toms
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jmh
BTW, Long ago there was a thread that touched the difficulty of using two levelizers on one track. Someone responded with a way to make them look different, which I quickly forgot. If anyone remembers, thanks ahead...
Hmmm... well you could always turn on a gate or compressor, section setting the parameters to be ineffectual, or change the output level, one one of them. Anything like that to make them look different. Not great, I know.
Re: Isolating drums - toms
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jmh
Edit: I was thinking that the two send tracks be gated to avoid minor triggering - but this is unnecessary, as turning up the appropriate tom threshold would accomplish this.
While this would probably work well, having the threshold near the very minimum would give you a very linear response to the undesired hits. On the other hand, lowering the response to the minor hits may be appropriate. Just trying to make a record of the details...
Also, using the compressor on a 'send' (i.e. kick) levelizer with 0 attack and minimal release should approximate a 'hold' setting on the compressor of the track that is being processed. This assumes that the virtual buffer send is after the compressor - which I am not sure about.
Re: Isolating drums - toms
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jmh
BTW, Long ago there was a thread that touched the difficulty of using two levelizers on one track. Someone responded with a way to make them look different, which I quickly forgot. If anyone remembers, thanks ahead...
Copy the Levelizer file to another directory
Rename the file as Leveizer 2
Move the renamed file back to the original directory.
You now have two different files of the identical plugin. I don't know for certain if that will make what you want possible, but I don't think you will break anything by trying. Only, just in case, create a new version of the EDL you try this in to protect your work.
Re: Isolating drums - toms
Re: Isolating drums - toms
I had the perfect track to try it on. I didn't check but, it might have been the same session that yielded the song that started this thread. I did the four levelizer method - it actually worked pretty well - or I think I got usable output. I had to stop working on this song and let my mind rest for a few days before I'll know if it is better than what I had (I've learned I have to do this if I focus on one thing for a couple hours). Anyway it was quite confusing. If I had to do it again, I would follow this path:
Save the edl with another name clear all of the tracks but the ones you want to work with - in my case, the kick snare and tom I had to slide the snare track left (I had already done so for the kick, as I had a kick gate trigger directed to a muted output track). Then build mix to file.
Here is why; I had started with the actual snare track - which I soon replicated so I had one that I could mess-up. I was working with the 3 tracks marked. The kick chained levelizer was working well, but the snare not. The original snare track was a send to the 'virtual buffer A' but now was muted (or not marked) so it was filling the buffer with noise. There were several other curve balls to swing at in addition to messing with the wrong levelizer all the time. The bottom line is you would never want to reopen a session with this stuff in place later on. It was hard enough doing it in one shot, and reopening this setup would just be an invitation to burn yourself. Anyway if you try this, the simplicity of a nice 3 track setup will save time...
Re: Isolating drums - toms
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jmh
I had the perfect track to try it on. I didn't check but, it might have been the same session that yielded the song that started this thread. I did the four levelizer method - it actually worked pretty well - or I think I got usable output. I had to stop working on this song and let my mind rest for a few days before I'll know if it is better than what I had (I've learned I have to do this if I focus on one thing for a couple hours). Anyway it was quite confusing. If I had to do it again, I would follow this path:
Save the edl with another name clear all of the tracks but the ones you want to work with - in my case, the kick snare and tom I had to slide the snare track left (I had already done so for the kick, as I had a kick gate trigger directed to a muted output track). Then build mix to file.
Here is why; I had started with the actual snare track - which I soon replicated so I had one that I could mess-up. I was working with the 3 tracks marked. The kick chained levelizer was working well, but the snare not. The original snare track was a send to the 'virtual buffer A' but now was muted (or not marked) so it was filling the buffer with noise. There were several other curve balls to swing at in addition to messing with the wrong levelizer all the time. The bottom line is you would never want to reopen a session with this stuff in place later on. It was hard enough doing it in one shot, and reopening this setup would just be an invitation to burn yourself. Anyway if you try this, the simplicity of a nice 3 track setup will save time...
Glad you're on top of it. My head starting hurting after the second Levelizer. ;)