Newbie to Audio Transients, Quantize, etc.

Nate74

HR4FREBR
I posted a specific question in the SONAR forum, but realize I could also use a basic education on this topic.

Essentially, I'm trying to use a snare drum track to create a MIDI file to trigger a sampled drum. I realize this has been done for years, but I've never needed to attempt it.

So the first step in the process is to have my DAW identify the audio transients (what I would call snare hits) on the track and get it to ignore the hihat bleed. I can get it to do this, but it puts some right on the wave form but some are slightly off. I'm assuming it is trying to adjust closer to the beat where the drummer was off a bit?

But if I create the MIDI from that information, the the sample won't line up with the rest of the drum track, in particular the snare drum sound on the overhead tracks.

I'm assuming there is some what to tell it not to do this adjustment but I'm not even sure what that adjustment might be called so I don't know how to search for it.

In retrospect, I should have just made the drummer go get a different snare drum... :(

Any guidance would be most appreciated.
 
I'm not familiar with Sonar, but it sounds like it might be automatically quantizing or snapping the midi events. Turn that off. I don't know if it's a setting on whatever dialog you use to generate this notes or on the timeline or midi editor, but I'm almost leaning toward the timeline/editor. That probably doesn't help you much.

But you know there are plugins out there that can do this kind of thing in "realtime"? Drumagog was the first big name, but there are a bunch more out there nowadays. Some you actually load the sample into the plugin and it will detect the hits and playback the sample all in one plug. Others only spit out midi and you have to use something else to playback the sample. Again, I'm not sure which is best or how it actually works in Sonar since they have different types of tracks for audio and midi and then instruments are a different thing altogether, but it might be worth looking into.
 
I'm not familiar with Sonar, but it sounds like it might be automatically quantizing or snapping the midi events. Turn that off. I don't know if it's a setting on whatever dialog you use to generate this notes or on the timeline or midi editor, but I'm almost leaning toward the timeline/editor. That probably doesn't help you much.

But you know there are plugins out there that can do this kind of thing in "realtime"? Drumagog was the first big name, but there are a bunch more out there nowadays. Some you actually load the sample into the plugin and it will detect the hits and playback the sample all in one plug. Others only spit out midi and you have to use something else to playback the sample. Again, I'm not sure which is best or how it actually works in Sonar since they have different types of tracks for audio and midi and then instruments are a different thing altogether, but it might be worth looking into.

Thanks! I will look a little further to see if there's a way to turn that off. No, I hadn't actually done enough research on the topic to realize there are other ways to do it. Though the method you describe makes sense. I have found a couple free VST plug-ins that claim to do it so I may try those as well. I do like the sound library I currently can use with the MIDI approach so may concentrate on getting the snap/quantizing thing figured out first though.

Thanks for the guidance!
 
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