Drum Editing Services: What They Are And Who Actually Needs Them
- drumaudioediting
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
When music producers or audio engineers mention 'drum editing' what do they actually mean? What are the different drum editing services that are generally available and why would we need to use them? In this short article, we break down the different drum editing servcies and which kind of scenarios call for each.
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Drum Editing Service 1: Time Correction/Quantising
'Time correction' is pretty self explanatory, it's the act of editing the drums closer to the tempo grid. Quantising, although meaning the same thing, often is used as a term for auto-time correction methods, such as flex time in Logic Pro X or beat detective in Pro Tools.
When a poor drum performance has been recorded, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Drums are the backbone of any song - the listeners focus on the drums to keep the timing of the song in their head which provokes how they feel about the song. If the drums are slowing down and speeding up drastically throughout the song and lack rhythmic consistency, it doesn't even require a trained ear to pick up on it. This can disengage any listener very quickly which is the last thing you want for your music.
So, who typically needs drum quantising services the most? The clients who really need this tend to be self-recording/producing bands or generally more inexperienced musicians. Although these kind of people need it the most, drum time correction has become an industry standard editing practice for almost all professional recordings, due to the demand for near-perfect sounding drums in modern music.
The modern day abillity for artists to record DIY is a truly beautiful thing. Putting out music into the world has become accessible to almost anyone, enabling more people to express themselves through recording audio. What once was a luxury, hiring out a studio, recording engineers and equipment is now becoming more commonly a thing of the past. Less time constraint, no expensive hourly rates, no naggy front of house audio engineer.
The downside of this luxury is that there's (perhaps) a lack of experience in the room of what it takes to produce a quality performance and drum recording. Couple that with an acoustically less than ideal room and a budget audio recording setup, you're generally left with a huge gap in quality difference.
Now, the issue here isn't exactly the quality of the audio, it's the quality of the performance. If you're recording DIY (or recording at all for that matter), a real emphasis needs to be placed on 'quality recording now, less editing later'. Too many beginner or novice producers/engineers seem to want to get the recording process out of the way quickly so that they can move onto the mixing (the real fun bit).
There seems to be this general attitude of "we can fix this later".
Here's a few simple but effective suggestions from us, so you don't have to hire an expert editor to put out your fires and be your future selfs' best friend.
Ensure the drummer is well rehearsed in terms of their parts and abillity to record to a click
If you have the luxury of time, take the time to record a quality drum performance
Record multiple takes so you have options to choose from at the comping stage (pre editing)
If the drummer is struggling to perform well in the studio, it's also worth recording one-shots for each drum and cymbal. These can be used at the editing stage as worse-case-scenario replacements for stubborn problem areas.
If you're a drummer and reading this, perhaps feeling a little triggered, then I understand your frustration. You're concentrating on using all 4 of your limbs simultaneously while focusing on playing the right thing at the right time, all to a 1D artificial fkn metronome. Recording drums is an art in itself and studio time comes with a lot of added pressure.
If you want to prepare yourself in the best way possible for recording drums, whether it's in your mates bedroom or a dolled-up music studio, then you can read our guide here on how to set yourself up for a sucessful recording session.
Drum Editing Service 2: Converting Drum Audio To MIDI
Why would you want to turn your drums into MIDI notes? Having a phase-accurate MIDI version of your drums gives you or your producer/engineer an option to beef up the tones of your drum shells (kick, snare, toms) by using a drum sampler or virtual instrument.
Some drummers individually may frown upon this, due to the fact it's artifical and takes away from honing your own sound through a fine blend of expensive hardware and accurate tuning. However, this is now a common music production technique for achieving out-of-this-world sounding drums in your mix, beyond what your drum kit, microphones and audio interface can offer.
Although this is a technique used by countless pros, it can also be very helpful and absolutely necessary for self producing artists. Drummer unable to tune his kit? Don't have expensive gear or the knowledge of good mic techniques? If any of these scenarios ring true, then converting drum audio to MIDI is going to enable you to achieve much more professional sounding results.
What is the downside of using MIDI drum samples? Well the hypothetical drummers I mentioned before are absolutely correct to be sceptical because drum samples definitely don't sound human. Drum sample libraries, such as GGD modern and massive are getting really, really good nowadays, however to the trained ear you can almost always tell that they aren't real.
The solution isn't in replacing your drum shells with samples though, it's in reinforcing them. When an editor produces MIDI drums or audio spikes for triggering as part of a drum editing service, they produce these so that they are phase accurate. This means they match the exact same groove as the drums themselves, to an extremely precise tolerance.
The MIDI notes or spikes are also generated to mimic the varying velocities in the actual drum performance. Both of these purposeful features are what enables the sampled drums to still feel human - so they can be blended with the original drums to create a more polished, professional sound, without the flamming.
If you have Logic Pro X, here's a tutorial for you on how to convert audio drums to MIDI for your own music production.
Drum Editing Service 3: Tempo Map Creation
Going back to our previous points about recording to a click, some bands just don't like or want to record to a click. This could be due to the musician(s) lack of abillity to record to a metronome, or it could be an 'artistic choice'.
Some bands and artists prefer to record their music in the studio as if they're playing live; altogether as a unit and soley based off the drummers natural timing. This can create magical sounding performances that are full of energy. It's the variation in the drummers natural timekeeping on recordings like these that orchestrate the emotions and feel of the song as it progresses.
Although this can produce a great group performance, the immediate product is often not suitable to go onto the mixing stage of the production. The drummers recording may capture the vibe well, however as is often the case for recordings like this, the other instruments may not lock in with the drums tight enough to sound radio-ready.
How do you edit the other instruments in time to the drums without a tempo grid? With difficulty is my answer. You can slip edit the other instruments roughly into place, listening by ear, nevertheless if you're after more precise results, this method isn't going to suffice.
That's where creating a tempo map comes in. As part of one of our most life-saving drum editing services, we manually generate a tempo map based off the drums so that the artist or engineer can edit the other elements of the song to a visual grid, making the process 10x faster and the mix infintely more tight.
If you'd like to learn exactly how we do this so that you can save on outsourcing costs and do it yourself, this is just 1 of our 10 Essential Drum Editing Hacks in our flagship PDF guide. Once you have this knowledge, you have it for life, and it keeps money in your pocket every time you use it.
You can read more about how to get instant access to it here:
Drum Editing Service 4: Microphone Bleed Removal/Noise Gating
Whether you have fully optimised your drum mic techniques or not, no mic placement is going to completely eradicate microphone bleed in audio recordings. It's a natural byproduct of having multiple microphones capturing multiple sources of noise in close proximity.
Mic bleed becomes a problem in the mixing stage of a song. Perhaps you're producing your band's new single and you're sprucing up the snare sound with some basic EQ. You try to make the snare sound a little more crisp-sounding by adding some mid-high frequencies.
Frustratingly, this now raises the volume of the cymbals that bled into the snare top microphone. Accompained with the weird stuff the compressor is now doing inbetween snare hits, you now have a mix that lacks clarity in this sonic zone.
To avoid mixing problems like this, it's common practice to add a noise gate to your kick, snare and tom tracks to remove background noise and bleed inbetween hits. This can be quite tricky to do without harming the quality of the production.
All it takes is for the threshold to be slightly too high and suddenly you get the noise gate allowing shorts bursts of cymbals noise into the mix, which is incredibly distracting. On the contrary, the threshold being too low tends to cut a chunk out of the tone of the drum itself, damaging the impact of your drums. There is definitely an art to using a noise gate effectively.
Unlike most audio engineers, I'm generally not a plug-in hussy and I believe you can create great sounding mixes with knowledge, experience and basic stock plug-ins. I have done it. I create drum cover mixes for content creators and on more than one occasion, a drummer has preferred the mix with the stock Logic Pro plug-ins.
With this in mind, I will tell you with honesty, experience and conviction that a good noise gate plug-in goes a long way. One of the best I've personally used, is the noise gate in Slate Digital's virtual mix rack plug-in, available as part of their all access pass plug-in subscription. I wish I was affiliated with them, but I'm not. You can check them out here though: https://slatedigital.com/gates-bundle/
I hope this article has been helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!
Ready to tighten up your edits and work faster with less frustration? Grab our essential PDF guide and start editing like a pro today.
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