ProTools is in my opinion the best DAW for editing instruments. It is super simple to make any drum part snap straight to the grid. I’m going to briefly show you the quickest way of doing this on ProTools. I will do this for any demos, however, if I am editing drums for a real mix, I will make sure the drum part is almost perfect first and then make minor edits by hand if they are needed.
In this track I have a stereo drum track made from MIDI and bounced out just as an example, so the drums are already pretty much in sync. Firstly, you select ALL of the drum tracks (if you have a set up with kick, snare, hats, toms, overheads and room it will help to group them all) for the section you want to edit.
You then click on “Event” followed by “Beat Detective”. This will open a dialogue box. All you need to do is make sure “Clip Separation” is selected and then click “Capture Selection”. Once this is done you click on “Analyse” and then you will see your edit selection fill with pink lines outlining the transients (you can choose sensitivity of analysis – I usually go with 40%). Then alt + click on any lines that aren’t specific drum hits to get rid of the pink line.
Then you click “Separate” to cut the clips up into transient hits which will be quantized.
Finally, you move down to the “Clip Conform” section and pick what rhythms are needed to be played, and when you are ready, just hit “Conform”. This will snap the different clips into the nearest grid (which you have selected) much like quantizing MIDI.
Once this is done and you are happy that it is perfectly on grid, you can move down to “Edit Smoothing” and then just hit “Smooth” and the clips will be crossfaded.
This is a super useful, quick and easy way of editing drums; however, it is always better to have a drummer play in time and with a bit of groove. You can repeat this process with drums and some guitar tracks.
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