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As promised, a little tute on Beat Detective - in my opinion one of the more useful and exciting toys Digi have implemented.
Beat Detective does several things. In essence it lets you:
- create a tempo map and bar/beat grid based on the beats present in any audio region (usually drums, but can be anything with a good groove)
- automatically separate regions at threshold-defined beat points (like strip silence does)
- conform (i.e. quantise) these regions to either a strict grid, a preset groove template, or a user-created groove template
- automatically seal and crossfade separated regions
Beat Detective is located in the Events menu (cmd-8 on the numeric keypad)
It would take too much time to explain everything about Beat Detective - the PT reference guide has a whole chapter devoted to it, but I have quick-start tute here that would be useful for anyone using played and sampled parts and loops in a track.
I find BD is easiest to learn with reasonably tight, percussive audio in neatly trimmed loops. You can move on to whole songs and complicated stuff later
EXAMPLE
In this example, I have a three percussion tracks - shaker, bongos and cowbell. The shaker is pretty straight and the others aren't too bad, but all were played by a human and as a result are a little bit loose, creating little flams:
The whole arrangement:
The percussion soloed:
I could simply separate the loose beats and nudge them into place, or snap them to a 16th note grid. But then I would lose the nice human feel and it's a little tedious. Instead I'm going to use Beat Detective to gently quantise the beats against each other.
Beat Detective will do two things for me:
1) Create a groove template out of the beats in the shaker loop
2) Conform/quantise the bongos and cowbell to the shaker
PART 1 - GROOVE EXTRACTION AND TEMPLATES
First step is to open BD and select the shaker region and:
1 - Select Groove Template Extraction from the list at the left
2 - Select the beat resolution of the groove - for my shakers I have chosen 16th notes
3 - Capture the highlighted selection - the start and end bars are entered into the appropriate boxes
Now we are ready to analyze the region for it's groove.
4 - Click the Analyze button
5 - Slide the Sensitivity slider until yellow bars appear on the region's beats. Adjust the slider until the bars neatly fit each desired beat (note I didn't need 100% - this was too much and made too many separations). These bars will determine the beat-points for our groove template
6 - Click Extract... to save the beat-points as a groove
Once extracted, a dialog will ask if you want to:
- save the groove to the clipboard (temporary in RAM), or
- save the groove to disk as a template
In this case I will save to disk and a standard dialog asks me to save it to a folder. The default is PT's global Grooves folder, but you can save it with (eg) your session if you prefer. I have saved mine with the name "Shaker Loop 16ths"
PART 2 - REGION SEPARATION
Now I need to separate the bongo and cowbell regions into individual beats for conforming.
The pic shows only the bongos highlighted and analyzed but ultimately I did it to both. Note you can only do it to one track at a time.
7 - Select Region Separation from the list
8 - Select the beat resolution for separation
9 - Select the area to be analyzed and separated
10 - Analyze the selection
11 - Adjust the Sensitivity of the analysis
12 - Separate the regions
Now we can see both the bongos and cowbell with their regions automatically separated:
PART 3 - REGION CONFORMING
Now we will move the regions to their desired new position using the "Shaker Loop 16ths" groove template we made before.
Again, the pic only shows bongos highlighted but was done to both.
13 - Select Region Conform from the list
14 - IMPORTANT - MAKE SURE THE SELECTED AREA IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS FOR ALL PREVIOUS STEPS. If it isn't it throws the template out of time and it moves your audio to the wrong place
15 - The first option available is to conform to a Standard grid. Several settings can be adjusted below this.
However, I am going to conform to a groove. By clicking on the 'standard' pop-up, we can also select Groove, and a second pop-up appears
If I click on <none> I get my list of preset and custom grooves. Note you can select Cubase, Feel Injector, Logic and MPC grooves. You can also see some of my custom-made grooves, including my newly saved Shaker 16ths groove.
16 - you can see the groove is now active
17 - I have reduced the Timing strength down to 88%, to keep some 'looseness' to the overall feel to keep it more human
18 - Click the Conform button and the regions move into place
Now we can see all the regions look nicely in line with each other
PART 4 - REGION SMOOTHING
The last thing to do - if needed - is to smooth over the rough edges left from moving the regions. The smoothing function automatically fills gaps between regions and adds fades if desired.
19 - Select Edit Smoothing from the list
20 - Select Fill Gaps only, or Fill and Crossfade
21 - Smooth the regions - you can see the little fades and smoothing points circled in the pic
THE END
All things going well, you are done! Now I would group or consolidate the regions to make them easier to duplicate to a grid.
To finish off with, some "before and after":
Original percussion soloed:
Conformed percussion soloed:
Original arrangement:
Arrangement with conformed percussion:
In the end a quite successful way to add that extra polish to my groove. I also have a nice swinging shaker groove as a template to use in other tracks in the future
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