Hey all!
My friend and I recorded drums for a single we want to release. Our audio interface has eight inputs, but we mic’ed up the drumkit with ten mics (kick in, kick out, snare top, snare bottom, crash overhead, ride overhead, rack tom, floor tom, room & close hi-hat). We ended up recording the room and close hi-hat mic through a separate audio interface onto my friend’s computer (not an ideal fix, I know) and recorded the rest to mine. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of recording at different sample rates (I had 44.1 kHz while they had 48) and the room and hi-hat stems they sent me don’t align with the rest of the stems I have, the drums are always out of sync at some point, even when they start off aligned.
We’re using Reaper, I’ve tried batch file item conversion to make the sample rates the same, and even stretching out the room and hi-hat stems to align, but no matter what they still won’t align with the rest of the eight tracks. There’s always section that’s out of sync somewhere in the song.
We would really like to have the room and hi-hat tracks in our drum mix, are they unsalvageable? Is there a different fix?
The problem is beyond the sample rate (not that it helped!): two computers unsynced means two different clocks running at slightly different speeds, probably with some variability throughout. These will never match up; you have to edit them into time.
So it's either group the hats & room tracks together and edit them when they get too off, or don't use them in the mix (you don't have enough hats in the overheads? rooms are just reverb?).
Either way, never do this again. Plan this properly. If you're using a Mac, make an aggregate device to use both of your interfaces on the same computer.
OP- This is the sad and unfortunate truth about your room mic. The hi hat mic had already seen its useful life on this planet.
You might be able to grab a sample of the snare in the room mic and trigger it from the snare close mic and see if that gives you a cool result. If so, follow with other shells.
Really clever idea!
You can’t record (in time) to 2 separate devices without a word clock to synchronise them
First off those are tracks. Not stems.
When you import the tracks from the other DAW just set your DAW to convert to current sample rate for any sample rate issues
But that’s not your issue here. It’s that the timing clock between the two different systems wasn’t synced
You can certainly
Thank you. Have an updoot. If I could give you more than one as a group, I would. But then again, that would be
"Have a stemdoot".
Well yes, but it isn't just the sample rate. When you record with several different input devices, you need one that sends out a clock signal. i.E a signal (48k times with 48 kHz sample rate), that tells the devices when those samples actually occur. It is called digital clocking. Without it, even when you record to the same computer it can be off time.
They are basically unsalvagable. if you have overheads then usually there is enough hi hat signal (i have yet to not mute hi hat mic in my 15 years of mixing)). With the room you probably have to create a fake one.
Amen!
Luckily in the last few projects i know the recording engineer and he has this funky mono room mic inspired by the garden hose from silvia massey - and that thing overdriven is quite cool. So i got that instead of a hi hat mic
Thank you so much! We'll make sure to never do this again in the future, haha
Play the room+hihat tracks on the 44.1 machine and send them out of that interface into the interface for the 48k machine.
Record them on the 48k machine.
You will now have those tracks recorded with the clock of the 48k machine and they will line up with the rest of the tracks.
This of course means you are adding noise from the additional D/A then A/D conversion but the timing issues will be minimized.
You will have to decide if the noise is worth saving the effort to re-record everything entirely.
I'm not really sure this would work, but it's worth a try.
I've done it to sync live recordings on Pro Tools rigs that weren't clocked together, its not ideal but it does work.
Very cool. Would not have thought of that at all.
Feeding the A/D into the clock of the 48k rig in real time forces it to be clocked with the same master clock that captured the rest of it. At least in theory.
Hard to be sure without hearing it, but my guess is that you won't be able to use the hi-hat (because it is so close to the other mics that you might get audible phasing artifacts with this method), but that you might be able to use some form of slicing beat align on the room mic, and that the diffuseness and distance hopefully won't give issues as long as you slice and don't stretch. Worth a shot, anyway. (PS don't align your OG tracks, or at least phase lock them to each other (and not to the room track)
Quantizing the audio is the best way to fix it. https://youtu.be/PXCbvjU9t6Q
I would quantize the 8 channel set to the grid without stretch manipulation, then quantize the two tracks with stretching enabled.
Btw, this happens when you don't know the pull down bit you need to set when converting 48->44.1 besides clock time base synchronization.
Thanks! We'll try this.
Don’t make decisions about the drum performance based on the drum sound. If you were already planning on gridding the drums; yeah; you can probably follow along well enough with the room mix afterward. But don’t quantize for the sake of getting the room mic back.
Tracks, not stems.
Just convert the sample rate and then edit the two extra tracks to be in time with rest of the tracks. It's extra work but otherwise not a huge problem.
And of course next time you'll remember not to do this mistake again so you've also learned something which is always nice bonus.
I'm just curious about this. In sections where the two machines were slightly out of sync, how many samples (roughly) was the error? In other words, how many msec apart were the two tracks at the worst places?
STeMz yo
It’s pretty easy to fixe this:
You can use timestrech or similar feature to modify the length (and just match the ends) but it’s more correct and u get less artefacts if u do it by adjusting the pitch/speed.
As someone mentioned it may well drift in and out of sync due to the two clocks not being synced, in which case just cut it into sections, align the start, then pitch it to make it the correct length.
I'm not sure how to do this in Reaper, but in Pro Tools, you just import the wrong sample rate files into the correct sample rate session and click add instead of copy and it'll fix it. If you can't figure it out, send me a link & I can do it for ya. Takes like 30 seconds.
You shouldn't need to do any stretching. Just align them my ear, get them the best they can be. If there are any channels that are doing strange things, offset them (delay) so that they are not competing for the same transients. Mute all, solo each one by one. As you do, flip the phase (ø) and listen how it affects the mix.