Midi files suck

[Womac911]

Especially bad midi files.

Been trying to perfectly replicate Bonham's Whole Lotta Love drums using Steven Slate Drums. Warts and all. Midi timing is so horribly inaccurate to the original tracks, so I'm using Pro Tools to slide notes perfectly into position using the original drum track as a guide. But when the Midi track is missing half the drums to begin with, geeze....

The beginning is very close. Starting at :13 The last 3rd is made up of the original midi score. And this was supposed to be a "pro" midi score, too. Awful. :nightmare:





What do you use for midi drum tracking? Wish Protools had a drum tracker. Piano roll sucks, but the ability to slide notes by sample position is great, down to the zillisecond. Haven't seen another program that does that.

 

[mwd]

I send a Logic project with the original track mapped out to an awesome drummer friend. He plays a Roland electronic kit triggering sounds in Superior Drummer. He dropboxes the result back to me which i render in Superior Drummer or Studio Drummer. Can use some stock fills to change or merge with live playing for spice.

 

[Womac911]

Good idea.

I discussed the project with the drummer for Zep tribute band "No Quarter" after much adjustment from what you hear above. Got much closer, but still tedious.
It just amazes me the poor quality and attention that people put into midi files. The file I started with was advertised as "90% accurate" I'd expect it to be pretty close, but it was so wonky..

 

[mwd]

There is great fluctuation in realistic sounding drums even in the pro ranks. For example both Superior Drummer and Studio Drummer come with MIDI loops. Superior is near unusable (to me) while Studio Drummer has absolutely awesome, and very realistic, playing.

 

[fret]

I've got BFD2, running in Logic 9. So I use Logic's midi editor a lot for drum tracking. BFD has a bunch of "groove" midi files that I use as a starting point and then start hacking away at the MIDI by hand. Going back and forth between takes of guitar and the drum sections till the groove is right, sometimes using the transients as a helpful guide. Sometimes just guessing or experimenting with different timings. Sometimes I watch the cursor track over the bar and remember where it was when I wanted the drum hit to go. Then I can pick up notes and slide them over without snapping to grid by hitting Ctrl or something on the keyboard.

The built in grooves cover 85% of my needs. The rest I improvise.

 

[SeasonOfPain]

What do you use for midi drum tracking? Wish Protools had a drum tracker. Piano roll sucks, but the ability to slide notes by sample position is great, down to the zillisecond. Haven't seen another program that does that.

I find Cubase's drum editor to be much better than ProTool's piano roll. I'm not sure if there's a precision to the individual sample when dragging (I don't know how I could hit something that precise), but you can certainly offset selected hits by exact amounts via a dedicated command. I like that you can do this in a random fashion for a whole series of notes, adding a much more human feel.