I just started working with these 2 guys, one plays piano, raps and sings. The other plays acoustic, and barely alittle bass. They came into record this song to a drum machine they brought in.

The beat on it was all messed up, out of time. The guy didn't quantize it. So we redid the beat on my drum machine.

They trakded the piano, acoustic and bass, but the playing was sloppy as hell. I hadn't work with them before so I didn't know what to expect.
Anyway we were going to try and loop the sections that were good, but there wern't any played well enough to use.

I spent over an hour tightening the piano track up by nudging the sections around. But the acoustic was so badly played I couldn't find a good enough sestion in both the verses and hooks to use.

Anyway they used uo there 5 hour block and only have a solid drum track and somewhat shakey piano part. There all bummed out because i couldn't use the magic button to make them sound good, becuse they play so bad.

I told them next time we'll map the song out ahead of time, have them play the sections until they get a good enough section of music to use.
What do you do when you get some guys who can hardly play, and they want to loop there track?

I make a chart of the tune by sections or bars and keep doing takes grading each section on the fly on a scale of 1 to 5.
As soon as I have enough takes so that a 3 or better shows up in each section I comp together the tune doing my best to correct problems along the way.
I then ask for a check and to have my name left off the credits.
Be careful about polishing s**t too long. It won't turn to gold. All you'll do is end up with it all over your hands.

Can you try quantizing the audio to a grid?

If they suck that bad, I have them play the parts to a midi paino and do some form of Iterative quantize. If they want the real thing... tell them to hire a professional piano player or bassist.

If they want to do it all on their own... let them do take after take (by sections) until the cows come home...and bill them for it.

AK

For sure I've been doing this all night tonite with a track that has Audio, midi, and the kitchen sink, and so far I've run everything but the vocals through beat detective on the MPC groove quanitze. It worked great on the acoustic and bass to line up with beat which was made up of me on BFD's for kick and snare and then me on my set with a malet on the low tom and a stick on the ride. It's weird cause I sucked at the rythem and somehow beat detective made me sound so locked into the BFD kick and snare, ran it through a side bus with comp and whala, I don't think these guys will know the better. Now if I could just friggen get my Ebow chops together its a slow tune and it sounds dope with Ebow but I just keep screwn' my takes up.
post audio maybe tomorrow. Oh and these guys that played have less rythem than the all white choir that my wife trys to lead sometimes. (imagine half clapping on the 1 3 and the other 2 n 4 neither in great time!)
So yea I feel ya on working with non-studio guys especialy when the last session was with goooood studio cats.
sam

Jeremy if you think its bad I'm watching American Idol right now...


yea could be way worse...

I'm watching the Ducks and the Sharks.

Setting up a grid and using BD in such a way is somewhat a mystery to me. I've used BD with limited success. I need to hok up with some who can show how to make it work.

Anyway, like I said, I didn't know how bad they were. And they were happy with the original takes.
Really though, if your that bad, you really shouldn't be in a studio to print how bad you are, so your friends can hear how much you suck.

This is a new one on me, expect me to polish this terd, and make you sound great?

A few suggestions that work for me when using Beat Detective.

Record with a click (or other sound or simple beat). Beat Detective works best when it doesn't need to do much 'fixing'.

If you are working on drums, make a group first. You want to edit all the drum tracks together. Work in small increments like 4 to 8 measures at a time. Make sure that you input the start and end measure/beat and that those values are the same as what you've highlighted. Otherwise you'll get into trouble when you select 'conform'.

Experiment with how many 'slice' points that BD makes. You can manually insert or take out them out later. I usually try not to have more than where the sixteenths would be - compare the ones BD puts in with the grid. Less is better. You can always work in smaller increments of measures or beats.

After you perform the 'conform' function, play the section to make sure that BD didn't move some of the slices to the wrong grid points. You might need to manually move the incorrectly placed slice(s).

After everything is in order, perform the 'smooth' function. I prefer the second option - i think it's something like 'fill gaps' and smooth with some predetermind millisecond value (something like 5 ms).

This is REALLY tedious work, by the way.

Sometimes I just have Drumagog convert the drum audio to MIDI, quantize the MIDI to some 'loose' value and then play BFD.

I have used Beat Detective on bass, piano, guitar (before any amp modelers/plug-ins) with good results.

"What do you do when you get some guys who can hardly play, and they want to loop there track?"

Break out the 9mm...I think Phil Spector was onto something...