Getting drums to line up correctly in Pro Tools 12

[DerikS]

This is the disappointing and frustrating par with SD3.

When I import the tracks to Pro Tools, every track is off-beat and doesn’t start off where I had it in SD3. The thing is, I have SD3 and Pro Tools open at the same time so when I record the first ten bars of drums to a song, I’m recording to the playback of the song in Pro Tools. In this case, the drums are supposed to start on the firth bar, but when I imported the tracks, I found the kick drums don’t start until five bars in (so the tenth bar), and cymbals are audible at the second to third bars. Spotting these tracks to their right location will throw everything off, which sort of makes it a problem when you have 3 rack toms and two floor toms altercating that will now be out of rhythm.

Is there anyway of recording/creating grooves in SD3 that will ensure they are better lined up when imported to a DAW to manage avoiding a bunch of editing work, or if anyone has any experience with Pro Tools, how to properly get the tracks lined up so they play in time and are correct?

Topic

[John]

Hi,

being a long time Pro Tools user myself, I must say I have never seen something like what you describe.
I have no problem with syncing, whether it is the Timeline running or draggin from the SD3 Song Track.
Is it possible for you to save me a Session where this occurs, before dragging MIDI from the SD3 Song Track? You don’t need to include any Audio, just ZIP the .ptx and attach to a post here.

BR,
John

John Rammelt - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Brad]

When you say you have SD3 and Pro Tools open at the same time, are you saying you are running SD3 standalone and Pro Tools independent of each other or are you running SD3 as an AAX plugin and you just have the SD3 window open and the graphic active when you are tracking drums?

Mac Studio M1 Max, RAM 64 GB, 1TB Drive, OSX 12.x/13.x and Windows 10 (VM)
DAW: Studio One Pro (always up to date)
DTX Express III (Extreme triggers), Nektar LX88
OWC Thunderbay Mini (4 X 1TB Sata SSD), Express 4M2 (4 X 2TB M.2 SSD), Envoy Express (1TB M.2 SSD)
Presonus Quantum, Faderport & Faderport 8
Black Lion Sparrow Mk2 A/D, FMR-RNP-RNC, MIDI Xpress 128, BM5A, KRK VXT4, Equator D5
2020 Macbook Pro 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Audio(mobile rig)

[DerikS]

@John said:
Hi,

being a long time Pro Tools user myself, I must say I have never seen something like what you describe.
I have no problem with syncing, whether it is the Timeline running or draggin from the SD3 Song Track.
Is it possible for you to save me a Session where this occurs, before dragging MIDI from the SD3 Song Track? You don’t need to include any Audio, just ZIP the .ptx and attach to a post here.

BR,
John  

Sorry if I did not make myself clear enough. I’m not using the Tracker at all. I’m simply importing the audio from SD3 into Pro Tools as audio tracks. And once imported, that’s where the problems begin. Before I upload anything, as I understand it .ptx files are simply Pro Tools session files, right?

[DerikS]

@Brad said:
When you say you have SD3 and Pro Tools open at the same time, are you saying you are running SD3 standalone and Pro Tools independent of each other or are you running SD3 as an AAX plugin and you just have the SD3 window open and the graphic active when you are tracking drums?  

They are independent of each other. When I’m creating grooves, I’m simply having the Pro Tools session playback as I’m creating the drum track.

[Brad]

So my first question would be, is there a specific reason you would want to create grooves for a song within Pro Tools using SD3, outside of Pro Tools? My second question is; how do you do that? I mean how do you get SD3 and Pro Tools to start at precisely the same time? (I have tried to do this with varying degrees of success)
I have created a groove within SD3 as plug-in, inserted in a Pro Tools stereo instrument track, playing along with an audio track in PT2018, bounced the audio from SD3 and imported it back into PT2018 as audio and it lines up properly.

Mac Studio M1 Max, RAM 64 GB, 1TB Drive, OSX 12.x/13.x and Windows 10 (VM)
DAW: Studio One Pro (always up to date)
DTX Express III (Extreme triggers), Nektar LX88
OWC Thunderbay Mini (4 X 1TB Sata SSD), Express 4M2 (4 X 2TB M.2 SSD), Envoy Express (1TB M.2 SSD)
Presonus Quantum, Faderport & Faderport 8
Black Lion Sparrow Mk2 A/D, FMR-RNP-RNC, MIDI Xpress 128, BM5A, KRK VXT4, Equator D5
2020 Macbook Pro 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Audio(mobile rig)

[dgwade1dgwade]

Let me see if I understand this correctly:

From SD3 Stand Alone you’ve exported drums as a .WAV audio file.

From inside ProTools you’ve imported the audio file;

–> this typically makes a new track and plants the new audio at the beginning of the session, eg @ 1|0|000.

Now you haven’t told us where your music inside PT starts.

If it’s not starting at 1, (I often start at 9, eight bars in), then you must drag the Drum track to the right until it aligns properly.

Set PT Edit Mode to “Grid” and line it up.  If for some reason the grid doesn’t align, switch to Slip and line it by ear.

There’s a big assumption, that the Tempo in both SD3 and PT is exactly the same and doesn’t vary.

If it’s not, either go back and redo the drum file or stretch the audio file in PT to fit.

My $.02 worth

Better way to do it:

Save your file in SD3, give it the same name as your tune, save as an SD3 file (not audio).

Inside PT, create an instrument track.

Add SD3 as an insert; open the SD3 insert, and load your SD3 drum file; it will show under “Open Recent”.

Choose “Follow Host” at the bottom.

That should solve any tempo problems,

you may have to drag your drum segments inside the SD3 insert to line up with the music start, that’s easy.

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.3.6
Operating system: Windows 10

• This post was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by dgwade1dgwade.

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