G-Man
So I'm recording a cover at the moment and have "borrowed" the drum track from a guitar pro tab, and , well they (the drums) don't sound great. They are acurate to a point but the sound is just awful, especially the cymbals. While it doesn't have to be perfect I was wondering if there was a Reaper plugin that deals with smoothing out the drums? The cymbal crashes are way too loud and the bass is sometimes too soft, and it's getting irritating. Any tips would be super.
AlanRatcliffe
You have to play with the velocities. The problem with a lot of guitar pro drum tracks is all the drum hits are programmed at 127 velocity. In most decent sampled drum sets, the drums will mellow when you bring the velocities down - just like a real kit. You might find you have a velocity offset on your MIDI tracks, which lets you bring down the velocity of all the notes in the track.
If it's individual drums that are problematic, you may have selection filters that allow you to select just the note number for the cymbals and then you might be able to bring down the velocity of all the cymbal hits by a percentage (you can in Sonar, but you might not be able to in reaper). Otherwise if you have the filters, you should be able to select each drum and cut and paste to a new track to separate all the drums from each other, so you can fiddle with the track velocities to effectively remix the drums. If you can't do any of these things, you might have to go into the track and edit note-for-note, which is a pain, but teaches you a lot.
ParadoximA
I know almost nothing about drum tracks, but I've messed with Reaper's midi editor and can translate Alan's advice into reaper instructions:
Since you already have the midi imported, double click the midi track to open the midi editing window.
In the bottom left of this window is a drop down select tool - right at the top of the list is "velocity". Select it. This will add vertical bars at the bottom of the screen, under each event (note), representing how hard each hit is.
You can then drag the velocity bars bigger or smaller to change how hard the hit is.
If you want to change all the velocities at once, press Ctrl A to select all the notes. Then if you drag one bar, all bars get adjusted simultaneously.
If you only want to change the velocity for one drum (test which is which by hitting the piano keys on the left), right click any of the notes for that drum, then click "select all notes for same note value". This can also be useful for dragging these notes to a different drum, shifting the notes later/earlier, etc.
Another handy trick is to select all notes (perhaps for one drum at a time) and then click Edit -> Humanize. This opens a window which allows you to randomize (by an amount you choose) the timing and velocity of the selected notes. Use with caution, and definitely within limits...
G-Man
Hey thanks alot guys, I'm gonna be trying out those suggestions tonight, there may still be hope! ?
