Advanced Audio Engineering
Course 6: Finalizing Drum and Bass Performances

For this course, you will be focusing on Elastic Audio and Drum Replacer to tighten up the song track from the previous lesson, putting the lessons previously learned to practical use. You will work on these areas with your mentor and complete this assignment at home on your own Pro Tools system.

In the first part of the course, you will be using what you learned about elastic audio in an earlier course to make new edits to the track’s overall performance, pushing, pulling, or extending audio selections to match up and sync with the other track recordings or metronome. Elastic Audio can help you with the creative aspect of a song with its time-stretching capabilities.

Then you will take your previously tracked drum performance and make it excellent with new drum sounds that enhance the original performance. Here you will learn how to replace a dull, quiet, out of tune, or badly performed drum sound with a sound in your computer’s drum library.
Your mentor will then upload your session files onto his/her system for your overdub session.

Carefully editing the performance of musical elements is a task that requires an artist’s best musical judgment. While it may be tempting to use cutting and pasting to make a song flow better at this point, we urge against it – those kinds of changes can be made during pre-production or tracking. Instead, we recommend taking your mentor’s input into account as it may help in terms of improving the song arrangement. Whatever you do, take your time and allow your creative instincts to lead the way until the results are just what you had envisioned.