Jul/090
Drum Editing
We just finished an album, so we have fresh tracks to throw at this thing... stuff you haven't even heard of yet. That's good news and great timing for us.
However, there's still some mixing and song tweaking to be done. As a first step I'm doing some editing of the drum tracks and consolidating them into the "playable" tracks in the game. For instance, if you miss a hit on the drum pad that goes with the snare then the snare drum drops out of the song for bit, the crowd starts hating you, and you develop some serious self loathing. I've seen it happen to kind, decent people. Like my sister.
So the first step we're taking is to sort the 12 or so audio tracks from each of the drum microphones (2 on the kick drum, 2 on the snare, 2 on the rack toms, 1 on the floor tom, 2 overhead of the entire kit, 2 further back in the room, 1 in the hallway) and group the tracks to correspond to the 5 parts of the RB drum kit - 4 pads and 1 pedal.
There are different ways to assign the drum tracks to the RB kit, but there is a common approach in the current RB songs that we'll use as a starting point - snare, hi-hat, toms, and cymbal crashes get one pad each, and the kick goes with the pedal, of course.
If you know a bit about audio recording, and if you're fortunate enough to have the tracks ready to go, this part shouldn't be hard but it will still take some time.
So less writing and more editing for now...
-Thom