One of the most important aspects of getting a
professional sounding recording these days is pocketing your tracks.
Basically, this is editing each track to get the best feel and
tightest performance possible.
If you are a “pure” musician this probably sounds like cheating – and it is.
Just like tuning your vocals...
But it has become part of the norm of modern music and your songs
will not compete with the masses struggling for radio play without this
crucial step.
Most of my experience with pocketing is based on the
book Multi-Platinum Pro Tools by Nathan Adam and Brady Barnett.
I came across this book only 18 months ago and it totally changed my
approach to post production and mixing.
This approach is recommended whenever you use live musicians,
especially rock, country, pop, etc.
It is less crucial for most electronic music or hip-hop, but would
still be useful on vocals for all styles.
If you do a lot of recording with live musicians or mixing of this
type I highly recommend you get the book.
One question that often comes up when talking about
manually pocketing tracks is:
why not use the audio quantizing features in my DAW?
The answer is that sometimes you can and it will actually save you
some time. But it is never as
easy as quantizing MIDI, and the results are usually less than professional
sounding. Use it for very
background instruments or try it out on other parts and you might get lucky
and have it come out sounding great.
If not, undo it and get to work doing it the hard way.
So how do you go about pocketing tracks?
The first thing you need to do is determine the master rhythm track
that will be the basis of the song’s feel.
With modern recording techniques this is often a loop that the band
played to. If the band didn’t
play to a loop, it could be the drums or the primary rhythm guitar.
You want to pick a track that plays through the entire song (or
nearly all of it) and that has great feel, not a stiff performance (this is
part of what makes this different than quantizing).
If you are recording new tracks I recommend using the loop approach –
find a loop that expresses the feel you want to achieve in your recording
and use that as your “click track”.
If you’re stuck with a bunch of tracks that don’t seem
to have any clear winner, pick the best one and solo it.
Zoom in and listen while watching each note.
Whenever there is something that bothers you, fix it.
You can rely on the grid to some extent (to see if notes are just way
behind or way ahead) but remember you are going for the right feel so use
your ears more than your eyes.
After you’ve gone through the entire track this will be your master rhythm
track for the rest of the process.
The next step is to start pocketing (aligning) your
other tracks to the master rhythm track.
You want to go in this order:
Drums, Percussion, Bass, Guitars, Keys & other instruments, Lead
Vocal, Backing Vocals. Let’s
assume your master rhythm track is an acoustic guitar that was recorded
first. In your edit window, zoom
the acoustic track vertically so you can see the rhythm of each string hit,
no matter how quiet. When you
are pocketing drums it is vital that you treat all drum tracks as one
instrument (assuming they were recorded together).
To do this, group all of your drum tracks so that any edit takes
place across all tracks. Now you
can hide all tracks except kick and snare and your master acoustic guitar.
Put the kick on top, acoustic in the middle and snare underneath.
This allows you to focus on these tracks and easily see the alignment
of both kick and snare to the guitar.
Now you are ready to start pocketing.
Start at the beginning of the drum track.
Cut out any audio to the left of the first hit.
Place a short (5ms) fade on your cut so there won’t be any clicks.
You should see these edits occur on both your kick and snare tracks
even though you are doing it on one or the other.
If not, ensure they are properly grouped and the grouping settings
are applying edits to all tracks.
DAW features vary so see your DAW manual.
Now for the scary part.
Grab your entire kick track and slide it so that the first hit is just ahead
of the guitar note (2-4ms). For
most of these styles of music I like the drums to be just ahead of the other
instruments. If you are going
for a laid back drumming style you may go behind the guitar.
Just be consistent throughout the process.
Now you probably realize that you just threw your entire drum track
out of alignment from where it was played!
It’s ok – we’re going to go through the entire track anyway and
pocket each note. Yes, this is
time consuming. You can plan to
spend 1-2 hours per track when you are first starting.
Trust me, it is worth it.
You are going to live with the results forever!
But it is not really that scary as most DAWs have a feature that let
you move regions back to their originally recorded location.
In Pro Tools, use Spot mode, select the audio you want to move (not
the audio you spent all that time pocketing) click the audio and in the
dialog that comes up click the arrow next to the Original Time Stamp time.
Okay, let’s move to the second drum hit.
We’ll assume it is a snare hit and
that it is ahead of the beat (based on the acoustic guitar).
Place a cut right before the snare hit and drag your track to the
right so the snare hit is 2-4ms ahead of the guitar.
Now you’ve got a hole in your drum audio that you need to fill.
Grab the left edge of your snare track (right before your hit) and
trim the audio back to the left to fill the gap.
Create a cross-fade and you’re done.
What if you trim to your left and it reveals a previous
drum hit? Sometimes you can get
away with trimming just before the hit and then grabbing the audio on the
left and trimming it a little to the right to fill the gap.
But this won’t always work.
This is when you use time compression/expansion.
The goal is to stretch the
previous hit so that it fills the gap.
But you don’t want to stretch the transient, just the sustaining part
after. Place a cut just after
the transient (about 4-5 cycles into the waveform) and use stretch function
to stretch your sustaining drum beyond the gap and into your existing audio.
Turn off stretch and trim back your un-stretched audio (on the right)
back over your stretched audio (on the left) and cross-fade.
I know this is confusing, if you really want to get this technique
down get the book.
So now you have all of the basics for how to pocket
each note of each track.
Techniques for each instrument vary slightly.
For bass, you want to line up the start of the actual note, not the
finger/pick sound. This is
typically 3-4 cycles in to each note.
Don’t be afraid to leave space before bass notes, it creates a
cleaner sound (unlike drums above).
Distorted electric guitars are pretty easy and you can get away with
murder on cross-fades and stuff.
Vocals can improve dramatically from alignment and removing sibilant
transients from doubled or harmony parts.
The process of pocketing tracks is tedious and you will
be tempted to say “good enough”.
Be disciplined and complete the process.
You will be pleasantly surprised with the results and it will make
you rethink the process of mixing entirely!