Okay, so I like to crunch all my drums into one track (or as close as possible), and when you have a lot of elements mixed in on one track, keeping track of the hits, and copy/pasting them from another step can get confusing really fast. How to fix this?
Well, use Voodoo editing!
The setup for this is as follows: Make your voodoo doll on a pattern you never will use for anything except editing your sounds. For me personally, I make a drum pattern and use the 4 tracks dedicated to specific drum sounds: Kick, Snare, Hat, Ghost Snare. I program in the general feel I want from those sounds, edit them so they sound good together, etc. Basically, I take the drums to where I want them to be as if they were in a single track. Export those sounds into your sound pool, all four of them.
NOW, make a new pattern, the one you DO want to keep and use and create a song with and on your single track you decide to put all your drums on, use those same sound pool sounds you made on the other pattern, using parameter locks, step microtiming, etc. to get it sounding good. Add in your hats, kicks, snares, everything. Set up your voices to not use more than necessary.
But wait, you just realized your hats are just TOO LOUD! This is where voodoo editing can save you lots of headaches! Go to your original âdummyâ drum editing pattern, dip into the amp screen and turn it down, re-export it to the same sound pool location then pop back over to your main patternâŚand boom, the hat is now satisfyingly lower volume!
You can use this technique for any kind of sound, but I find it most useful for dealing with complex drum sequencing that uses a single track to handle all drum duties. With all of the microtiming, pitch changes, etc to get all of the voices timed right, changing the volume or tone of just one element over the whole pattern leads more destruction than I intend but with voodoo editing, if I want to change the entire feel of the snare over my song, I simply drop back into the dummy pattern, make the change, then listen to it in my main pattern! EASY!
This has probably been mentioned as a technique before, but I thought Iâd provide a real-world use case for it that has definitely helped me as of late do complex single-track drum sequencing without putting forth as much effort as I previously did, laboriously editing every step just to make a tiny change overall.
Peace and keep FMân!