Drum editing?

Drum editing. It sucks.

You see, I can handle myself fairly well in a live environment because the groove there is physical, i.e. I either can see the other players and benefit from the band's natural rythm or they can follow me; also, if I practice with my MP3 player on, the whole song already has its groove so it's a lot easier to play in that situation (note to self: find some other way to practice drums).

So drummers, if you want to be recording stuff, you better be ready to play to a click track; yeah yeah, kills the groove, whatever. It's either that or you'll be drum-edited :-)

When drum editing, two things are important: 1) edit while all the tracks are playing so that by trying to fit the notes to the grid, you don't accidently kill the sync with the other instruments (yes, those can move too) 2) look at patterns in the drum playing; for example, I noticed that I start fills a tiny bit early which makes me be early for the next x measures. Note to self: be patient, the nice fill will sound better if you wait :-)

Finally, this: bass and kick have to be aligned. Really. You will notice such a huge difference by moving them in sync by even a 1/32th note. My ears seem to be more sensitive to rythm discrepancies in the lows, go figure.