Sample placed in the wrong spot?

[gnogtr]

So I've noticed this before but it hasn't always behaved like this. Here's what's happening:

I'm doing a 100% sample replacement on a snare (all others are fine, ie kick and toms). When I bounce in place (and this even shows up in the triggering when I listen to the track with just the drum bus soloed) sometimes the sample gets put in the wrong place which can be as much as a few miliseconds off. It really happens in fast phrases, 8th and 16th note rolls and even ghost stick bounces. After the track gets bounced I play it back (no effects since it gets bounced with them) and some snare hits sound like flams even though it's not supposed to be. I pull the hi-hat track and the snare track parallel to each other and enter flex mode (Logic 9). When I play the track and get to a hit that's off, I have to move the transient of the snare to the transient of the snare hit in the hi-hat track. After I do that it's fine, but it seems to me that Dgog is putting the sample in the wrong place, not always but it does periodically happen.

It's a ton of extra work because after I get the snare track properly lined up I have to re bounce it and then enter flex time for the overall drum tracks to do any necessary lining. I have a compressor first in the chain followed by Dgog. My sensitivity is pretty low, I have stripped silence to get out hi-hat, kick, toms, etc out of the track because the drummer uses a lot of ghost notes that have to be triggered. I have my transient detail set to the default setting of 75%, when I have it set higher it really seems to get off.

Like I said it isn't always, but it happens more often than not. I was working on a ballad yesterday and the drums are quite exposed so it had to be perfect, and of course after some work I got it there.

Some information about the micing:

Miced top and bottom of snare (makes no difference in the triggering)...however I'm only using the top mic (were going to use a live snare, but the samples sound better). Mic was set at a 45 degree angle to the center (shouldn't matter for sample replacement). We used a 57 on the snare (top and bottom) as well as 57's on the toms and a beta 52 on the kick.

Like I said I have noticed this issue in the past but it wasn't as bad as it was this time, of course this band has uptempo stuff as well as a fast drummer who likes roll type fills and lots of ghost notes. Also to be noted the faster flams don't trigger at all, I have to copy the track up and "make" my own flams.

System:

2 year old Mac
Logic 9 in 32 bit mode
Presonus outboard gear
Alphatrack controller

[Matt W]

Hello,

If Drumagog is having trouble aligning the samples correctly on particular hits, there are a few different things you can adjust:

1. Switch off Auto Align 2 (which switches into transient-based alignment, which might work better for this particular track)
2. If it happens in very fast sections (where the hits happen less than 40ms apart) then switching to "Live" mode might pick up more hits (use the detection slider to fine-tune)
3. The Transient Detail setting best for one section (like a slow, "2 and 4" snare rhythm) might be different than the best setting for a faster section (rolls, ghost notes, etc), either by moving that section to another track (and another instance of Drumagog), or by automating a particular control.