Lock tracks so other tracks are aligned to group?

[elvisish]

I'd like to be able to phase align my overheads, snare and kick nice in the same group, then lock them, add my tom mics and align the toms to the rest of the mics without them being affected by the toms. Since the toms are rarely played, they don't need to compromise the rest of the mics, but they could still have some minor adjustment. Is this possible? Using seperate busses wouldn't work as they wouldn't influence the toms without use toms influencing them.

[MeldaProduction]

You are talking about MAutoAlign, correct? Well, I'd personally suggest against this - align all microphones, that are close to each other, e.g. multiple snare drum or kick mikes. Overheads together etc. If the mikes are too far away, they become too ambient and the whole aligning won't make much sense anymore. You can of course experiment, but from my experience it just doesn't make sense.

Anyways you can always put multiple MAutoAligns (MAA) on the same track, but there's a catch, imagine this:
Snare drum - MAA group A
Tom - MAA group B
Overheads - MAA group A - MAA group B

Here you first analyze group A with snare drums. MAA will realize that overheads are delayed (since they are further away from the drum), so it will delay the snare drum appropriately. Then you start analyzing group B with toms. MAA should again realize that the overheads are delayed, so it should delay the tom. So in this case it is fine. But in some other cases, where what I have hear as overheads would be something different, that would be further away from snare, but close from tom, the second aligning would actually make the first aligning incorrect.

The thing is, delaying is single dimentional, there's just one value - distance, hence time. But the space is 3D, so in fact once you record something using multiple mikes, the result cannot be perfectly aligned no matter what. What MAutoAlign does is just trying to find the best possible solution given the limited possibilities.

[elvisish]

Thanks for the detail! Thing is, I've been finding that I get great results when I just align the two overheads, top and bottom snare and front and back kick all together, but things get mushier if I include the four toms into it, and since they rarely get hit in compared to everything else, be just been leaving them unaligned. It would be nice if they could benefit from a child alignment from the rest of the kit, but this doesn't seem possible. Would you just suggest leaving them as I have, or including them in the rest of the alignment?

[sirmonkey]

Perhaps a naive question, but....
Could you use Auto-align as described already, and then just manually align the toms (or whatever has just a few hits)? In other words, why not just nudge or drag the track by a few milliseconds in your DAW?

[elvisish]

Perhaps a naive question, but....
Could you use Auto-align as described already, and then just manually align the toms (or whatever has just a few hits)? In other words, why not just nudge or drag the track by a few milliseconds in your DAW?

Cause I don't trust my own judgement as much as I do auto align!

[mibby]

-- OR -- What if you auto-aligned the toms with the snare top mic? ...Making sure that the snare top was the baseline for the snare group, i.e. the MAA in the snare group with the "0" ms reading.

[mibby]

Thinking about it - I guess that is the same thing as putting them all in the snare group and using the snare top as the baseline...

[MeldaProduction]

I'd recommend doing what I described and then just use your ears to decide if the 2nd alignment is an improvement or not.