Remove everything, but leave drums

Report · May 24, 2018

I have an alternative rock song I want to sync with a short film, but I have some problems matching the song drums to the video cuts.

I am using the audio waveform in Premiere to help me understand better where the drums land so I can make the cuts there.

However, because of all the other musical instruments and the voice, the spikes in the waveform for the drums are not evident.

I would prefer to remove everything and just leave the drums, to help me do a spot on editing.

Is there a way to accentuate the drums in Audition?

This is the original song.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11JS-xU7-Jpc-RfdPZgmXd01TwapvN64L

This is my experimentation in removing everything else and accentuating drums, but the drums became muffled and mix in with the noise. The data on the waveform is not that helpful. (please lower the volume when you are playing it)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15SaVh3XZmLbs74aYbdUhOy8foG6YawUt

Report · May 24, 2018

Having listened to your original, and your attempt to isolate the drums, I don't think you'll actually get much better results than that - they really aren't that clear in the original (although that might be because it's an MP3, which is never a good starting place for this sort of exercise). If what you've got is reasonably accurate, then it's not much of a drum track anyway, and all you really need to do is concentrate on the BD beats. The chances are that the video cuts are simply in the wrong place; the normal way to do this is to sort out the sound first so that it's continuous and then cut the video to it (preferably on the beat). Back in the day I did loads of these sorts of videos, and because we were doing it with tape editing, this was, in practice, the only way to proceed if you wanted any sort of a decent result.

Report · May 25, 2018

Thank you for your answer.

What does BD in "BD beat" stand for?

Report · May 25, 2018

BD = Bass Drum! (aka Kick Drum - that big one you play with a pedal, and which provides the basic beat)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_tablature - see the 'key or legend' section.

Report · May 25, 2018

It is very easy to see where the BD beats come in the Spectral Frequency Display. So you could go there and add Markers to the audio file which, I believe, should show up in Premiere to align your video cuts too.