One of Tracker’s incredibly useful features is the ability to select trigger points based on their note divisions. This allows you to select trigger points and then alter the selection as a group. For example, you could select all whole notes on a snare drum and raise their velocity together, or you could select the quarter notes of a ride cymbal and change their articulation to the bell. In this example I’ll be using a hi-hat and I’ll outline the procedure for selecting all eighth notes and changing their articulation as a group.

Make sure to download the attached project file to follow along as these instructions will outline the process on a step-by-step basis.

1. Load the attached audio files found here into Tracker. This is done by simply dragging them into the Tracker interface.

2. Tracker will automatically analyze the files and find all hits. For the hi-hat contained in this file, Tracker detects some of the hi-hats as open when they should all be closed. This is easily fixed in one step by selecting the ‘Hi-Hat Track’, then clicking the drop down menu in the ‘Sound Recognition’ section and finally selecting ‘Edit’ and changing the articulation from ‘Multi’ to ‘Closed Tip’. Don’t forget to click ‘OK’ to save your selection. All steps can be seen in the image below.

3. In order for Tracker to understand the note divisions in the loaded audio material it must know the tempo. Click the ‘Find Tempo’ button near the top of the interface. With this file, Tracker will automatically find your tempo, so you won’t have to do anything here other than click ‘Update Tempo Map’.

4. Now that Tracker understands the tempo of the audio, we will be able to select the eighth notes on the hi-hat and change their articulation. Make sure that the hi-hat track is still selected and then click the ‘Select’ menu and choose ‘1/8th Notes’.

5. With all of the eighth notes selected, we can again go to the ‘Sound Recognition’ window as we did in step 2 and change these selected eighth notes to ‘Closed Edge Articulation’. The only extra step here will be to make sure that the ‘Apply to Selected Notes Only’ option is clicked in the ‘Sound Recognition’ window.

‘Select Notes’ is a great technique for quickly editing the feel of Tracker’s output. Now, when played back, the hi-Hat will have a much more human feel and add to the dynamics of the groove.

Michael Sanfilipp