Hi, got a bit of an odd one here that I'm not sure I trust my ears on. I'm working with a band right now, and since their drummer's feet are all over the place in regard to velocity (pretty typical metal drumming, light on the fast stuff hard on the slower) I've been experimenting with a new technique.

I zoom in and make a slice between every kick hit (or every two hits, depending on how much I want to preserve the two-foot feel of a part), then crossfade the slice, highlight a whole pile of these and have been normalizing to -5db. It seems to be fairly effective, though if I try to normalize too many at a time Cubase (5, haven't gotten 6 yet as I'm on XP) freaks out and crashes, not surprising really.

The first issue is just that scrolling the screen left and right seems really jumpy after this is done, I'm thinking all those edits are slowing it down and confusing it?

The bigger issue is that during playback, the kick drum seems to be played sloppily. At first I thought the volume normalization had just uncovered bad drumming, but after going back and listening back and forth between the normalized and original tracks, I'm actually thinking it seems to be a playback issue. It sounds like the drummer is just tripping up a bit, some hits too late, some too early (the part in question is a straight double kick part), sounds fairly sloppy.

My question is two-fold. I'm liking this normalization trick so far, it's not the ideal, but it's getting the kicks to a more level playing feild so I don't have to crush the hell out of them with compression, I can just use compression to control the envelope of the hits - which I like.

So A: is it possible that this is actually a playback problem? I've heard Cubase have playback issues before when I was taxing my comp hard, but it's always been ALL the tracks that were playing back. In this case, all the other drums, guitars, etc are all still nicely on the click and fine, it's just the kick drum that sounds like it went to hell.

And B: is there a way that I can merge the sliced up kicks into one event for the whole song, retaining the volume normalization for each hit? And I guess question B.2: might doing this help out at all to correct what to me seems like simply asking too much of my computer's processing?

This is a new one to me! Any help would be massively appreciated.

EDIT: One more thought, it just occured to me that this newfound sloppiness might have to do with the crossfades between hits as well. I'm going to experiment with tight gating to get rid of everything between hits and see if that resolves much. Either way, all the edits do seem to be taxing my DAW/Comp, so I really do still need to find a way to resolve that problem, especially as I start doing this to the entire 8 songs...