AA2 before or after drum quantizing?

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Total AA noob, here (today). Literally only watched some YouTube videos. Reaper DAW.
Impressed me enough to get it. Intermediate-ish+ music producer. Remote/mobile studio side business.
Quantize the grouped drum tracks before or after AA2?
Also…any Reaper users familiar with how to auto-aligned tracks and “print” them…so you can take auto-aligned tracks…drop them in…and take AA2 off, to save CPU? Or, is it not very CPU heavy?
Like I said…noob, here…
Thanks, everyone…

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Hey @nihmjim ,
First of all, as a general rule of thumb, when quantizing multi-mic setup, it’s important to apply the same adjustments to all tracks, not just some of them, also any quantizing based on time-stetching could change the phase. So I guess you’re quantizing by chopping regions and putting them at the right time with some fades. similar to what’s mentioned here.

AA2, would still work just fine as long as all the tracks were moved together (you didn’t break their time/phase relations).

But…
Ideally, AA2 alignment can be made on the raw tracks before any edits - that way AA2 gets the maximum data it can on the actual recording. that would work just fine also after quantizing.

Also…any Reaper users familiar with how to auto-aligned tracks and “print” them…

For ARA, as of writing this you need to use Render Track to Stem with AA2 only that track.
If you’re not using the ARA mode, you can freeze the track of to that insert.

(you can ensure the plug-in is actually using ARA or not with the about screen, if the instance is using ARA then it will have ARA suffix to the plug-in format).

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Here’s how it works best… Lets say you’re working on drums.

  1. Track drums
  2. Comp takes
  3. Edit takes ( I do comping and editing at the same time)
  4. AA2 → use kick or snare as the Key and make sure its not moving any mics more that a couple milliseconds in either direction
  5. Print AA2
  6. Remove AA2
  7. Strip Silence your mics (optional)
  8. Mix

But as Tal said, make damn sure you have your drum tracks grouped so they all move together when comping and editing, or else you will have an unfixable disaster on your hands

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