When you play it back, you notice that the snare just doesn’t hit right in a couple of spots. Let’s say you play a simple drum beat with kick and snare into your MIDI sequencer while listening to a click track. Just know that most of the concepts apply when quantizing audio, too. + Read more on Flypaper: “10 Tips for Keeping Your Hip-Hop Beats from Sounding Stale.” MIDI QuantizeĪlthough most DAWs now have the ability to quantize actual audio, quantization is first and foremost a MIDI function, so that’s what we’ll talk about here. What’s more, editing and mixing a bunch of musicians playing semi-arbitrary rhythms that aren’t “locked” to one another can be a pain. Enter quantization… If the player is great and the timing feels great, everything will sound great, but other times it can sound awful (say if a player is just off or inexperienced).
But a human will not hit notes exactly on those mathematically defined divisions. At a given BPM, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes - every note you can think of - lines up exactly into a mathematically and graphically defined place in time.īut, even if we have a numerical notion of tempo, a human tempo could fluctuate over the course of a song which is honestly often desirable, music that is exactly on time every beat for minutes on end can be exhausting. Only, with computers, you can view these beat divisions visually, and edit them in what we call the “grid.” The grid is not at all arbitrary. When reading notated sheet music, we use a metronome to measure tempo, and when working digitally with computers, the same basic functionality applies. At 120 BPM, a quarter note is precisely 0.5 seconds long. One beat here is defined as one quarter note. That’s why, in music, we assign numerical values to tempo to keep it pretty much standard. 120 BPM means there will be 120 beats over the course of a minute. Your “medium” could be my “way too fast,” and so on. If a drummer decides to play at a “medium” tempo, that’s actually a pretty arbitrary idea. It may not surprise you to learn that human timing is not perfectly uniform. Ok, deep breath… and away we go! For hundreds more lessons on beat making, music theory, composing, songwriting, mixing, and more, subscribe to Soundfly here. Let’s dive a little deeper so we can fully understand what this “grid” is, what quantization really does, and when it might be useful to either use or ignore. But on the whole, it’s actually quite simple.īasically, quantizing means moving notes recorded into a MIDI sequencer or DAW in line with the “grid,” which makes a rhythmically imprecise performance end up perfect.
#Bitwig studio quantize how to#
So if you’re unfamiliar with how to use it, it might at first seem confusing and intimidating. + Learn how to break out of repetitive loops and add emotionality and vulnerability to your tracks with Jlin in Rhythm, Variation, & Vulnerability.Īh quantization, it’s one of those terms everyone in music production talks about.
0 kommentar(er)
