What is this midi thing called?

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fwest3975

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On GarageBand ,when you record drums from within the app you can then go to the recording and move individual hits around so each note is prefect timed.
What is this called? I'm pretty sure it's not midi mapping. Is there other daws that have this option of moving midi notes?
 
Also, you can either turn on quantization-- set to a particular note value (32nd, 16th, 8th, etc.)-- so everything you record to MIDI tracks will be automatically quantized, or you can record without quantization and apply it after. But excessive quantization can make things sound too artificial and clockworky, so some DAWs let you humanize MIDI tracks, or nudge event timings away from the quantization boundaries by small random amounts.
 
Although what you are doing is manually quantizing the notes, at a broader level you are describing editing from within what is known as the piano roll. The piano roll is the part of the user interface that allows you to make changes to the midi notes after they have been sequenced. You can do more that quantization though, you can adjust duration, delete notes, add notes, change notes, etc.

It's called the piano roll because of its similarity to the roll in old player pianos that had raised bumps (metal roll) or oblong holes (paper roll) to indicate notes and their duration. Imagine that physical roll unraveled and spread flat. And, all software DAW's that are capable of sequencing midi notes have this functionality.

2012-08-24_210812_piano_002.jpg gb1.jpg
 
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It's also the tool that can wreck the feel of a track, because it is a very blunt instrument. Ideal for 80s/90s technopop where solid drum timing is required, but hopeless for more fluid drum stuff, where quantisation can fix rubbish drumming, but produces tracks totally lacking in realism.

You get different types of quantisation too on the better DAWs - where you can perhaps quantise the kick, but leave the snare, or just sort the hi-hats, leaving the rest. The thing to remember is that fixing poorly timed hits is different to making every hit play on the beat.

Even the most clever quantise setups never quite get it right.
 
The OP was talking about editing, not quantizing. Any good DAW should have some sort of "snap" setting in the piano roll so that you can get MIDI notes right on the grid without quite some much messing around, but you can usually turn that off and just position it freely.

Most Quantize functions nowadays include a "strength" parameter that tells it how close to right on the beat you want it to move the notes. For example if a given snare hit lands 16 ticks before the beat, and you set Quantize strength to 50%, it'll move it 8 ticks closer to the beat. This can go a long way toward preserving a human feel while still tightening up the timing.

Also, a lot of times there's a window parameter that tells it to ignore anything that is too far from the beat. Most of the time quantization is like "rounding to the nearest". Anything that hits between a half beat (by beat I mean whatever beat size you're quantizing to) early and half beat late gets moved to that beat. The window can narrow that up so that, say, it only reaches out a quarter beat or whatever, and those other hits in between dont get "fixed".
 
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