quick quantize question

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razmat

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do you have to setup quantize before recording. or can you take an already recorded track and add quantize to it? thanks
 
You can use quantize when recording MIDI, turn it on with a click at your transport panel.
You can't use quantize when recording analog instrument like guitar or bass or vocal etc. If we can do that, then we don't need to practice with click anymore.....
 
Naw you can quantize audio, it just isn't anything that can be done with any sort of set in stone perfection.

You can also make the click track fallow the worlds shittiest drummer as long as he can at least count to four.

There is a lot of turd polishing you can do, it just tends to be REALLY meh compared to just playing it right when you record.
 
Guitargodgt said:
Naw you can quantize audio, it just isn't anything that can be done with any sort of set in stone perfection.

You can also make the click track fallow the worlds shittiest drummer as long as he can at least count to four.

There is a lot of turd polishing you can do, it just tends to be REALLY meh compared to just playing it right when you record.
Click to expand...

THREAD JACKIN: I'd like to pick your brain on how to make a decent drummer sound perfect when not recorded with a click track. If even possible. The whole quantize thing has given me gray hairs. They are not the hairs on my head either, which I am not real happy about. I have not yet been able to create a tempo track for a whole song successfully. Not from a track that was recorded without a click anyway. Any suggestions GGT?
 
You can use the tempo warp tool and markers but it's tedious and you need to mix down the drums into a stereo track for easier analysis.

Cheers :)
 
I use the time warp tool and drag the timeline to fit the drums. Takes around 20-30 mins for a drum track depending on how bad it was....

And even with that, the only thing that lines up is the downbeat and sometimes beat 3 (because you can line that up as well).

Here is a screeen shot of how crazy the tempo map ends up looking:

Picture1-59.png


I have not tried the new stuff in 6 yet (still on 5 at the moment), but my experience with audio drum quantising is that it's best done by hand... which means there isn't really any fast way of doing it.

The best is when the drums were done to a click and your only tweaking small sections instead of the entire song.

Also: This technique is awesome for editing drums in cubase: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/794136/slipeditcubase.swf
 
Hey man, thanks for that technique link. That command setup totally helps! Now I have to figure out another issue that just started. 'X' stopped inserting crossfades yesterday and autofades aren't working. I had initially thought this was due to opening a clients LE 4 project, but now it is not working on a C6 project either. Still searching for a setting, tho looking like I may have to trash prefs. :(
 
Just to follow up; trashing preferences did the trick. Saved myself a backup this time. :)
 
Nice! Yeah always shitty when things stop working and you forget how you got them to start working.
 
I've got Cubase 6 and have been using the new group quantizing features. In fact, I did it yesterday. I had recorded some drums for my band a couple of years ago for a pre-production song and we pulled it out for a re-work. The drums were ok but they weren't perfect even though they were recorded to click. On top of that there were only four tracks (kick, snare, and two OH) so I figured it would be a perfect oppertunity to try get the group quantize to work.

Truth be told, it's not fool proof. You still have to give it one more pass to check if it missed anything but it didn't take long and in a few minutes I had the drums quantized to near perfection (I used the Iterative Quantize to 80%).

I then went through and triggered the toms that were missing with SSD samples and the drums ended up sounding huge! We are now going to use those drum tracks for the final album.

I give the new group editing feature a thumbs up!

Cheers :)
 
I got a bit flustered when I first tried using the group quantizing. I was attempting to get it to work on drums tracked without a click track. That is a pain in the arse! I will have to revisit that now that the hair I pulled out has grown back. :D
 
Or laugh out loud at bands that wont play to a click, then want you to fix their 'feel' to be 'tight' LOL!
 
jimmys69 said:
I got a bit flustered when I first tried using the group quantizing. I was attempting to get it to work on drums tracked without a click track. That is a pain in the arse! I will have to revisit that now that the hair I pulled out has grown back. :D
Click to expand...

Well, Cubase needs a reference, i.e. the grid, to quantize the audio to. So audio that was recorded without a click has little chance of being manipulated into keeping time to a preprogrammed tempo because Cubase 5 and below is not capable of analyzing the audio to determine the meter.

However, with C6 you get a tempo detection algorithm and used in conjunction with the new quantize features I'm sure it's a powerful tool. I found this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEq7SlNzsrI

So you can either match the Cubase tempo with a pre-recorded track that was recorded without click or match the pre-recorded track with a steady tempo in cubase. Once that is done I'm sure group quantizing will work if you want to tighten up the original recording.

Cheers :)
 
Well here is an interesting note. I was about to say that the Tempo Detection in C6 doesn't work worth a crap. I tried it numerous times on my old machine and it would detect correctly for the first third of the song or so, then the tempo track would just go to 0 for the rest. I just tried it again on my new PC and it worked perfectly. Multiple times. There must be a relation to computer power here it seems. I have myself some experimenting to do now! :D
 
Interesting. I haven't tried it yet because I haven't really worked on any material that wasn't recorded to click lately. I assume it will only be affective on material with sharply defined transients with little interference noise.

On a lighter note, I tried this in Pro Tools yesterday and it also failed miserably.

I guess we just can't get a machine to do the hard work for us, huh?

Cheers :)
 
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