Who can Quantize my upcoming album? (Paid, or free :P)

  • Thread starter Thread starter TheComposer
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miroslav said:
You have to be REAL careful with vocals.
While things like drums and other rhythm tracks favor being right on the beats...vocals and leads usually tend to dance all over them and HOW they "dance" is key. Push all the vocals right ON the beat...and they could sound weird.
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That pretty much what I thought, although I've never tried it, I figured some of the emotional expression might be the words coming in slightly ahead or behind the beat.

If I was going to do a Dance track with a 'Hard-Tuned' phrase, I might quantise that to add to the robotic nature of it (I haven't tried that either though).
 
I'm curious as I've never done it...what's the workflow like when quantizing audio? I know MIDI is just the click of a button.
 
FunkDaddy said:
I'm curious as I've never done it...what's the workflow like when quantizing audio? I know MIDI is just the click of a button.
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It's more time consuming.

You have to slice up at the transients of the audio and move it, or you have to slice up the audio and stretch it to fit. Then you have to do tiny cross fades between said sliced up audio. For drums you have to edit all the drum tracks together or else it gets fucked up (obviously because everything bleeds into everything else on a drum setup).

It's much better to only have to do that on the occasional shitty fill or small section. An entire song can take 2-4 hours depending on length and how off it is.
 
Guitargodgt said:
It's more time consuming.

You have to slice up at the transients of the audio and move it, or you have to slice up the audio and stretch it to fit. Then you have to do tiny cross fades between said sliced up audio. For drums you have to edit all the drum tracks together or else it gets fucked up (obviously because everything bleeds into everything else on a drum setup).

It's much better to only have to do that on the occasional shitty fill or small section. An entire song can take 2-4 hours depending on length and how off it is.
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Makes you wonder why you would have a drummer at all, just program the whole thing. Check out at the 6 min mark.

Alan.
 
witzendoz said:
Makes you wonder why you would have a drummer at all, just program the whole thing.
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It would have taken less time and stress to sample the drummer doing patterns and single hits, edit them into loops and build a track out of that.
 
miroslav said:
Personally...I can't take sloppy playing that's sometimes disguised as "human feel".
If everyone *could* play perfectly...they would. :)
It's about hitting the beat where the beat is...not a few milliseconds before the beat or after the beat, but ON the beat.
That's not the same as an entire band slowing down/speeding up for effect on some sections of a song..etc....that's a different thing.
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I can't agree with that. Check out post #37 of this thread. programmed drums and groove - Page 2 - The Womb

In fact check out the whole thread. Interesting stuff. Anyway, the dude posts the drums from the beginning of Billie Jean. One file is taken straight from the album. The other file is quantized. The funny thing is he posts the files in an attempt to defend quantizing saying there is no difference between them. For me, the natural version grooves so much harder it couldn't be more obvious.

Anyway, give it a listen and a read. It is a great discussion on quantizing in general by some real pros.
 
I'm not sure what you're "not agreeing" with...?

Playing on time is not necessarily the same as computer quantizing.
If you like coming in a pinch ahead of the beat, you would do that repeatedly to create the groove, hence you are still *on time*. You can't come in ahead of one beat, behind the next beat, on the beat on the third, behind again on the next...etc..etc. That's sloppy playing and NOT *on time*.
What I'm saying in the post you quoted is that there are sloppy players who are not on time, but they like to call that "human feel" and "groove".

I never auto-quantize...but I do manually adjust the drum beats to fit the groove and fix any that are to far outside of it.
 
Ah. When you said "on the beat", I assumed that the beat was also on the grid. That's what I get for assuming... Sorry 'bout that.
 
Yeah...I think the way I originally worded my comments about playing perfectly on the beat, it sounded like I was all about every beat being dead-on the grid mark.
I Like things to be tight and on the beat, but I do understand what is meant by groove. I think in a later post I was talking about how when you strum a guitar chord...there are many ways to strum on the beat but that you can still choose which part of the chord actually falls dead-on the grid line...either the leading edge, middle or end of the chord strum...
...and that's the groove part.

So yeah...we are on the same page about playing "around" the beat for the sake of groove....though you still have to play on the beat while playing "around" the beat for there to even be a groove.
When I see guys who are playing *randomly* around the beat (sometimes ahead, some times dead-on and sometimes behind)...that's not groove, that's sloppy. :)
 
Is there a sample of a Mix I can hear to see how big the problem of timing is?
I might be able to help out if it's not massive issues.
 
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