Hey all,

How are you quantizing

1 . In your DAW of choice?

2. In realband?


thanks.

Are you asking about MIDI?

Good question Matt Finley.

In general, no, I mean how do I send my 6, or whatever # BIAB tracks to my DAW. Then-- In my DAW, How to I quantize my vocal tracks from biab --- or any newly recorded DAW tracks. [ Or any newly recorded instrumental/ drum track additions?]

I heard it was easier with Midi, right? But most biab export tracks and vocal tracks won't be midi.

How are the pros doing this?

thanks

I wouldn’t class myself as a pro and I do not use RealBand except for minor changes in RealTracks.

What I do is export the RealTracks these rarely if ever need much in the way of quantisation. I tend to use Reaper for mixing etc.

For MIDI I export the parts and usually pull them into Cakewalk by BandLab and there I might Quantize the file then “humanise” again (set them just a little bit of from being exact) using CAL scripts. I do similar to velocities.

For recording I pull the backing into Cakewalk then sing or play the part (I use Cakewalk because I’m more familiar with Cakewalk for this purpose and have stuff set to go.). Once the part is recorded for voice I might put it into Melodyne where notes can fairly easily be put to key and also have the timing adjusted. For guitar I might just pull the track into Reaper make splits or stretches where necessary. Why Reaper, I find doing the splitting and stretching far easier in Reaper.

So in reality the tool depends what I’m trying to achieve.

Do not over quantise. Over quantising makes things sound false as does overdoing the editing of singing. Musicians rarely if ever play as exact as the computer.

My thoughts

Tony
Stay well

Melodyne is great for aligning vocals with tempo.

Other than that, in Reaper, I sometimes use stretch markers. These work best if added to a quieter region and at a point where the waveform crosses the horizontal axis. There is also a smoothing option for any stretching/shrinking that occurs as a consequence of vocal alignment.

Set the tempo in the DAW to be the tempo of the BiaB song before bringing the tracks in.
90% of the work is done.
Image below is a 7/4/song at 112 .. dragged right into Reaper on the beat.

Quantizing is a term for midi. You are really referring to tempo mapping. 80% of that is done during recording. Some folks play and sing to a click or drum track. I usually make sure I have at the minimum drums base and one instrument track prior to vocals. This helps me stay in time. Most timing issues are resolved by careful setup when using BiaB or RB.

If by chance a word or phrase gets out of time like I start a verse to soon or to late I split the piece on both ends and drag it into time. The same can be done with live played instrument tracks.

Also I usually do at least 4 or 5 takes of a vocal and comp them together. That way I can cut out weaker phrases mis-spoken words etc. lastly I solo the vocals and edit out any background noises and sounds like a swallow or breath I don’t like the sound of. Another good practice is to solo the vocal, one instrument and drums. Listen carefully to the phrasing against timing. Just be careful not to over think it and make it seem unnatural. Don’t lose uniqueness.

If none of this is what you are asking then maybe you’re talking about putting tracks together from different sources recorded in different timing. In that case it is truly a situation of tempo mapping. That requires that you be very careful in setting up your temples to start with in your bass tracks, and using as Bob said a program like Melodyne, or learning to use tempo mapping in your DAW

No I absolutely never-ever quantize anything unless it's a style of music like techno or EDM that needs to be quantized.

IMO Music needs to breathe, and when it is too rigid, it takes the life right out of it.

The solution is to practice the part until you get it right, starting with the drums. Lock with the groove the drummer and bass player sets up.

It'll keep your music from sounding stiff and mechanical.

Insights and incites by Notes

I also never quantize, but I'm not sure of your reasons why you wish to do this. Perhaps to align notes to make a melody line more readable would be one good reason.

Put me in the I never quantize group also. Subtle variations are what make it human. If the timing is more than subtle it is time to record it again.

thanks guys, good comments. Just a couple replies off the
top.

WHY?

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A producer who heard my track said it needed quantizing.

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NOTES NORTON

No I absolutely never-ever quantize anything unless it's a style of music like techno or EDM that needs to be quantized.

IMO Music needs to breathe, and when it is too rigid, it takes the life right out of it.

The solution is to practice the part until you get it right,

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One experienced video on Quantizing, or tempo mapping-- said "Time is money" today in studios, they don't have time waiting for musicians to get it right.

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ROB HELMS


Quantizing is a term for midi. You are really referring to tempo mapping. 80% of that is done during recording. Some folks play and sing to a click or drum track

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Gotcha. this producer said quantizing, and then I got confused 'cause my searches turned up midi.

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Skimming the follow-up posts, it appears Rob got you started down the right path. Your producer either misspoke or was trying to give you an equivalent concept.

If you recorded a bunch of audio vocal tracks not sung to a click track, or less likely, a bunch of tracks sung badly in time to a click track, now you have a serious problem trying to align these tracks in your DAW. Is that what is happening here? If so, each DAW may have a way to do what Cakewalk calls 'audio snap' (or at least that's what they called it in SONAR; don't know about now). It is also possible to micro-manage each track, snipping them into pieces (called clips) and manually moving them left or right to fit, and/or tempo stretching a clip to fit. This is painstaking work, but sometimes it's the only answer. Your audio engineer will have good skills to do this most efficiently.

KGU 2, could you confirm if I'm on the right track here?

I use a pdf to midi converter to help me decipher tricky Bill Evans, Charlie Parker, Jarrett, Hancock transcriptions. The output is highly quantized and every note has identical velocity.

Even then, the performance is often remarkable. There is a (quantized, even velocity) midi of Jarrett’s My Funny Valentine, somewhere on the net. The harmony, the variation between straight and triplet playing, the sudden changes from eight notes to flurries of 16th notes or 16th triplets, the changes in octaves, largely make up for the quantization.

Real good players have great time and you’d be surprised how close they get. As stated above, play it perfectly or... imo... quantize it, or like in Ableton “warp” it if it’s audio.

Some commercial midis of Pat Metheny’s music are quantized (to help reduce the file size in MIDI). But with varying velocity. Anyone who has ever heard the Midi of Third Wind or Are you going with me, James, American Garage... can agree: quantized music is not necessarily sterile or lifeless. Rather, it blows your mind.

The human ear is quite tolerant of little lags or leaps, but has little tolerance for sloppiness. And I know, cause I’m not a great musician and it even bothers me.

There’s two possible answers, I think: play really good, quantize... both will do.

I took what the producer told you as you need to improve your timing.

Be it midi or audio the root of this discussion is timing. The practice button in Band-in-a-Box has a wonderful tool where a song will play for "X" numbers of bars and then there is silence for a number of bars. The goal is to learn the "feel" of a song's tempo by playing along to a song and discovering if you speed up or slow down during the silence.

Good musicians and singers can work all around the beat without loosing track of where they are at. While they can work around the beat they remain as rock solid as a metronome.

By-the-way my sense of timing is terrible.

thanks guys,

good discussion here.

Great. Did you post it here in the User Showcase also?

An extreme example could be this...

[video:youtube]https://youtu.be/JKY7TmB2TYY[/video]

Hope you like it. Sounds not really perfect, but still has a lot of power, even if velocity is even and quantizing was done.

Jan,

Oh Wow, this is so well done. So much is played in the cracks. Quantizing it to make it too rigid would have destroyed everything.

I really like the way this floats, ignoring the underlying rhythm completely, but never breaking the rules.

Quite sensational.

The answer to that is to practice, prepare, and get it right BEFORE you get into the studio.

Back in the tape days, and especially before multi-tracks, musicians and singers practiced until they knew their parts, then rehearsed with the band and ironed out the song before recording.

Once in the studio, they simply played the song from start to finish, usually getting it down in one or two takes.

When we had a pro studio in town and I was a first call saxophonist, I got a lot of work because they called me a "one take Jake". I spent some of my time, off the clock, practicing what I was going to record.

In all the band recordings I did 'back in the day' we rehearsed until it was right and never did more than two takes.

Today in my personal MIDI studio, where recording time isn't more expensive than practice time, I still practice until comfortable with the part before recording.

I find when I'm comfortable enough so I don't have to think about what I'm playing, but instead just let it flow, the timing and phrasing come out many times better.

I think the three worst enemies of music are quantizing, auto-tune, and needless compression. Quantizing takes the human breathing out of it, auto-tune takes the vocal expression out of it, and compression takes the dynamics out of it.

IMO there is a lot more to music than dots on the page and/or notes in a grid.

Insights and incites by Notes

When you post the YouTube link, take out the "https://youtu.be/" part and just leave the "JKY7TmB2TYY" (Unique video code). It would look like this except brackets instead of braces: {video:youtube}JKY7TmB2TYY{/video}

Thx sslechta. I already wondered how other people did that!

Thx to Jarrett, he got really wild there. But to be sure, it is totally quantized. It’s taken from a transcription and every 16th note or triplet is right on the mark. Strange, isn’t it? Weird even.

Amen.

I also agree.

I would agree if Notes quote was re-worded to something like "I think the three worst enemies of music (that can be overly used) are:".

Used in the "right or limited" amounts they all can greatly enhance a project.

Very good point!

Thanks

I guess it's a good addition depending on what you mean by overly used.

For me, I'll quantize Techno and EDM styles. They need to be, but if the style doesn't require quantization, I practice the part until I get it right and play it in real-time.

I don't use auto-tune at all, instead I sing and play on pitch when needed. Sometimes I sing and play a little off pitch, either for tension or to have a couple of parts sound more like just intonation than equal temperament.

I don't compress, but I will use a bit of peak limiting if there is a very strong peak that makes the rest of the song so soft that it doesn't "master" with my other tracks.

IMO anything more than that is excessive. Of course YMMV. There is more than one right way to make music.

EXCEPTION: I will use compression on my guitar, before the recording process. Some guitar parts need it for the sustain and the sound.

Insights and incites by Notes