Groove quantize from Audio

Cubase
1

Hi,

I keep coming back to this feature to try it again - only to be defeated by it - till I think it can’t be that difficult and try again.

My questions are based on a simple scenario whereI select 4 bars in a cubase project and groove quantize the bass guitar part - then try to apply it to 4 bars of kick drum midi within the same selection.

i.e the simplest case I could imagine it being used!

Open the midi part - set quantize to the one I extracted from bass it changes the visible grid to one that makes zero sense
And to make it even more confusing the midi snaps to places that are not even on that grid.

So I am guessing

  1. I am missing something and what seems totally bizarre - is in fact a feature I am not getting ?
  2. or … ?

Weird thing to me is the detection from the audio looks to be good - i.e. the “hard” part looks to be done well.

Am I wrong in assuming that applying that groove quantize to midi should be as trivial as applying a quantize to a regular grid ?

2

Hi and welcome,

Make sure the ruler is set to Bars+Beats in the Key/Drum editor, please.

3

Hi Martin, thanks for the response - the length of time for me to respond is due to not having email notifications setup from this board.
I recently upgraded from 8 => 10.5 and the reason I logged in again to comment on the mega long transport bar!)

Anyway - seeing your reply I have experimented again and I have Bars+Beats set and it is exactly same as my original post - results of groove quantize make no sense.

There is one thing I suspect might be going on is that the audio groove quantize might be locked onto the length of the recorded audio rather than the segment selected or cut as the groove looks to be shifted

But the behaviour is hard to get a handle on what it is even trying to do.

If there is a video of this - i.e. groove quantizing midi from audio - being done successfully that would be great.

If not - then I can put youtube video together to demo the problem.

4

Just tried another experiment and think I have found the problem and it is related to the length of the underlying audio file.

The groove extraction is working on the entire length of the underlying file held by cubase not the segment showing in the project.

So - if you loop recorded N takes on 1 bar and then groove quantize the final take it would have N bars in the groove quantize including the outtakes.

So applying that to your drum midi for that segment applies what ever (random to the user) the quantizing of the start of underlyling audio file.

So a 4 bar section gets the quantizing info from the 4 bars at the start of the underlying audio

Is there a way to make the groove extract to only apply to the selection itself as that would cover the most common use case

5

This also applies to 10.5 as well by the way

6

Hi,

If you are recording to the layers (takes), Cubase is creating one long file, which is broken down to the takes. Then if you apply any process, this one is applied to the whole file. So if you use it as a source of the quantize Cubase takes the whole file.

If you want to apply for the one take only, select it and use Bounce Selection. A new file of the take length will be created.

7

Thanks that behaviour has been totally confusing but now I have a workround in bouncing I should be fine now.