Thank you Mlindeb!
I really appreciate this. I’m going to keep this and refer back to it. This is a very bumpy path I’m on right now. Because of my stumbling into the edit world I’ve lost my momentum. I’ll try your method for sure.
Thank you very much.
Chris
Thanks Cdr80. So you too are breaking up the midi event to do the quantizing?
There are so many options and I’m not experianced with any of them so I’ll try different methods of recording and see what “clicks”. Recording without a click…with a click…etc.
I remember this happening a long time ago when using other DAWs. The issue is me I think . I don’t have the time in yet to be too hard on myself but I need this recording/editing process to NOT feel like it’s non-musical and clunky. I feel right now that when I play a tune without recording there is a good chance I’ll play is fairly well. Then when I record I screw up all the time. Which means now I have to edit more and because of this and my lack of experience editing it starts to get more like I’m “assembling” a song rather than recording it. Because of this, I then become super critical because I know I didn’t play it in one shot so I’m trying to use the edit process to make it feel natural…as if I played it all the way through. I don’t like this at all.
Thanks again. I’ll take what you said and document it, referring back to it when I record and edit again.
Thank you
C
I completely agree that it’s good to play in parts as best/accurately as you can, and then only go back and quantize if you need to. So depending upon how accurately you play, you may find none or only gentle quantization is needed, e.g., maybe start with 1/32 or 1/16 and increase the quantize strength from 0% to 100% (which I prefer to doing iterative quantization) until you get a feel that’s a bit more tight but not necessarily always on the beat. But I’m not talking about quantizing individual notes in the key editor because usually Cubase (and other DAWs) do a good enough job quantization wise (on a MIDI region with many events) that you can get some reasonable quantization w/o having to edit the timing on a per note basis.
Play in your parts as best you can just to get them recorded and into the project. Then go back and re-visit them with more of a “producer” hat on and focus on how all the parts hang together timing wise. For popular music, many people start with getting the rhythm of the drums and bass correct . Once these are together, they might go back and re-record the parts they played in to now be more in time with the drum and bass track, e.g., keyboards, guitar, etc. In this workflow people often end up cutting up the performance with a region for verse1, verse2, chorus1, bridge, chorus2, etc. - because they might want to play in (and/or quantize) the parts for chorus2 to have a slightly different feel compared to chorus1. It really depends upon the type of music you are doing and how picky you want to be about the timing and variation of parts.
What I often find is that I come back to a project after 1 or 2 days of not listening to it and conclude that I no longer like the timing of the parts in chorus2 and want to look at each (MIDI) region there to see what is going on with them timing wise including recalling whatever the quantization settings are for those regions. I find this is not straightforward to do in Cubase (so I filed a feature request for it, Display and set quantization parameters per MIDI region (regardless of track)).
Instead of having to hit the record button, do a take, and then hit stop - try using retrospective recording. Cubase is always buffering the MIDI events you play, and can save them at any time into the project - should not matter if you are playing back the project and practicing with playing other parts. You can turn that into real take I think by using one of the options/fold down menus in the track inspector where it asks you to insert retrospective recording into the track. Maybe you can set the buffer size in preferences but I’m not sure.
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Hey thanks. I have a bad habit of gradually picking up speed when I play. Slowly but surly. But the time I realize it’s too late. I have the song played in four takes and I comped them together. These were played to a click and an active tempo track. It’s not terrible but it feels a little stiff in a few places. I them muted this and played the song two more times without a click…but I actually forgot to disable the tempo track when playing it back. The results was that both tracks played without the click was faster. The second try when recording without the click was 5 bars shorter then the one with the tempo track played to the click. I’m desperate to find the “Ah ha!” moment but so far I’m not there. The bridge of the song has a slightly different feel and there are emphasizes parts of the music has plays a little before the beat. I don’t understand if not playing to a click how I would slide things around. Since I wasn’t playing to a click the grid really doesn’t reference anything. I’m not sure yet but I don’t think that NOT playing to a click is the answer but it does sound more natural.
Crap - if this takes me this long to record a lead piano line in every song I’ve go to record I’ll be doing this for a decade or more!
I need a break for tonight from this song…I’m going numb!! Bedtime for now. I’ll dive into this more tomorrow.
Thanks very much for your input and time on this. I’m really hoping I can find a solution or two that will work for me. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this issue and struggle with a DAW while recording MIDI.