As part of increasing my knowledge of music production, I’d like to know how to take a drum or full band multitrack recording that’s been recorded with the band playing live together without a click track and edit it so it is totally on the grid in Cubase 12 Pro. Is there a standard method that the pros use for doing this? Obviously if a band records without a click, when you open the audio in a DAW everything will not be lined up on the grid (bars etc). So is it possible to take such a recording and put it on the grid? I’ve tried looking online for tutorials and info on this, but only found stuff about how to quantize audio recording with a click.
Thinking about it logically, it seems to me that the way to do this would be to 1) use a tempo detection feature in the DAW to detect the average BPM of the song, then 2) use some sort of audio warp and/or audio quantize to get everything onto the grid (and also time corrected). Is this correct, or is there another way?
The next question is how to make it sound natural when putting the recording on the grid. Of course, a real band playing live without a click will have slight, natural tempo fluctuations that create human feel, so I’m not sure how this will affect tempo detection in a DAW.
To add to this, there’s much debate about whether you should or shouldn’t put everything on the grid, but that’s for another discussion. I just want to know how to do it for the sake of learning and experimenting. Thanks
