Quantizing a free performance

This is sort of a newbie question - I’m in my first weeks of using the programme.

I don’t want to play to a click track when I’m coming up with musical ideas; I’ve improvised freely onto the timeline without attending to or setting up a tempo or time signature. I’d like to quantize it all to a snapping grid for editing. I may find my tempo changes a bit so it would be good to selectively adjust/scale quantize ranges of notes. There are pauses between musical ideas which won’t fit any sort of tempo - so it won’t fit a grid without tweaking. Within most sections the meter’s regular enough that it’ll probably quantize if I scale it a bit and/or set the right meter for cubase’s grid.

  1. In general I’m hoping for suggestions on a workflow to most efficiently accomplish this.

In specific…

  1. I’m not sure where the best place is to set up the snapping among adjusting the BPM, Time signature, fps (this is for a score), grid setttings, and tempo track.

  2. I’ve discovered the TimeStretch selection mode for working in the timeline but my instinct is to do this in the Key Editor. Does that sound right?

  3. Maybe there’s a tutorial somewhere folks can recommend.

thanks

There are quite a few posts about this dotted around the forum. Do a search (including in the Cubase manual :wink: ) for “Merge Tempo from Tapping”, and also the TimeWarp tool. Should be enough to at least get you started on the right footing :wink:.

Here’s the first one I stumbled upon just now :wink:

Thanks. I’d only searched “quantize” + “free”. I’m going to follow up what you suggest, Vic.