Hi everyone, I’m fairly new to the mixing world. I’m a metal guitarist 15 years in the making. I dove into the recording briefly when I was younger back in the tascam 4 track recorder days. About 6 months ago I started researching daws. Fell in love with cubase, purchased elements 7 and recently decided to fully commit. I purchased full 7.5 upgrade and the waves gold bundle along with several other plugins to get me going. I also use ez drummer 2 a good bit for drums. I record all guitars and bass and some vocals.
I’ve been devoting a lot of time to learning the ins and outs of cubase. I love 7.5. They’re are so many features I can barely wrap my head around it. I recently FINALLY started grasping quantizing midi patterns and getting them close to what’s in my head. I have a question about this, hopefully some one can lend me a hand.
I play 8 string guitars. Lots of super heavy killswitch engage, korn style riffs with some dubstep flavor a here and there. I’m having trouble quantizing kick drum triplets to sync with my guitar chugs. You know. Da da da… Da da da… Da … Da da da… Djent style playing. The track I’m working on now is 160 bpm. I have it set to 4/4 but some riffs are 6/4. Should I be quantizing to 1/4 triplet grid? Or somthing like 1/32? The closest I can get is to manually draw in the triplets and it’s very hard to get it lined up. My distorted guitars do not make clear hitpoints. I have tried making them with bass (works ok…) I do like to quantize to the bass line on “half time” chorus. But I need that tight syncopated verse with the kick drum. There’s GOT to be a way to do this easier than what I’m doing.
I’m so commited to this that I would probably be willing to pay a vet level cubase user to teach me if necessary. I in this 100%. If I’m not mixing I’m reading about it 24/7 I just can’t seem to find an answer for this. Thanks in advance!
If anyone could provide services like that please let me know. Specially if your into the metal/dubstep mixing. Low tune, fast tempo. I’d be willing to pay month at a time in advance as long as some one really can teach me.
I’m actually really good timing with my guitar bass playing. I just couldn’t get my triplet kicks lined up with the guitar right… I figured it out today. I needed 1/32 triplet. Now it’s on point. I’m definitely not a drummer… At all but I always know what I want to hear. Quantifying definitely makes that quicker. I was spending days on a drum line that still sucked.
I turn midi quantize ‘on’ & ‘off’ as needed when I work with midi tracks, and I tend to move each midi note ‘individually’ (yes, takes a lot of time but it’s the best way for me). If I want a note to be exactly on the grid, I’ll have quantize on while moving each note. When I want it to be either early or late, I’ll have it off. It’s always off when I want a note for any given length (long or short), as I feel the length of a note is very important and makes world of difference. I don’t typically quantize the whole midi track, or even a section/block of a track because it ends up sounding too mechanical/robotic… but if I do use quantize on a whole track or section is because it’s only a starting point that I haven’t yet got into the track to manually move notes. Yep, I spent a LOT of time on my midi tracks!
In the case of using Toontrack EZDrummer, I’ll often drag N’ drop in some of their good & natural midi grooves - if I end up using them - and alter as needed to fit it to my song…but again, moving one note/beat at a time. Thing is, I can’t always find the right groove…and not quickly enough before I start forgetting a new song idea. I also have an e-kit that I use, as well as just tapping something quick on my keyboard with midi.
When I actually PLAY a midi instrument/controller, whether it be from a keyboard, midi guitar (for guitar & bass parts), or e-kit set-up, I find it’s best never to do a straight out quantize, but leave things as they were played, and start to fix each midi track, beginning with the WORST bits 1st, then the next worse bits. I find that when I use my midi guitar for parts, I have to do the ‘most’ work on fixing bad notes…this is because a midi guitar doesn’t follow exactly what I play, like it does from a keyboard or e-drums…and I’m more of a guitar player than the other instruments I play.