Recording.... ok..now it's time to screw up!

Cubase
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I couldn’t agree with you more Rickpaul. For me, disjointed when recording in pieces is chronically is vastly understated. It drives me nuts because I don’t feel like I’m playing a song but assembling a song and not really in a musical way…which is the exact opposite way it feels when NOT recording and playing it all the way through.

What do you mean by “iterative quantize”?

I too are recording in midi for the instruments but so far feel I’m stumbling through edits with the editor (I guess this is off topic for this post). Still learning the best way to quantize a track without taking the subtleties out of it. Ever time I see a video about quantizing it’s like…click and done! This turn I’m working on…just the piano track needed to be split up about ten times to keep the quantize from messing up part of the music that can’t be quantized (or at least not in the same resolution as most of it). The way I’m doing things now it doesn’t feel very musical. Then when listening back at times things don’t feel right. It’s stripping all the fun out of things right now…and I’m sure it’s all my doing. I just don’t know yet how to avoid this.

I’ve always used an Alesis DM5 for my drums…played manually on a board. I always felt drum loops are “cheating” but now I second guessing that.

How does Cubase keep track of the original unquantized state and how do you recall that? I could have used that many times in the last week.
I’m finding my way to find Cubase solutions that work for me. It doesn’t help that I got away from music for about 15 years because of a vocal issue (that I still have) due to a reflux and nasal issue that is just killing my drive because I feel like I can only do half of what’s needed to complete a song.

I have been doing this for 30 years and trying to make record all of the music I’ve written over the years so I feel like I have something to show for my efforts. It’s a slow process…especially learning so much new gear to find what works. There are lots of things that didn’t (or don’t) work as I would have expected so I’m constantly reading manuals and watching videos on Cubase. Little by little I’m learning.

Yeah, no body cares are how long you spent recording or what it takes to do it. I guess that’s irrelavent anyway. I was always thinking “music is the one thing I don’t want to get technical with”. Meaning I’m a tech head but I didn’t want to get caught up in the gear. I honestly was going to take my rough tracks with zero effects and ship it out to get mixed and mastered because sometimes I feel like I’m to close to my music to give it a objective and accurate opinion. I get fatigued big time…well unless I walk away from it for a month. I just feel sometimes that it’s never done! It almost feels like a burden…which is why I may be better off shipping my stuff out to somebody else to mixed/mastered.
Thanks for the insight and the advice.
Chris

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Hm. I wonder if you should follow the opposite route: Record in free time, with the track in time linear mode. Play freely, take your breaths, play it as it is supposed to be played. At this point, your job as a session musician is done. It’s time for the engineer-you, the Cubase operator to get to work.

Do a tempo detection on the MIDI part(s), and then manipulate the data. Set your time signatures, smooth out tempo fluctuations, establish those 5-6 tempo changes you have in your song. The goal (for me) is to not have to do much editing at all. Just a little note here and there. Maybe you could quantize an 8 bar loop if its consistently behind or after the beat. But you shouldn’t need to quantize whole chunks of the song, in my humble opinion.

The point I’m trying to make is: Don’t oppress the musician (you), so that the engineer (you) has an easier time.

And as others have said, retrospective recording is very neat! You could also give Auto Quantize a try if you want to record with a click after all. But seeing how you need lots of tempo changes, I don’t think it will be a good fit.

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To un quantise something g go into the editor and select the notes you want to reset. There is an option on the left to do this.

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Hey thanks for your input. Hmm. By Linear mode, you mean just play it without a click and try and fix things later? I actually did try this before I tried playing to a click…but I understand more about Cubase then I did just three weeks ago so I could give it another try. I purchased Cubase 12 Artist not Pro, so I don’t have tempo detect. That was the first thing I thought of a month or two ago after purchasing Cubase. I was going to have it detect the tempo but the feature isn’t there. I had to play the song through and see what tempo worked for different parts of the song and built a tempo track from that.
I agree when it comes to not feeling that I should have to quantize a whole track but I become a stumbling moron when I know I’m recording. It has been a brutal experience for many years when it comes to recording. Maybe if I just keep pluggin along it will get better.

What do you mean by “Retrospective Recording”?
I guess it’s a lot of trail and error as to what works and what doesn’t work for me and I would think that each song has different needs so what works for one song may not work for another. I’m looking for my Cubase bread crumb trail to find my way. Only using it everyday will get me there I guess.
I will try your advice and see what the result will be.
Thank you for your time and advice.
Chris

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ahh ok I’ll check it out right now.
thanks!

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Ah, bummer.

That’s the basic idea, except that it’s easier to get at this tempo track.

About Retrospective Recording, read up here. Essentially, whatever you’ve played without pressing “Record”, Cubase can put it on a track, because it’s silently been listening to what you’ve been playing the whole time. It’s for those situations where you’ve played something good and then though, “Ah, I wish I had pressed that record button”. You press insert Retrospective Recording instead, and what you’ve played is laid out on the track!

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You may want to look this manual page:

Then experiment based on that. Note, though, that some of the options may only apply to Cubase Pro – I’m not sure one way or the other (I’ve only ever used Cubase Pro since starting with Cubase back at 9.5 - I was using Cakewalk’s SONAR for a decade and a half or so before that, and Passport Designs’ MasterTracks Pro before that).

With respect to iterative quantize, the basic idea is that, when you have it turned on, there is some percentage of movement it will get closer to whatever your quantize grid is set to (including if it’s based on your own custom groove) each time you invoke the quantize function (e.g. hit “Q” with a clip or individual notes selected). I think my setting is 25%, so, a note that isn’t on the grid gets 25% closer to the grid (from its current position) each time I hit Q. So let’s say it is 20 ticks off from the grid. The first time I hit Q, the note will move to 15 ticks from the grid (since 25% of 20 is 5, thus making it move 5 ticks closer). If I hit Q again, I’d guess it will move 4 ticks closer (does Cubase round 3.75 up to 4?), thus being 11 ticks off the grid, and so on.

If after all these tweaks you decide a certain note (or selected set of notes) needs to go back to how it was originally played, you just use the reset quantize feature to put it back to where it was when it was played (Cubase obviously must be keeping track of both the original position and the quantized position behind the scenes).

One key with quantizing, though, at least for me when playing more complex parts (i.e. stuff where not all note lengths are intended to be the same), is to be choosy about what I’m quantizing how. In such cases, I’m less likely to quantize MIDI clips and more likely to quantize selected notes inside the key editor. Also, playing with the parameters in the quantize panel can help for deciding what gets quantized and what gets left as it is to help preserve the human feel. And, of course, if you have one instrument (e.g. drums) you want things to be tighter against, then you can make a quantize groove from that rather than using fixed beat divisions. (Perhaps that is a Pro feature only?)

Back in the old days, before virtual instruments, when I had racks of MIDI modules, I was playing keyboard drums (I’ve never had a drum controller) with an Alesis drum module. But once I moved from MIDI sequencers to DAWs, I started experimenting with Acid loops. Those were always frustrating because it was hard to find the beats you had in mind for your song, and maybe the sound of the drums would also not be a match. Since Toontrack’s EZ Drummer, and Superior Drummer 2 (or maybe 3? – whichever version added more of the EZ Drummer song construction features) came along, though, I’ve mostly used that. It is real drummers playing the grooves, and you can tweak those, and you can mix and match drum kits and grooves. Also, the search facilities, especially Tap2Find, where you play in a groove, then let it match your feel with parts that are in the neighborhood, helps fairly quickly get to something close to what you have in mind.

If I had any budget, I’d prefer to hire musicians to play the instruments I don’t play well enough (especially guitars), so I’m quite okay with “cheating” through using the facilities of virtual instruments that get great drum parts from tweaking MIDI-based loops, make it possible to get strummed guitars, etc. :slight_smile:

I hear you on the trying to make a record of decades’ worth of material. I’ve got demos dating back at least to the mid-80s (actually even some from live recordings back in the 70s), but most of the old recordings are not up to snuff on the recording quality front, partly due to my own learning curve, but partly also due to the way technology has evolved during the period to make it possible to do much more than our limitations would have allowed even 15 years ago. I’m currently working on album #6 (my fifth of original songs), and, while some of the songs are very recent, there is at least one that dates back to 1997 – one of those I’d recorded at the time, but where the demo quality really was nowhere near what I can do now. I’ve got a pretty large back catalog, but it’s one song at a time, and I’m not super quick on the production front.

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I’ve settled on no warp tool use to speak of at all!

I play and record without click. I then drag each beat barline to match the notes I’ve played*, which when I’m done results in a very non- metronomic/non- flat tempo track (the detect tempo tool doesn’t work with my music, maybe because the intentional speed ups and slow downs are too much for it to handle). Then, super important, i save the tempo track for later use!

(*Sort of the opposite of warping the music to fit the grid, in that I warp the grid to fit the music!)

It’s all MIDI piano I’m recording up to this point, BTW. What i do next, after not listening for a day or two, is go to the tempo track and adjust the tempo of the song in different parts to taste. Is the intro too slow? Do i want to “compress” the tempo variations so they are a bit flatter, but definitely not completely flat? I do all that here, and the midi piano follows faithfully along (just make sure the piano track is in Musical Time Base)!

If later i decide I’ve strayed too far from my original timing “vision”, i can always retrieve my original tempo track and start over!

Overdubs? Up till now I’ve done them by playing or singing to the backing track at its original variable tempo project, but that does take a lot of practice to get the timing of the overdubs correct.

But I’m going to experiment on doing over dubs a different way: first temporarily completely flattening the tempo in the overdub section of the song, play the overdubs (much easier when there’s no tempo variation), then figure out how to “marry these flat tempo-recorded overdubs to my original variable tempo tempo track i stored so the overdubs match the original backing track in its original non- metronomic/non- flat tempo”.

I don’t know if that last part will be easy or hard! :grinning:

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I do a variation on what you describe here for certain types of songs, especially ballads. I also record MIDI piano without a click then use the time warp tool to conform a tempo map to my playing. Usually at that point (at least for pop, country, and similar genre songs – not so much for something meant to be more freeform), I’ll smooth out the tempo map, mostly by song section with transitions in between sections (e.g. using a ramp in the last measure or two of a section).

Once I’ve got a tempo map I like, I’ll build my drums track, at least the basics (I may go back and change fills, add cymbal crashes, etc. later). Then I track everything else to that, typically including replacing the original piano part. Thus, the virtual drummer serves as my metronome, but it’s already pretty close to what I would play naturally since I’ve conformed the tempo track to my playing, albeit smoothing it out.

The main challenge with this (and the whole variable tempo map in general) is that some instruments behave pretty badly with tempo changes. For example, NI’s Noire piano is one of those. It breaks up badly with tempo changes (at least on my system, but I’ve also seen that reported in some NI forums). And various other virtual instrument also have this issue. Sometimes I just switch virtual instruments out of frustration. Other times, I just put up with it as long as I need to for getting the track done then freeze it (the audio issue only persists when the instrument is live, not in rendering).

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Do you guys know - if there is MIDI and audio in a project: how to swap the project tempo track out for another one I want to import from my hard drive?

I mean, I can’t wrap my head around it … do I import the other one first (and then have two tempo tracks on this project at once??), or maybe export the current tempo track before importing the new one (but then for a moment I’ll have zero tempo tracks in this project??) …

My brain hurts, I can’t figure this one out :upside_down_face:

Also …

Assuming all the tracks are in Musical Time Base, and all the audio files are in Musical Mode with Set Definition From Tempo activated … I can’t quite picture what will happen when the new tempo track is imported. Will all the MIDI and audio files BAM all of a sudden change as soon as I hit enter to import the new tempo track?

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Alexis and Rickpaul. I’ll get back to you both on this. I’m going to read what you had to say very closely and try and work out what works for me. I’m sure every song will be different but so far this is painful! Very little progress but will spend more time tomorrow and Friday pushing to see what works. Thank you both
C

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I found it sooo liberating to be able to play the way i want, and not be a slave to a click …

The joy of playing was back when i hit that point.

Sure, headaches and brain burns after that, but the fact it was all “computer stuff”, isolated from the playing, made it lots easier to take.

Good luck, and post back here with questions, my friend! :smiley:

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Hey Alexis
I would love to play without a click but I tend to speed up as I’m playing. This likely because I never got into the habit of playing to a click in the first place so I drift. It’s hard to put into words how much I need to figure this out. I suppose I can get used to playing to a click. At least the song has some referrence. Two week or more ago I played a few takes to a click. I played this to a tempo track. The tempo track was created by first playing the song without a click and knowing where the tempo changes needed to be marked. After this I then when back and played to a click with the tempo track enabled. This worked…sort of. My brain is my worst enemy right now. I get distracted when I know I’m recording. I overthink parts I’ve played a million times when recording and screw up and miss getting the “feeling” that a particular part of the music should have. It drives me nuts. I find myself going into the midi editor and trying to figure out what I have to tweak to fix it.

For the life of me I can’t figure out how your playing without a click and sliding the grid to the music. I recall seeing a way to do this in a video about Cubase but I don’t think this was in the midi key editor. How are you doing this?

I’ve included two screenshots. One with the click the other without. I haven’t touched anything yet in terms of moving anything in the non-click recorded track. If I take a few notes and move them and try to do the same with the other they are way off in terms of timing and no long are “synced”. I
don’t see this being the way to do this.
I’m interested in exploring all the possibilities to fix this bump road. I record two more takes but this time without the click. I guess since I’ve been playing with the click for the last month I find I’m a bit more consistent in my playing. I like the feel of the non-click recording. I have found when comparing the click recording to the non-click recording that the non-click recording is 4 to 5 bars shorter in length then the click recording. Meaning that the non-click recording was play faster than the click recording. I do like the feel of the way it was played but is it really possible to play most of the music without a click and adjust later while maintaining the feel but while also having some kind of consistent tempo even with a few tempo changes??

WithClick
WithClick1937×1093 176 KB

WithoutClick
WithoutClick1932×1093 173 KB

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I recall watching a video where sliding the grid to match the tune. I just found the video again. Time warp appears to only be available in Cubase 12 Pro not Artist. Is this correct? The time warp tool isn’t in the tool bar on Artist like in Pro.

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You’re right that the Time Warp tool is only available on Pro:

In general, there are lots of things in Pro that I’d have a hard time living without, and that make life a lot easier for considerations like the ones you’re raising in this thread. Maybe time to consider an upgrade?

For my own purposes, as far as my main DAW goes, I’ve always wanted all the features, not some cut down set. The extra expense for the full shebang has likely saved me lots of time over the years, initially with Cakewalk SONAR and now with Cubase. It’s not even so much about the extra toys (and there are extra toys) as the productivity features.

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Yes sir. I agree…time for an upgrade. The first three things that I was excited to try when I purchased Cubase was three things not included with Artist. A bit of a downer. But three weeks ago I realized that if I’m going to do this and do it right while using Cubase it makes a lot more sense to me to spend the extra two hundred dollars and get it over with, rather than prolonging what’s going on right now.

Thanks Rick for the help and input on all of this. I really do appreciate it.
C

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Hands down, just like @rickpaul said. I use so little of what Pro has to offer, but there are things like that i wouldn’t know how to get by without, Timewarp being one. Others are the control room (that Listen Bus is sooo cool!!), import tracks from projects, and (compared to Elements) comp tool and Variaudio.

Multiple mixer views i could work without, but having gotten used to working with them, i don’t want to be without them at all now.

If i had to pick one thing i would not want to be without (re: Pro) it would be Time warp, and the Comp Tool.

You’re gonna love it when you get there!

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I might just upgrade this weekend. Like I said, this is the third time I went to go use a tool that I didn’t have in Artist.
Thanks Alexis. I appreciate your time and input~!
C

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Same feeling here. I really appreciate the input

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It’s amazing how like you say you can play something perfectly then you play a bum chord or note when recording.
I find I’m hopeless at playing in time to the metronome so I load a simple drum track without any fills to play to and that works for me. Afterwards I often delete that drum track and use another with fills etc.
I often record several different style bass tracks and choose the one that suits the tempo of the instrumental. It all depends on the day. Sometimes I only need one take when recording a track and other times multiple as I stuff things up. :hugs:

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