I’m having issues with Cubase’s hitpoint detection. It seems to generate hitpoints at the start of every transient by default. Some instruments have a long, slow, or messy attack before the transient reaches its apex. Quantizing to hitpoints auto-generated at the very beginning of this kind of attack will push the apex of the transient noticeably late on the beat, and it can make your tracks feel slightly “off” or “weird.”
Usually I go in and manually move these hitpoints over to get a better result. On a 3 or 4 minute song, this is practical, but I’m currently working on a 40 minute project writing music to video cues. Suddenly, this is an ENORMOUS time sink.
Looking for solutions, I found this article on Sound On Sound:
Less commonly used are Q-points. These can be thought of as extra ‘markers’ between two hitpoints and they’re useful if a particular hit has either a slow attack or some sort of secondary peak. In the case of the slow attack, the hitpoint might be located at the start of the sound, but the rhythmically important point is where the sound peaks, as this is the section of the sound that needs to be locked into any quantising or time-stretching that is being done. Placing a Q-point at the peak gives the audio warp process more information to go on, so that the time-shifting is achieved in a more musically appropriate fashion.
This is EXACTLY what I was talking about! But, I can’t find this feature in Cubase 10. Futhermore, a Google search oddly returned no useful search results at all. The internet seems never to have heard of this feature. I guess it was removed?
So, what are we supposed to do now when this problem crops up? Move everything by hand?