Quantize Functions in Cubase

today we talk about

Quantize Functions in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today we're goingto talk about quantized functions inCubase but before we start I want toremind you that there's a link below tothe free content navigation guide whichis an easy to navigate web page withlinks to all the content on this channeland besides that in the near future I'mgoing to begin adding tips and otherbits of information that will only beavailable there you know things likesimple steps that will get you startedand up and running quick things that arein the videos but are written down insimple steps that serve as quickreminders when you need information downthe road if you're working with programslike wavelab or Cubase plugins or thecable guys shaper box and many manyother projects that are in the worksthen I know you're going to find justlike I have that this is an invaluablestudy Aid and the other thing I want tomake sure you understand is that this isnot a simple PDF this is a constantlyupdated page that has any informationthat is new or anytime videos arechanged really anything update it andonce you have it you will always havethe latest information constantlyupdated so if you haven't gotten italready go to the link below click on itand save it to your favorites it's mygift to you and it's absolutely freeOkay so let's get started so we're onthe subject of the quantized functionsand we spent some time on the quantizedpanel specifically in previous videosthose videos and all videos on thischannel are in the navigation guide inthe link below but if you're anythinglike me you might have thought quantizewas just the simple thing of you knowadjusting your notes and hitting thebutton and being done with it it turnsout some of the major processes that youcan do in Cubase in terms of aligningyour audio or creatively moving yournotes to a groove or just changing allyour tracks to have various kinds offeel all of these are wrapped up in thesubject of quantizing in Cubase and itturns out to be quite a rich subject interms of some of the features that youcan use if you understand and as I saidwe Dove real deep into the quantizedpanel let's look at that real quickagain if I go to my drop down hit the ethen I get this quantized panel and onething we learned in the last few videosis how this thing will change dependingon what things you're quantizing whetherit's audio or different kinds of midiwhether you drop actual midi patterns onthis some of the choices some of thedialogue on here it's all going tochange and this thing has just a lot ofoptions now there's some other ways toaccess quantizing in general you couldactually go up to the menu hit the editmenu here and you can come down and hitquantize if you need to you can resetyour quantize in case you've made somechanges and you can get to the panelthis way as well so if you click on thatyou're going to get the panel but youalso have these options called Advancedquantize and the first option here saysto quantize the midi event lengths andwhat's going to happen here when youlook at these notes in front of uswe have some various midi notes they'rearound the 16th note but not exactlycompletely a 16th note and if I go up tomy drop down list that's what I have setright now as a 16th note I could chooseany one of these values but I'm going tokeep it on a 16th note we use this firstoption that it gives us here on thisAdvanced quantize what it's going to doit says quantize the event links gonnamake sure each one of these notes areexactly a 16th note in length now itdoesn't move them to a different pointon the grid they still remain exactlywhere they are so if they're a littlebit off the grid like my notes are herethey're going to stay a little bit offthe grid but the length of the note isgoing to change let me play it listen tothe differenceI'm going to go ahead and hit quantizemidi event linksthank yousee that almost more legatonow the next option it gives us in thisAdvanced areais it says quantize the midi event endsand what's going to happen here is it'snot going to necessarily make all ofthese the same length in fact some ofthem could be much longer than the othernotes but what it's going to do is it'sgoing to go to the next option on thegrid that lines up with what we selectin this case the 16th notewhat happened here is a lot of notesbecame very tiny because it quantizesthe end of the noteit didn't just automatically take thenote and run it to the end to the next16th what it did is it looked at wherethe note starts in this case it was infront of the 16th note so what it did isI took this eighth note and finished atthat 16th so as soon as you get thesevery tiny increments so the bottom lineis wherever the note is at the beginningthat's going to stay there wherever theend is it's going to go to the nearest16th note or whatever you know grid youhave set up so you have your quantizedrop down up here in the project toolbarif you need to make some quick changesthat's right there you start by pickingyour resolution whatever you want it tobe I'll say an eighth note make yourselection of whatever you want and thenhit your quantize on the right you havethe soft quantize option if you turn iton or off when it's on quantize kind ofinches towards the grid and when it'soff it's just a hard quantize right onthe grid you have your audio warp optionwhich is really the hidden item in thiswhole quantize option you just turn theaudio warp on select any audio hitquantize and you've got instantlyquantized audio and like we've saidbefore if you hit the e you get yourquantize panel once something isquantized beginning of the event alwaysgoes right to the Grid in this examplewe have this event which is a little bitin front of the grid over here we haveone that's a little bit behind the gridbut no matter what if I got on an eighthand I hit quantize everything snaps towhere the beginning of it always linesup to the grid as long as you're usingthe hard quantize and not the soft nowlet's examine this a little bit deeperin this whole audio quantize thing whenyou're dealing with audio in the projectwindow and we select a piece of audiolike this the clicks are happening andthe little beeps are kind of on the beatbut not quitebut pretty much without exception if youselect some audio in the project viewhere and then you go up and hit thequantize button and of course you wantto set a resolution I'm going to leaveit on an eighth note but without doinganything else if I hit quantize thataudio typically is going to move andit's going to move based on a couple ofthings if it's just basic audio likethis is right here it's going to lookfor SNAP points or the beginning of theevent or something try to move it righton the grid this doesn't necessarilymean your audio is going to line up atthis point if it's close you know it maybut it's kind of a rough quantizationwhen you do it this way let's listen towhat we have hereit's better as long as the parts areautomatically lined up you know becauseit did kind of shift it right at thebeginning here let me control Z out ofthis on the other hand the minute youkick this audio warp on things get alittle bit deeper Cubase analyzes whatthey call the warp markers on this thingit's going to move and stretch thisaudio whatever it takes to really try toline it up so if I hit the quantizeagain this made a real good effort atlining it upnow the only other thing you have tokeep in mind it does make a bigdifference in terms of how you resolvethis up here on the resolution whetherit's an eighth note or a quarter note orwhatever you do for example if I go to aquarter note and do this audio warpingit's only going to look for where thequarter note hits are and it's going toline those up and anything that's afterthat is going to leave that relationshipalone let me hit this on the other handif I go to something that's a littlefiner like the 16th notes then it'sgoing to try to move around everythingit can by 16th notes and that may againthat may give you something good or itmay totally destroy itlike it did thereso keep in mind that the differentresolutions are going to give you adifferent result you may want to movearound 8 16 and then retry it and seewhat kind of example you getand if you get too far into somethingand it's just not working out open upyour panel and hit this reset button andthat'll put everything back to squareone again or you can go over and hityour edit there's a reset quantize rightthere as wellall right so in the last video we wentthrough the audio warp quantizing I wantto recap that a little bit because I'mgoing to show you something else that'savailable here let's start with thisexample we have all the stuff that's alittle bit out of syncand I have all these audio events inthis one folder and in theory you can goup and enact the group editing whichmeans whatever you do on one trackyou're going to do on all the tracks andthen if I open up my panel again andturn on the audio warp option in theorythey should be able to throw all ofthese audio parts into sync and as Isaid in the last video I just don't findit to work really good that way you dohave this option up here to experimentwith these different little stars interms of what's going to be the guidetrack and what's going to reference howthings are sliced and that kind of thingbut no matter how you cut it let me justput some of these stars in here when Ido it this wayif I go ahead and hit quantizeit's just not in sync yet and you couldgo through experiment after experimenttrying to get a better result I havefound it is just more worthwhile to takea little bit extra time in thissituation turn off the group editing andthen one by one audio warp your tracksand the result in my opinion is almoststunning how good it does the job I'mgoing to mute these other tracks for asecond let's start with just this hi-hatobviously all over the place if I selectit and then I hit quantize with theaudio warp on it just does such a greatjob it just puts everything right inline now let's add our other tracks inone by onequantize itand everything just lines up perfectlyby the next one[Music]I really am an amazement at how goodthis worksquantize itlet's do the last oneforeign[Music]ER to do it one by one without thefolder option on but in my opinion theresult is just great so I'll let youdecide which way you want to do it onthat as long as you know the operationbut now here's another option that wehaven't talked about let me shrink thisdown a little bit in order to do thisnext option which allows us to makeslices out of the stuff you're going towant to go ahead and render these tracksoff first if you leave them like theyare they're in what's called musicalmode and when it tries to make slices itbasically takes everything back tosquare one and all your work is prettymuch undone so you want to keep allthese tracks because now they've allbeen warped in time let's just renderoff new copies so I'm going to balanceall these downall these changes are now permanenteverything is in great sync still we'regoing to do a couple things now and goback to the folder and turn the groupediting on which means I hit one trackand every track is affected and everytime you do something like this you wantto check make sure you didn't lose yoursinkwhich we have and everything's stillintact now I'm going to go over and I'mgoing to turn the audio warp off look upon our panel about Midway up we haveanother audio warp button we can use butnext to that it says slice if I hit theslice button it now Cuts all these partsup into tiny little slicesforeign and there's tons of options youcould do with this just like this aswell but let me show you what I havefound to be really fun with this stuffCtrl Z out of this and as you can see Igot slices all over the place so I gotlittle slices and big slices and I maynot want all this kind of detail so if Igo up to my little stars and like turnall these Stars down to nothing I cannow experiment with different ones toget different grids as you can see likehere the hi-hats because they're so evenif I click on those and I can pick anyone of these tracks add a couple starsto that that now makes really nice easyslices into the whole thing without abunch of little micro slices all overthe place you can experiment dependingon what kind of result you want everyone of these I turn on it's going to adddifferent kinds of slices in there but Iwant just real simple and basic kind ofslices so I'm going to leave these likethat so now if I go ahead and hit theslice button just like that all of thesehave become tiny little slices in smallincrements all rightfirst of all it's saving you a ton ofjust work of sitting here slicing allthese pieces up but now watch what youcan do if I change from my select toolto my mute tool and I go ahead and mutethese parts outforeignnow before I go further I'm going to goback and turn my group editing offbecause what I'm going to do now I wantto use just individual pieces so I cango to little partsstart on muting my different slices[Music]adding in whatever part I want[Music]and just like that you get this totallymorph different LoopCubase used to have a plug-in calledLoop mesh still has a loop mesh but notthe one it used to have it used to haveone that did this kind of like as aplug-in but the idea that you can takethis and this could be all kinds ofdifferent percussion parts or differentinstrument Parts guitar parts whateveryou want you can create these kind ofhybrid Loop slices so between thequantize panel being able to do all yourslicing for you and then just be able tomute Your Parts this opens up atremendous amount of creative options toexploreso have some fun with that one foreignas always if you haven't grabbed ournavigation guide be sure to grab thatfrom the link below this video gives youaccess to all the content on thischannel ever growing and free to use doyourself a favor stop working so hard toget it use it as your online referencemake it your go-to Source when you'retrying to figure something out ninetimes out of ten you're going to findwhat you're looking for save yourself alot of time and effort all right so wehave finished through all our quantizeinformation we started out looking atsome of the advanced quantize optionsthe event links and the event ends wesaw the quantize on the toolbar welooked at the midi event starts welooked at the audio event start andlengths and then we explored the amazingfantastic features of quantizing andslicing multiple audio tracks if you'veever found yourself in a situation whereyou're trying to line up multiple tracksthis is your option you definitely wantto look at this explore this make this apart of your workflow this is the key tothat feature as we continue to exploreall the options and all the informationavailable in this and all the programswe talk about on this channel as alwaysit's great to have you guys here andI'll see you on the next video