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Old 11-15-2018, 09:17 PM   #1
Rangler
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Default Should I quantize all the audio tracks together as a group?

Or should I quantize only the instruments and leave the vocals more naturally off the grid?

Everything is recorded with a click track, but none of the performances are perfectly locked.

I will be putting MIDI drums on top of the analog performances.
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Old 11-15-2018, 11:54 PM   #2
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You should quantize as little as possible. The more you quantize, the less natural your recordings will sound. You can often just quantize big hits around the starts of bars and the looseness of the rest won't be that noticeable. If you need a lot more, it's better to keep recording instead, because that improves your playing skills. If you record anything with a multi-mic setup (e.g. drums), you do need to group those items before quantizing.
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Old 11-16-2018, 12:05 AM   #3
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Originally Posted by foxAsteria View Post
You should quantize as little as possible. The more you quantize, the less natural your recordings will sound. You can often just quantize big hits around the starts of bars and the looseness of the rest won't be that noticeable. If you need a lot more, it's better to keep recording instead, because that improves your playing skills. If you record anything with a multi-mic setup (e.g. drums), you do need to group those items before quantizing.
They're not my recordings, so I'm stuck with the performances. I figure perhaps I should quantize just the featured instrument only at the bars and leave the vocals alone.

The problem comes when I writ the drum parts on the grid and the instruments aren't locked to them. It sounds jarring.
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:22 AM   #4
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Sometimes the best thing for an uneven performance, imo, is an uneven grid. Instead of snapping your performance to the grid, you can change the grid to match the performance. With the action "sws/br: move closest grid line to mouse cursor (perform until shortcut released), you can quickly line up the grid with the performance. Now the metronome won't be perfectly even, but anything you quantize to grid will match the performance.

It's not a big deal to quantize transients in a vocal recording, if they are obviously off time. My suggestion was to just be lazy about it. Do only the minimum to smooth things out, since quantizing is essentially removing the human element (at the extreme).
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