THE BASICS OF QUANTISING

Subtle timing nuances play a large part in the feel of much of today's rhythm-ba
sed music.
Martin Walker bangs the drum about creative use of groovy time-tweaking function
s.
Music can be broken down into three parts -- melody, harmony and rhythm. Arguabl
y, the last of these is the
most important for much of today's music, and the accurate timing and placement
of each beat in a riff can
make a huge difference to the end result. The accomplished performer can add tha
t almost imperceptible
'something' that transforms a pedestrian riff into a killer groove or turns a mi
nor hit into a classic. We're not just
talking about live performances here. Nowadays, just as much importance is attac
hed to manipulating the
timing of an existing performance as to playing a good groove in the first place
.
Sloppy Timing
The simplest form of quantise (and the original reason for its existence in MIDI
sequencers) is to move notes
that are badly timed back onto the beat where they were intended to be. Devised
as an aid for people with poor
keyboard skills, the idea of quantisation was that however sloppy your
performance during recording, every fluffed note could be pulled back exactly
into line afterwards. This was a godsend to people who knew what notes they
wanted, but didn't have (or didn't want to bother with) the technique necessary
to play accurately and consistently in time.
However, although many people were initially impressed with this basic
quantise function, perfect metronomic timing rapidly fell out of vogue, amid com
plaints that such music lacked
soul, due to the absence of human expression. As more was understood about the m
echanics of timing and
musicianship, software developers added more elaborate tests for their quantisin
g, so that only the notes that
were way out of time were corrected, leaving the little nuances in place to give
some life to the performance.
Then it was discovered that if recordings by top-class players were analysed, th
eir timing could be extracted
and imposed on other performances. Quantising rapidly became not just a means to
correct mistakes, but a
creative tool in its own right.
Basic Quantise
Although the basic form of quantising moves every note played to an exact locati
on in the bar, it is still important
to understand the options. First of all, you need to set the quantise value. A q
uantise value of 1 will pull every
note played to the nearest whole beat, a value of 2 will pull to the nearest hal
f beat, 4 to the nearest quarter beat,
and so on. The screen below shows how these three quantise values affect notes i
n a single free-form 4/4 bar.
To correct the timing of notes without completely destroying the feel , you need
to select a value for quantise that
relates to the music being played. For instance, if you have a
four-to-the-bar bass drum, you need a basic quantise value of 4 to
pull every note exactly on to the beat. The Over Quantise function is
a more 'musical' offering from Cubase. This not only moves the
notes as before, but detects chords and holds them together when
moving notes, as well as noticing if you are consistently playing
ahead of or behind the beat.
Fortunately, most sequencers allow you to undo any quantising,
and/or to fix it in place when you are happy with the result, which
makes experimentation less stressful. You can also often use
automatic quantise, which moves the notes according to your
chosen quantise values as they are recorded.
Just a Little Bit
Since basic quantising can rob an original performance of much of its human feel
, various developers produced
ways of pulling notes part way to the exact values. Cubase has Iterative Quantis
e which features Strength %
and Don't Quantise parameters. The idea is that you set an amount, such as 50 pe
rcent, for Strength, and then
any note not on an exact quantise value will be pulled 50 percent (or halfway) t
o the nearest hard quantise value.
By setting Strength to even smaller values, you can keep applying Iterative quan
tise to gradually pull each note
closer and closer to the exact value, then stop when you have the desired feel.
The Don't Quantise function (set
in ticks) ignores any notes that are close enough to the exact value to be alrea
dy within the limits set by the
Strength value. Only notes that are obviously out of line are moved, leaving any
subtle timing imperfections
alone. Analytic Quantise is a special Cubase option when you are mixing straight
beats and a triplet feel, and
attempts to preserve both feels when moving notes.
Groove Quantise
Once we get beyond the concept of 'correcting' timing, we enter the realm of rhy
thmic feels -- the way top
players play certain beats in the bar consistently before or after the strict ti
ming.
Possibly the biggest motivation in the development of groove quantise was reggae
music, since many people
loved the 'lazy' feel of the rhythm sections (particularly the classic pairing o
f Sly Dunbar and Robbie
Shakespeare), who had an almost imperceptible behind-the-beat timing. Performanc
es by such musicians
were analysed in great detail, and it was discovered that some beats in the bar
were always played away from
the metronome position. At its most simple, in a single 4/4 bar, beats 1 and 3 m
ight have been exactly on time,
but beats 2 and 4 were slightly (and consistently) delayed.
Groove Quantise works by producing a map for a musical bar, which includes a pat
tern of these measured
beats. The feel of a particular groove is dependent on the exact position of eac
h of these beats. To use Groove
Quantise within Cubase, you choose an appropriate map from the selection provide
d, and then the relevant
notes in your own music are moved so that their timing exactly matches that of t
he groove map.
For instance, the upper (red) sequence of notes in the screen above shows a bass
line played rigidly in
sixteenth notes, while the lower three lines of notes show the effect of applyin
g a few sample Groove Quantise
settings. The yellow notes use the Slow Shuffle preset; the green ones use the H
eavy Shuffle. Notice how the
four main beats in the bar are still in exactly the same place. It is the in-bet
ween notes that have been delayed,
with the Heavy Shuffle option simply shifting them further to the right. The fou
rth (blue) line of notes shows a
real-world example. This has been matched to the audio drum loop described in th
e 'Rolling Your Own' section,
below. The interesting thing to note in this case is that the shifts are much sm
aller. It shows that the timing
changes made by a good live drummer will tend to be quite subtle.
Matchmakers
Although most sequencers come complete with a range of preset groove templates,
you can create your own.
The sort that most people want to make are for matching their MIDI music with an
existing riff, either a MIDI
sequence, or an audio snippet such as a drum loop taken from a sample CD. To mak
e this easier, a few
sample CDs actually do all the hard work for
you, and provide ready-made groove maps
for the audio loops.
If you already have a MIDI part with the
desired feel, and want to impose this feel on
other parts, each phrase must be broken
down into its constituent beats, and the
timing of each note measured relative to its
strict metronomic subdivisions. For
instance, if there were four beats in each bar
of music, a metronome would divide the bar
into four quarter beats of exactly equal
length. Measuring the actual positions of
each of the four beats in a real performance
allows each to be given an offset value,
which can then be imposed on the
corresponding beat in the other parts.
In Cubase this is easy to do by selecting the
Match Quantise tool from the Arrange
window toolbox, and then dragging the part
with the correct feel (the source) over
another part (the destination). However, you
first need to set the normal Quantise box to
a suitable value. This places a grid on the
Match Quantise effect so that only the notes
in the destination part that are close to notes
in the source part will be moved, leaving the
in-between ones where they are. When you
drop the source part on top of the
destination part, you also get the option of
imposing its velocity values. If you decide to
do this, there are two options. Copy will
simply force the velocity values to those of
the source part. However, you may already have strong accents in the original pa
rt that differ, and in this case
using the Merge option will preserve them. If you are matching two different ins
truments it may be safer to use
the No option.
Rolling Your Own
To extract the timings from an audio file, you first need to analyse it to find
the start of each significant beat. This
is done by scanning the file for a sudden increase in level, which normally indi
cates the attack start of each
beat. As you might expect, most modern MIDI + Audio sequencers can do this
for you automatically.
Let's start with a one-bar CD-ROM drum loop, and then apply its feel to a MIDI
track. I'm using Cubase VST for this example, but you should find similar
facilities in most current MIDI + Audio sequencers. After importing the drum
loop as a WAV file into the Audio Pool, and then placing it in an audio track,
open this up in the Audio Editor (as shown in the top half of the screen on page
102). Make sure that the
contents of the window to the right of Ed Solo reads 'M-Points' and then click o
n the View menu, and check that
Dynamic Events is highlighted.
Cubase uses M (Match) Points as Markers in an audio event, to indicate significa
nt positions -- Get Match
Points in the Do menu assigns M-Points to audio events automatically. The dialog
ue window has a number of
settings, including Sensitivity and Attack, and although the default values will
probably work well in many cases,
you will probably need to increase the sensitivity to detect quieter beats such
as the hi-hats between the
stronger kick and snare hits. When you are happy with your settings, click the P
rocess button in the dialogue
box, and the Match Points will appear beneath the waveform. If some beats are no
t detected, select Get Match
Points again, increase the sensitivity a bit more, and process again. If you wan
t to be even more creative, you
can edit the Match Points using the normal Cubase tools, such as pencil and eras
er.
To translate the Match Points to a quantise Groove Template, you need to select
the Match Audio and Tempo
option from the Do menu, which will take you to the Graphic Mastertrack editor.
Here, in the Audio menu, you
simply click on the M-Points to Groove option, and a new template will appear at
the bottom of the existing list
of Groove Quantise options. I used the Gr
oove Template derived
from a drum loop to match the timing of a
MIDI bass line, as shown
in the lower part of the screen on page 1
02. Notice how much the
hi-hat beats have moved from the exact gr
id positions, and how the
strength of each drumbeat that has been m
atched to a MIDI note
has also been imposed on the MIDI note ve
locity.
Many of today's MIDI + Audio sequencers a
lso allow you to carry
out the same process in reverse, to impos
e the feel of a MIDI part
onto an audio one. This is a similar two-
stage process, the first
part of which also involves the creation
of Match Points. In Cubase
VST, you select the desired MIDI part usi
ng the Match Quantise
tool and then drop this on the audio part
in question. You are first
asked to confirm Dynamic Time Correction
with a Yes/No
response, and then exactly the same Get Match Points dialogue box appears (assum
ing that no Match Points
have already been created).
Once the Match Points have been successfully created, the second stage happens a
utomatically -- each
segment of audio between the Match Points will be time-stretched to exactly fill
the equivalent space between
the MIDI notes in question. Fortunately, there is at least one level of Undo in
most sequencers, as the audio data
itself has to be modified to do this. In many cases you will probably get better
results working a little with the
Match Points, and perhaps even massaging them by hand in some cases, before appl
ying any time-stretching.
Time To Take It Further
It's possible to lock MIDI timing to a complete live drum track, although many p
eople prefer to sample a few
bars at various points during the song, and then create their own loops to work
from. However, you don't have to
stick with the tempo of the original performance. Although you can get involved
in time-stretching once your
audio loop has had its M-Points added, another command in the Cubase Audio Do me
nu is Snip at M-Points
which, as its name suggests, separates the audio into multiple chunks at the M-P
oints. Once this has been
done, you can change the tempo of the entire song quite freely, with the audio s
taying exactly in sync, by
squashing together or spacing the chunks apart.
If you are working entirely with MIDI material, it
is possible to go too far, and
strip out the subtle timing imperfections that can
add the final icing on the
cake. Some sequencers have randomising facilities a
vailable, to loosen up a
track a little if it has been quantised too rigidly
. Sadly, of the Steinberg range,
only Cubase v4.0 for the Mac provides this feature,
and although randomising
is still possible using other versions, it involves
 working with Logical Edit,
where few people dare to tread.
Finally, remember that although most people nowaday
s tend to use samples
of drum loops in their entirety, you don't have to sacrifice audio quality to re
tain the feel. Simply paste that
seventh-generation cassette copy of the killer groove into your sequencer, grab
its Match Points, and use these
to give you a MIDI groove template. Then you can map exactly the same feel on to
any drum sounds (ancient or
modern) that you care to use.