Fig. 1. Drag and drop the MIDI part from your percussion plug-in into a MIDI track.
Fig. 2. In Cubase, any MIDI part can be turned into a groove template with this menu command.
Fig. 3. The name of the part will become the name of the new groove, and it will already be selected as the quantize value in all edit windows.
Fig. 4. If some chords fall in the gaps in the groove template, leave them unselected when quantizing. Here, the black notes are selected, the red ones unselected. The template is visible as light gray lines.
When the bass, drums, guitar, and keys all have the same feel for the rhythm, the band is tight and smoking. But how can you create that same tight live feel with studio-recorded MIDI sequencer tracks?
Hours of hand-editing are not required. Most sequencers (though not Live 7, unfortunately — Ableton is still working on it) can extract a groove template from one track and let you apply it to other tracks. After loading a REX file drum loop, for example, or a beat in Spectrasonics Stylus RMX, you can lock the bass and other tracks to the drums. If you’ve loaded two MIDI drum loops, you can quantize one to the other. If you’ve played a keyboard part whose feel you like, you can quantize the drums and bass to it.
Here’s how to use groove templates in Steinberg Cubase 4.
1. Drag the MIDI data for the beat into a track (Fig. 1). Record other tracks as desired.
2. After selecting the Part that contains the feel you want in the Project window, use the menu command MIDI > Advanced Quantize > Part to Groove (Fig. 2).
3. Open the part that you want to quantize to this groove in the Key Editor (piano-roll). You’ll see your new quantize template already selected in the quantize field at the top of the window (Fig. 3). Hit the Q key. If you’ve selected no notes, all of the notes will be quantized to the new template.
4. Not all MIDI drum parts have hits on every sixteenth-note. If the part you’re quantizing has notes that fall into gaps in the grid, quantizing them would make a mess. So shift-drag around groups of notes that you want to quantize, leaving other notes unselected (Fig. 4). Hit the Q key as before.
Most drum grooves are close to the expected beats. Individual hits may be ahead of or behind the beat by only a few clock ticks. So the effect of this type of quantizing will be subtle. And the effect can be overdone. Try experimenting with Cubase’s Shift-I command, which performs an “iterative” quantize on selected notes (called strength or percentage quantizing in other programs). This command moves them part of the way to the nearest point on the grid. Try quantizing two parts to different templates for a looser feel.
I usually leave certain parts, such as lead lines, entirely unquantized, but I often have to edit their rhythms by hand.
SIDEBAR: JARGON JOCKEY
quantization: Moving the start times of a group of MIDI notes so that they line up on the beat, or on some more complex rhythmic grid.
REX file: A file containing a series of sample slices, often of drum hits, and a corresponding MIDI clip that will play the slices with a particular rhythm. Many plug-ins and some DAWs can load REX files and then allow you to extract the MIDI data to a MIDI track.