From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

Editing rhythm and quantizing - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

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Editing rhythm and quantizing

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- [Instructor] After making a MIDI recording, you'll likely want or need to fix some rhythmic errors. I've got the Quantize Project open if you want to follow along. And let's select this base clip by clicking it, and that will show it down here in clip view. Now, right now it doesn't look like we can see all of the notes, so remember that if you click in the background here, you can hit your H key to size things vertically, so we see from the highest to the lowest note in the clip. And then if you hit your W key, that will zoom back out, so you can see the entire clip contents. Now, to edit one of these notes, we need to select it. And I can select a single note by clicking it. Now, because the preview switch is enabled, I'm hearing things, so I'm going to disable that temporarily. Okay, the other way that I can select a single note is to drag and close it, and that also works if I want to select multiple notes. I can also select multiple notes by making a time selection. And you do that by clicking in the timeline and dragging to the end of where you want to select and then letting go. Now that I've got a time selection, if I hit my return key, it will select the notes within that selection. I can also select all of the notes on a single pitch by clicking on the corresponding key on the piano ruler over here on the left. And finally, I can select all of the notes within the clip by pressing Command+A if you're on a Mac, or Ctrl+A if you're on a PC. Alright, I want to make an manual adjustment, and I noticed that this one note that's right here is quite late. So, I can click that note and then I can drag it, and as I drag, I want you to notice that right now I can move the note freely, but when I get over here near the grid, it's snapping to the grid. And then as I begin to move it more, it's going to be snapping to the grid as I do that. So, that's great if you want notes all to be on the grid, but that's typically results in a non-musical performance. Now, if as I move this note, I want to have freedom to put it anywhere I want it, as I click and drag, I'm going to add the Command key if I'm on a Mac, or the Alt key, if I'm on a PC, that's going to override the grid and let me put this wherever I want it. Now, when I'm ready to release this, I'm going to let go of my mouse first, and then the Command or Alt key, and that will ensure it doesn't snap to grid. If I hit my W key again so I can see all the notes, I want to point out that it looks like there is a lot of stuff that's late. So, instead of clicking and dragging all these individual notes into place, I'm going to use the quantize command instead. So, I'm going to click here in the background, and I'm going to go Command+A, or Ctrl+A on a PC, to select all the notes. And then we can go up to our edit menu and we can choose either quantize or quantize settings. Now, if you choose quantize, it's automatically going to quantize this to whatever the settings are, and I don't know what they're set at. So, typically, I will always use quantized settings instead. And this is another one of those key commands that you're going to want to memorize. So, on a Mac, this is going to be Shif+Command+U, and it's going to be Shift+Ctrl+U on a PC. So, if I click that, it's going to bring up one of our new transform options. Now, in the past on Ableton Lebanon before, it would have brought up a little dialogue box that shows these same options that we now see here in the transform area. I'll also mention that I like to work with this transform button disabled. That way, as I'm making changes, it won't automatically start applying them to my selection. Then when I'm ready, I'll click the apply button down here in the lower right-hand corner. So, let me click here, again, I'll go Command+A to select all the notes, and then I'm going to come over here and I'm going to set the grid. You're going to typically choose a rhythmic value that equals the length of your shortest rhythmic note in the passage. And here we have 16th notes. So, I'm going to set this to 16th notes. I don't have triplets here, so I won't enable that. And then I want to apply this to the notes start so that they all move to the correct places. And that will accomplish that without changing the lengths of the notes. Sometimes when the notes are early and you have this end also selected, it will truncate the ends of the notes. Now, this won't hurt probably much with this base part, but in some cases, it won't sound right. So, I'm also going to set the percentage amount here because I don't want to quantize at a 100%. That will hard quantize everything on the grid, and that will result in those very mechanical performances that you want to usually avoid. So, I'm going to pull this down to around 80 to 85%, which is a good compromise for the quality of my keyboard playing. And then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click the apply button, and you'll see all of these notes move closer to the grid. I'm going to quickly scan through here to make sure things didn't quantize the wrong direction, because sometimes when the notes are way late, they'll quantize to the wrong direction instead of moving forward where we want them. Alright, let's quickly do this to the drum clip as well. And so, all I need to do here is click in the background, go Command+A. Again, I've got the same issue with 16th notes. So, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click the apply button. And, again, I'm going to check to see what happened. And you can see that I've got one of these high head notes was way late, and it quantize the wrong direction. So, I'm going to try and select that note very carefully and click and move that closer onto the grid. So, now we should be able to hear this, and this should sound relatively rhythmically musical. (gentle downbeat music) Okay, that's all worked. So, let's just review here some, things that you're going to want to consider. So first, when I record something, I'll listen to it and then I'll rerecord it if I don't like the performance. And I'll do that until I get something that's pretty close to what I want. And then I'm going to quantize judiciously, using that percentage parameter. Remember that these notes are differing amounts away from the optimal position. And when you quantize using that strength parameter, it's going to move them all a certain percentage closer. But remember, because the notes are differing amounts apart from where they need to be, it's going to move some notes more and other notes less, and thus, it's going to retain some of that human imperfection of the original performance. And then I'm only going to quantize what's necessary. I typically won't do everything unless everything needs it. So, knowing when and how to apply quantization is key to generating musical results.

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