 Hi guys, this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music and in this lesson, let's understand a very, very important topic in the field of music production or actually in the field of music in general, which is what I call as time fields or what we call in the music production DAW or the recording world as the grid. So I have recorded some music as you just heard and as you can see it records it as MIDI notes which essentially indicates where the notes started and for how long the note was. Now we need to understand where these notes were actually musically aligned and also how we can work with them and what tasks you would generally end up doing once you have recorded musical information and it all starts with the grid and understanding how beats are divided or understanding what I call as the time field. So to access any kind of information after you have recorded MIDI in an application like Reaper or pretty much in any DAW, you double click, it opens up into its own MIDI editor window you could say and if I play that back. So I've basically recorded some kind of information and there's vocals as well but we have focused more on the MIDI. Let's understand the musical grid in more detail now. The musical grid will first of all have bars in this instance as you can see I started at bar number three and then the bars have beats. This would be bar three beat one, bar three beat two, bar three beat three, bar three beat four and if I zoom a bit further in I have the sub-beats. In this instance the bar three got divided into two equal units that's bar three at the end or the sub-beat one. If I zoom in further I have the bar three being divided now into four equal units one E and E. So now if you read this clearly it's bar three beat one sub-beat one and now your grid is divided into four okay. Here this is bar three beat two sub-beat one or the E two E and E so if I count this out for you one E and E two E and E three E and E that is a generic way or a general way in which we count this information or the sub-beats. So if I played this music now for you you'll realize that I was in the world of sixteenth notes because I divided the musical performance into four equal units two E and a three and a four E and a one E and a two E and a three and a four E and a one E and a two E and a three and a four E and a one E and a two E and a three and a four E. The amount of information I played was basically up to the nearest sixteenth note or I played musical notes which were dividing the beat by four or went into the division system of four okay. There are many ways in which you could look at it. So you need to understand that when you open up your grid more you're going to see more lines. So if I go one by thirty-two I see a lot of lines. In this instance I don't need to see so many lines. So I would prefer one sixteenth or dividing the beat by four okay. So let's understand the grid a bit further before I give you a few practical examples. So first off you have the eighth note grid which I would recommend is the most default starting point your music is divided into two equal units or the pulse is divided into two equal units. However you could also show the grid at the pulse level which is one fourth. So if you show your music at the pulse level or if you show your grid at the pulse level then basically you're telling yourself that your music will not divide the beat which is going to be highly rare unless perhaps you want to play something as simple as this three four one two three four one two three four one two four right. So in this instance you see I'm not at all dividing the beat one two three four. So that's my quarter note grid but for the most part when you're creating music you're not going to be not dividing the beat you are going to be dividing it by something so you'll find that your default is eighth notes however you can even go deeper away from the division of the beat or you can multiply the beat as we sometimes call it you can do minims or you can do half notes that means you'll not even see the beat two you'll only see beat one and beat three of the bar right or you can go the entire bar of four. You can start with an eighth note grid sequence so you're dividing the beat by two one and two and three and four and one and right and three and four and however you also have the option of dividing the beat by four which is sixteenth note so there we go one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a or you divide the grid by eight so you'll be making like very very fast music probably some fancy arpeggiated bass lines or leads and so on. So I'm going to just show you what eighth note straight sounds like and then we're also going to explore a few other options which we get with the grid and these options mind you are musical things so when you compose music it's important that you know what you're composing on especially the first thing you write so the first phrase you wrote was let's say on a sixteenth note straight time feel then all of your arrangement is going to be around that you need to perhaps set your grid to that setting right so eighth note straight means if I played you the metronome track two three four one two three four first of all I would want to count it one and two and three and four and like this right so now if I play music one and two and three and four and four so even if I don't play the divisions this is going to be the maximum inside I'm going to get in the beat that that that that that that that that see I can play some eighth notes which are ghosted or soft eighth notes all eighth notes right three if I count again one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two I'm still feeling eighth notes one and two and three and four one and I'm bringing back the eighth notes or I can just play the ends and one and two and three and four and one and two and right so the metronome right now is actually just giving me the pulse which it should be because then you feel your music better you I feel you should always hear the pulse with the metronome and not not anything else really don't experiment too much with the click now if you see where my music is aligned and if you see my grid currently quarter notes I'm going to take it up to eighth notes straight that means it's dividing the beat into exactly two units so you see bar number 27 for now beat one sub beat two or sub beat one this is the main on beat or down beat and this is your end of the sub beat how many sub beats do I have when I am on an eighth note grid two let's see how it sounds two and three and four and one and two and three so if I have to do operations now with this in an application like Reaper what I can do is the most obvious thing or the first thing we do as producers which is quantize so one option is to hit this button or just hit the shortcut Q so if I hit Q I can quantize either selected notes which I'm selecting here or what I prefer to do is perhaps all notes so if I do all notes as you just saw they all get aligned with the grid I'm going to do that again quantize all notes and now all notes get aligned to the nearest location in the grid and now if I played back it sounds a lot more on time right and you can always take a few notes back to normal to retain some original vibe so in this instance I've just taken those notes back to the their originally played location okay so this is an eighth note feel now let's also explore an eighth note swing feel where if this is the pulse two and two three four one and two this is straight divisions one and two and now if I swing this one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one right but before I actually play something with swing I'd rather play you something with a triplet feel the triplet feel sort of covers the swing inside it so if I have to count triplets now a good way to count it would be one one and a two two and a three and a four and a one and a two and right four and one two and a three and a four and a one triplet two triplet three triplet four triplet right so now let's build some music on a triplet time feel and let's see how we can work with our grid now I'm just swinging bringing some triplets I'm gonna have to play all the divisions of the triplets again you can play a few and make it groovy right so that also makes it interesting so just because we've divided the beat into three equal units doesn't mean that you play all let's just give it a short listen to how this sounds and since we said it's triplets you need to change your grid into triplets so I would say eighth note triplet so we've covered the straight feel eighth notes now you do eighth note triplet and as you can see all the notes sort of align yes there is some human mishaps but sometimes the human mishaps are also good so be very careful when you quantize especially if you're working with a with a trained musician sometimes this is not really a mistake it should not be considered a mistake if it sounds good to your ear but just know that it's sort of on the triplet feel all of my division points as you can see are pretty much on the grid on the triplet grid so a triplet generally when you're composing your music every pulse would be divided into three equal time units and so on okay so this is about your triplet and inside the triplet you also have the element of swing so let me just play you something which is just pretty much only swing and then we could take it from there okay that'll be so what I played for you is something I guess you could say bluesy so if you observe there I'm not really going one triplet I'm not doing one and I'm not doing all the three divisions it's always one and is off and the ear is hit so so you're only playing the one and the three divisions of the triplet and leaving out the middle one so what we have in Dawes is you'll have a swing grid which you could access so you could access this swing grid make it eighth note swing because I'm still dividing the beat into two equal in now unequal units right I'm doing it in eighth note swing and there we go you'll find that all of my units all of my beats are at that swing point and what's nice with some of the DAWs it allows you to kind of adjust that swing there we go it adjusts the swing so it doesn't have to be perfect triplet swing you can adjust it here and there you know using this marker maybe little lazy and you see this slider change I can even change the slider here so maybe I I wanted to be 50 swing 50 swing would be perfect triplets then I could move it a little bit here and there and that's the beauty of working with swing in a DAW you can make your performance sound a little bit more interesting or a bit more human and get those hip hop R&B vibes which people try out like they do quintuplet swing or you know septuplet swing there are all sorts of swing which you could consider which are used in genres like neosoul or funk and so on and so forth right so if I play this back you'll see that it's pretty much swung so now if I have to fix this performance or work with it in any way I can actually take any of these elements and move it so if I take this I can snap it to my grid snap this to my grid now if I have to quantize this or if I have to fix this if you actually do not realize that this is a swing performance which I guess you have figured out by now but if you have not and let's say if the grid happened to be eighth note straight you see first of all it's quite obvious a lot of my notes are off this grid because it is not straight it is swung so what I do if I have if I do this by mistake and just hit quantize to the grid which is straight it's going to completely change this performance it's automatically automatically made it like rock and roll right it's quite cool actually right now if I take this back to where it should have been which is eighth note swing let's come back to the the way I tried to play right or you could leave it back to normal or bypass the whole project altogether of quantization and yes I hope you've understood the difference between swing and straight guys so a swing feel is more like a triplet feel without the middle triplet while a straight feel is exact 50% division of the beat since you've understood straight and swing triplet is not too difficult either triplet is all the divisions pretty much every single division also please note that if I do a sixteenth note version of straight what's going to happen is now I have the access of dividing the beat into four equal units so that'll be one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a right so if I build music on this feel I can get some I can get a lot more rhythmically interesting results because I have so many more permutations to divide the beat in right so let me just demonstrate sixteenth notes straight a little bit okay quarters which is fine you can relax here you see how normal the quarters sound right or pulse I'm on the pulse divide by two and now divide by four right so that's your sixteenth note feel let's see how this looks in the grid again you're going to want to choose the sixteenth note straight grid and now you will see all these ease and the earth so if I zoom in a little bit you see one e and a two e and a so you see all these divisions one e and a two e and a three and a four e and that's how you count it so you see all these additional divisions and if you quantize it it should sound quite good as a sixteenth note rhythmic feel right if you have to also do sixteenth note triplets sixteenth note triplet would mean you're actually a simple way to understand it is you're dividing the beat into six equal parts so if you do sixteen note triplets it's going to be one two three four five six one two three four five six one two three four five six one right we'll come back to that but for now let's just focus on the sixteen notes straight which i'm going to play you a little bit right so let's just consider this division so this is the a one e one e and a one e and a so this is why i needed to choose sixteenth note straight in order to catch the earth one e and a two right so this is how 16 notes look and then you can obviously quantize this stuff to make it tighter or move things to wherever you desire right so that's 16 notes straight and similarly you can also have 16th note swing 16th notes swing would mean you go something like dug dug dug dug dug dug you swing the 16th note instead of the eighth notes. E and a 4, E and a 1, E and a 2, E and a dug a dug a dug a dug a dug a dug a dug a dug. Right? So this is 16th note swing. Let's see how that looks on our grid. See it's caught those swing elements. So eighth notes will remain eighth notes and 16th notes swing because we are swinging the 16th notes, the E's and the E's. Okay? So 16th note triplet is where you're going to have six units for the grid. One, two, three, four, five, six and then the next beat. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Right? So you have a lot more available options if ever you do compose using that and then last but not least we have the dotted time field which can be chosen here. The dotted time field basically is straight. That's important to keep in mind. It is straight but it accesses information more in dotted notes. So that means one E and a 2, E and a 3, E and a 4, E and a 1, E. Essentially you divide the beat into four equal units but then the music you play is grouped in threes. Right? I hope that makes sense. I repeat you divide your beat into four equal units but then your accents are in threes. Let me just try and show that to you with some basic examples. Two, three, four. So this would be a dotted 1, E and a 2, E and a 4, E and a 1, E and a 2, E and a So by dividing or by accenting differently you're going to approach or you're going to acknowledge a lot of the off beats which are there as opposed to the 1, E and a 2, E and a 3, E and a 4, E and a 1. So if you do 1, E and a 2, E and a 3, you're not really playing off beat music or groovy music but if you do 1, E and a 2, E and a 3, E and a 4, E and a 1, E and a 1. So that's the dotted field. Let me try if I can let me see if I can play you some music on the dotted field. So you need to get this groove into your mind, something like 16th but grouped in accents off. So it's a little tricky to count and play but it's good to acknowledge that when you play this information. So let me try and show you on the grid. So you don't necessarily need to always be in a dotted grid as such unless you're only playing on the dotted eighth note field. So if I show you, this is the E, 1 E and a 3, E and a 3, E and a 3, E and a 3, E and a 3, E and a 3, E and a 3, E and a 4, E and a 1. Even though the pulse is very commonly used for your EDM and your dance music very very common for that those sort of genres right guys so let's revise all that we've learned so far. So the whole intention of this lesson was to explore all the different grid settings in your DAW software's and also understand the purpose behind it and as I say time feels this is the way you feel your time so essentially you figure out how you're dividing the beat whether you're dividing into two whether you're not dividing that's one by four or quarter notes or you're dividing into four so generally you're going to work with quarter eighth or 16 mostly eighth and 16 if you ask me very rarely you'll want to see your grid in multiplications of the beat then by default your beat will be straight I would recommend eighth note straight as much as possible you can also look at triplets if your music is da ba da da ba da da ba da da it could be swing if it's ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta or if it's in fact straight it'll end up being da da da da da da da da da da da or dotted in rare instances where you're playing more of the dance EDM hits like ta ta ta ta ta and you're always in that sort of dotted world and when we do swing please understand that you can adjust the percentage of the swing to make it more and more groovy as per your requirement by default you could set it to 50% and that's your normal swing triplet world okay so these are all the time feels in music guys if you have any questions if you'd like us to teach you something more please leave it in the comments and if you haven't already please subscribe to our youtube channel right away and also share the channel and the video with all your musician friends give us a thumbs up cheers and I will catch you in the next video