 Here I am in cakewalk with some drums and some bass guitar, and I'd like to say they're playing a groove, but my timing is so sloppy they sound like they're tripping over each other. Let's have a listen and hear what I mean. Yuck, I'm going to fix that with some quantizing, so I'll shut down both of these windows here, I'm just going to make sure that my drums and my bass guitar are selected, then I'm going to press Q on the keyboard to bring up the quantize options. I'm just going to change the duration here to one sixteenths and then I'm going to hit okay. Let's have a listen now. Much better, but I knew which settings to choose to get the results I wanted. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well, and I'm going to help you to get the results you want from the quantize feature in Cakewalk by BandLab by looking at just a few key features which help me out time and again. Let's start off by taking a look at resolution. So in order to get the results you're expecting from quantizing, it's vital that you understand this setting right here which is resolution and I'm going to help you to understand that by using a different feature in Cakewalk and that's the snap feature. Let's just close this window and you can see that I've got snap turned on right at the top here. Now I'm going to be using this little rhythm here between this kick and snare. Let's have a listen. Now of course that's being played over two bars and there's four beats per bar. Let's just count those out. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Now to help us to visualize that I'm actually going to change the resolution of the snap feature. So I'm going to go at the top here and I'm going to choose one, four. That's four divisions per bar okay. That's going to give us those four beats per bar. You can see those vertical grid lines have appeared there and we can see that a number of these notes are quite close to those grid lines. Now if I start to use the snap feature and actually grab one of these notes and drag it around you'll see as I move it it does snap to the nearest line. Now I'll do this one here it snaps to the nearest line. This is exactly what quantizing is doing. It's not dragging it of course it's just saying hey where is the nearest grid line or resolution line and I'll move the note to there so it's in exactly the right position. So I can do that with these notes and they will move to the correct position okay. That's what quantizing is actually doing. But the eagle eye amongst you will notice that some of these notes are nowhere near one of these vertical lines yeah. And if we start to move them to the nearest line of resolution so to speak I'll start moving this around. They end up a long way away from where they're supposed to be yeah. You can end up getting a rhythm that you weren't quite expecting. Let's see how that sounds now that we've moved those notes to the nearest grid line. Not the result we were wanting at all let's undo most or all of that okay. So what we had there was an incorrect resolution in order to accommodate some of these notes which were in between the grid lines we're going to change the resolution here to one eighth or eight divisions per bar okay. Now you can see some new vertical lines there and you can see that all of the notes are somewhere near one of these lines okay. Now rather than actually use the snap feature and move these one at a time which would take absolutely ages I'm going to now use quantize. So I'm going to right click and drag this blue square over all of these notes to select them all. I'm going to press Q on the keyboard that brings up this quantized dialogue and then I'm going to select one eighth remember that's the resolution that we need to have these notes somewhere near the nearest grid line. I'll click on okay and you can see they've shuffled around a little bit and now it sounds like this. So it's important to understand what resolution setting you're going to need to get the results you want. If you were to do the same here and you had the setting in quantized too low let's just choose one or two divisions per bar like so we'll click on okay that's close to the result we had before yeah where it's just going too far away yeah and likewise if you were to choose something sort of crazy we'll just press Q and we'll go for all the highest setting we can go for 132 dotted click on okay well yes it's done something and it's almost there but as you can see quite a number of these notes are nowhere near our grid lines that's because the resolution was way too high so it's very important you understand your music and what is the right resolution setting to get the results that you want. Quantizing is all about timing and now would be a great time for you to like this video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already done so. Now we're going to talk about another problem you may come across when quantizing your music. Now some pieces of music are written in what's called compound time and again if you don't quite understand the settings for resolution here you can get some very undesirable results let's just have a quick listen to this rhythm here which is a kind of a swing rhythm. Now we're using snap again to demonstrate this and we've got our snap resolution setting up here set to 1.8 now you can see that a number of the notes are very very close to grid lines here but some of them are really not very close to grid lines so what we did in the last example was just to increase the resolution here so let's do that now let's just go up here and change this to 1.16 on the snap settings. Now you can see that quite a lot of these notes here are pretty close to grid lines yeah so surely right that's the setting we should use. Let's try that out I'm just going to right click drag across all of these notes press q for quantize and change the resolution to 1.16 I do it confidently expecting yes that's the answer I click on okay and okay quite a nice little rhythm but not the rhythm I was wanting let's press okay the problem here is is that this piece of music is not about divisions of 2 4 8 16 and 32 in fact each beat in this kind of rhythm is divided into three parts okay so what we would do for our snap feature if we were changing that is we would go to 1.8 which would be reasonably close but then change it to a triplet value okay by pressing this three button up here when we click on that you can see that each of our four beats one two three four is now divided into three little sections there okay now you can see that our notes of our little rhythm are all quite close to a grid line now if I select them all press q for quantize I'm going to choose 1.8 but triplet this time okay click on that click on okay have a listen so if you're trying your quantize resolution settings and nothing's quite working out and you don't have much of a music theory background then it's very much worth trying out to see if it actually should have a triplet value now some people find that if they quantize everything the music starts to sound way too robotic everything's too much on the grid as they say now if we quantize the drums and bass that we quantize right at the beginning of this video we'll click on q and we choose our resolution and click on okay just when I do click on okay just look at the notes at the bottom here in the drum grid I'll click on okay and you see that they all moved exactly to the grid line sounds okay but it can sound a bit too robotic let's undo that one of the things that you can do to counteract that is to use the strength setting so I'll press q on the keyboard again and you can see here with the strength setting that can be at 100 which means it's going to go exactly to the grid line or you can move it all the way down to close to zero now if you do this let's just say put it to I don't know 35 and click on okay again just look at the notes again down at the bottom here I'll just move this up out of the way look at the notes here I'll click on okay now you can see that some of these notes moved close to the grid line but didn't move all the way to the grid line so it's going to make the performance sound a little bit tighter than perhaps before without it sounding like everything is programmed exactly to the right place now I personally find and it is a bit of a personal preference thing if I quantize this and change this to around about sort of 80 or above I think we'll go about here 82 click on okay that I generally get a sort of a decent result you do have to have a bit of trial and error with this but let's have a listen now so there's no obvious timing issues there anymore the drums and the bass seem to be in time even though they're not actually perfectly in time now some instruments can really benefit from the offset feature particularly I find it useful with instruments which have a slow attack okay let's just have a listen to these strings here now in order to to make these sound like they're in time you actually tend to naturally play them just a little bit early there's a clue there you can see with my playing all of the notes are just a little bit before the bar line or the grid line there okay now if I go ahead and grab all of these and quantize them like normal click on okay they've all moved to the grid line I mean if I play them by themselves they might sound okay but if I play them with the metronome they sound like this some of them are just sounding like they're a little bit late especially the last chord here let's have a listen again okay so the metronome is revealing that they're sounding a little bit late now of course you don't normally have the metronome turned on you may have something like this piano turned on let's have a listen so particularly again that last chord there really sounded out of place to me let's undo that so what we can do is improve the timing of these if we got a little bit sloppy but we can actually offset them all by a particular amount now I'm going to click cue again for quantize and you can see we can offset them using this offset setting now we want these notes to be a little bit early there is a little bit of trial error probably involved here if I just drag this control down I'll go all the way as far as or not as far as it can go let's go to here I'll click on okay or you can see that they're all now way too early okay so you need to play around with this a little bit I'll undo click on cue for quantize again I happen to know that around about minus 50 or so should be about right click on okay you can see it has lined them all up now now they're sort of more in time with each other but they're also going to be in time with that piano much better as well let's have a listen so I find that a really useful feature as I say when I've got instruments with a slow attack we're back to our original drum beat and I have the resolution on snap here set to one eighth okay we're not going to be using snap but I'm just using this as a visual representation because it gives us these lovely grid lines here now you can see that most of the beats are very very close to one of the grid lines okay so the one eighth setting if we were to quantize this is going to work for all of these beats apart from right at the end here where we just have one beat which is not anywhere near one of those grid lines so if we followed what I did earlier that would mean we'd increase the resolution here up to one eighth I'm sorry one sixteenths okay that makes sure that we have everything near a grid line but it's sometimes a bit of overkill and sometimes you'll find that some of these beats the other beats don't go to exactly where you want them to go to so another solution for this and it's just one of the solutions is to use the window setting in our quantized settings now if we take a look at this beat at the moment and we just quantize it with the regular one eight settings we'll do that now set to one eight I'll click on okay you can see that beat at the end there has gone very close to this other beat we've got two right on top of each other there that's not going to give us the result we want so I'll undo that you can see it's back where it was so one of the things we can do we'll go to quantize we'll still leave it on one eighth okay we won't change the resolution but we'll use this window setting now this is a kind of a tolerance setting and what it's saying is like okay now if a note is very close to the grid line I'll quantize it but if it's a very long way away from the grid line I won't quantize it at all I'll just ignore it okay and we've got a kind of a tolerance value here okay so with it's set to 100 basically the feature is switched off and if we go all the way down I'm going to choose something like so let's go for 20% here okay so I'll click on okay you saw all of the other notes were quantized to that one eighth setting but it just left this last note alone that can be really helpful sometimes when you've got sort of flanges and sort of ghost notes and things like that things that are not exactly ever supposed to be on a grid line that can be quite useful if you want some incredibly useful tips and secrets for cakewalk by bandlab click on the thumbnail on the other side of this logo I've made a playlist of a series of secrets and tips I've made which may just save your day