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S2E09 – Quantizing Makes Life Easy

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Quantizing is a very powerful technique for an extremely fast workflow while making beats.

Quantizing is not limited to only FL Studio, it is a part of the ORGANIC TOOLS which I teach you in my SAFE SPOTS book.

There are two strong opinions towards quantizing.. that is do not quantize, and fix it by manually note-nudging (which is fine for drum loops, or smaller melodies)..

But once you start playing bigger melodies with many notes, manually adjusting every single note becomes extremely time-consuming in the beatmaking process.. where time is of the essence, and you want to quickly move onto your next sound and melody to continue building off the initial melody you created.

FL Studio allows for many ways to quantize, but the two I talk about in this episode are Quick Quantize (CTRL +Q).. this adjust BOTH the beginning and end of a note, which can be powerful, depending on the melody you have played, and the sound selected.

However, I have started to favor Quick quantize start times (SHIFT + Q). This will adjust the beginning of your notes to grid, helping them to be on time with the beat. Sometimes you may still have to drag a note left or right to line it up properly, but you will discover that this is an extremely fast workflow to get the sound you want, howbeit, maybe a bit too “robotic”.

To get the sound you want, WITHOUT sounding robotic, definitely read my SAFE SPOTS Book, which will teach you about sound placement, and the ORGANIC TOOLS which are FREE inside of any DAW, and are the core tools beatmakers must learn to use to become a good well-rounded producer.

I hope you enjoyed the episode about Quantizing in FL Studio, and if you should do Quantize or just manually note-nudge. (I like to quantize, then manually note-nudge afterwards for a much faster workflow).

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S2E09 – Quantizing Makes Life Easy

  1. Alright, hey, what's up, guys?
  2. Gratuitous here from It's Gratuitous.com, season two, episode nine.
  3. Quantizing makes life easy. Now there's a lot of controversy around the topic of
  4. quantizing. We're gonna cover what is it, as well as two ways to quantize inside of
  5. FL Studio. Now, the two sides of the fence is more of like the sampling
  6. community doesn't like quantizing.
  7. they like to kind of hit their notes, and then where it lands is where they're where
  8. they will start working with it.
  9. Maybe they'll nudge some sounds to the left, which is early, and then maybe nudge
  10. some sounds to the right, which is late in the loop.
  11. Alright, so quantizing, I'm telling you, in my opinion, I think quantizing makes
  12. your life a lot easier. I like to quantize again, there's two different ways you can
  13. quantize inside of FL Studio. There is quantizing both the beginning and end of a
  14. note, or you can quantize just the beginning of the note and keep the end of the
  15. note the same lengths that you recorded them as.
  16. So I kind of like doing it the second way, which I'll cover more in this episode.
  17. Okay. Now I want to give you guys a little update behind the scenes before we get
  18. into quantizing. So I have been getting super super organized.
  19. I put some new computer fans into my computer to allow for better cooling.
  20. I'm hoping to get my computer lasting for another year or two before I upgrade.
  21. Computers have come a super long way from when I did my computer upgrade, and I
  22. did a huge walkthrough of the computer parts I bought, how I actually installed
  23. them, why I picked them. I've specifically picked my computer parts for a music
  24. production computer. So if you guys are interested in that, I will leave the link in
  25. the resources for this episode.
  26. It's a little bit of an older video, but the knowledge still applies for the most
  27. part. And I've also been planning about backing up and keeping a nice
  28. organized workflow for my files and everything.
  29. when you guys are just just getting into this and you're brand new, you might be
  30. using FL Studio for fun. But once you get into serious projects and you know what's
  31. a serious project, a serious project, in my opinion, is something that you're going
  32. to be uploading to something like Spotify or if you're going to be working with
  33. clients, okay. As soon as you start working seriously like that, you got to be
  34. thinking about a backup strategy.
  35. Now, because of so much content I've created over the years, I have a lot of
  36. different files, like everything from video content to this podcast to
  37. my own music. You guys can check out my music on Spotify.
  38. I now have nine beat tapes, but I also have a couple albums.
  39. What do you do with all these files?
  40. And how do you store them and how do you keep them safe and organized for the long
  41. term? And how do you also plan for growth in the future?
  42. And so in future episodes and you know on the blog as well as the podcast here.
  43. Again, you guys can always just visit it'sgratuitous.com to check out learning about
  44. FL Studio on my website. But I want to teach you guys a lot of powerful things when
  45. it comes to backing up your files, keeping organized and just yeah, so that you
  46. can flow and make your music. Because at the end of the day, that's what it's all
  47. about. It's being able to sit down in your computer and make music when you want to
  48. make music, not having to do updates or not having to worry about where are your
  49. files. Okay. So I've been doing a lot of reading and I've been very busy on that.
  50. Okay. So thank you for your patience.
  51. So, in this episode, though, I want to talk to you about quantizing, okay?
  52. So I have two melodies here. I'll leave the metronome on, and this melody is not
  53. quantized. And what happens when you play your notes on a MIDI keyboard is
  54. it's never gonna be snapped to grid.
  55. So what is grid?. Grid is when things are one, two, three, four
  56. And that is why digital music has its bad name is because it's so perfect.
  57. See, like a real musician on stage where they're recording with a microphone or you
  58. know, however they're capturing that audio, it's recorded and it's printed into a
  59. file. And so their timing is is quite good.
  60. But many times when we are recording through MIDI, there's some latency going on
  61. there, okay? And the latency makes your notes not on time, as well as you know, if
  62. you're not the best piano player, or like even for myself, like when I play the
  63. keys, many times the notes are not perfect, but again, we don't want perfect, we
  64. want catchy melodies, which we'll get a bit more into as we go here.
  65. So let me just let you listen to
  66. this. Okay, so
  67. if you're listening to the metronome, some of these notes are
  68. off. And so there's two ways to quantize in FL
  69. Studio. So right now I'm just in the piano roll, and you click the top left arrow,
  70. and you guys are gonna see tools.
  71. Okay, and if you hover over tools, there's quick quant quantize, and then there's
  72. quick quantize start times. Now, over the years I've favored quick quantize start
  73. times. And the reason for this is because what you're doing is you're snapping the
  74. beginning of the note and you're keeping the tail.
  75. So if you held down a note extra long, that is not getting touched.
  76. It's just the beginning of the note, it's snapping it to grid, making it a lot
  77. easier. So again, quantizing, there's controversy in the industry.
  78. More of the sampling community doesn't like quantizing.
  79. Like they'd actually come into the notes and they would adjust them, you know,
  80. themselves. But for me, for workflow, quantizing by far makes my life so
  81. easy. And then I can quickly go back and edit it with my mouse.
  82. Again, if you want to learn more about the organic tools, check out my book called
  83. Safe Spots. There's also a course.
  84. there's so much good information in there.
  85. So I'm first gonna start with shift and Q.
  86. And so they just snap to grid.
  87. And so this is now in perfect time, which is good because it's gonna be
  88. in perfect time, like if we play it with like a drum loop
  89. now. I
  90. will turn off the
  91. metronome. So
  92. I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna unquantize those
  93. notes.
  94. So as you can hear, it's not in time.
  95. So if you hit control and q, this quantizes the beginning and end of the note.
  96. So a note is going to be snapped to the very, very beginning of a line and the very,
  97. very end of a line. All right.
  98. So again, that is control and q.
  99. And so you can see, you know, if you do that yourself, that your notes are no longer
  100. what you really played. It's still the same notes, but it doesn't have that same
  101. melodic flavor that you added in.
  102. It still keeps all like your velocities and all that kind of stuff, which is very
  103. powerful. Okay. Velocity is very important for that human sound.
  104. But if I undo that and again, I use shift and cue, it just quantizes the beginning
  105. of the notes. So it snaps it to grid, but it keeps the length of the notes.
  106. By far, this is the easiest way to edit.
  107. Then if you really want, you can just highlight notes.
  108. You can hold on shift and the scroll wheel.
  109. It allows you to nudge notes. You can also use alt and the scroll wheel, it adjusts
  110. the velocity. All right. In my opinion, I'm on the fence of I really like quantizing
  111. for the fact of speed. However, you have to be careful when it comes to quantizing
  112. that your music doesn't sound robotic.
  113. All right. So I hope you guys enjoyed the episode about quantizing.
  114. Super powerful stuff. If you want to learn FL Studio, then please visit my website,
  115. it's gratuitous.com. I have my FL Studio Beginners course.
  116. I have my FL Studio Beginners book.
  117. I also have a membership where you can access 26 of my courses.
  118. All right. So there's like my piano course, which is my bestseller.
  119. There's you can learn about safe spots, which is all about drum loops.
  120. If you guys ever have questions, you guys can contact me at it'sgratuitous.com
  121. forward slash contact. Or if you guys want to check out some free goodies I have for
  122. you, like I I have some like free books on there, some free sounds.
  123. You guys can go to it's gratuitous.com forward slash resources.
  124. You guys can check out my five keys to a successful beep.
  125. And I also want to say that if you guys are checking out this podcast to get the
  126. best experience, make sure to go all the way back to season one and listen from the
  127. first episode because I laid out those episodes in order for you guys to get the
  128. best learning experience. Okay, I've kind of set it up so that as you listen to each
  129. episode, I kind of build off of what I thought was required to really get you
  130. learning well. Thank you so much.
  131. I'll talk to you guys in the next episode.
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