Swing quantize / groove pool
Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2021 2:51 pm
I use Live as a traditional DAW in the arrangement view, having from a Cubase/Sonar background, moving to Live as I like the drag and drop workflow. However I'm now working on a piece that I need to swing quantize and the way it's implemented in Live is baking my brain.
I'm aware that I need to use a groove pool to apply the swing, but if I record a midi track where I tap in a swing rhythm, and I want to tighten this up with quantize while keeping the swing feel, I'm having the following issues:
- which of the swing presets should I choose from the groove pool? Like what is the difference between say 'swing 8-15' and 'swing 8-99', and how do I know given that there's no audition feature?
- I'm not sure the groove is actually having any effect on the midi, as some parts still sound out of time - to test this I quantized a midi part to remove the swing totally, and applying the groove didn't seem to make a big difference
- The grid doesn't reflect the swing timing, so if I want to move individual notes with reference to it for any reason I can't see a way to do that
- if I use the quantize function in the groove pool, which apparently is to pre-quantize notes before the groove is applied, it seems to completely remove the groove feel the more I go towards 100%
I'm aware that I'm atypical in the way I use Live but I don't see why they couldn't just add a swing function to the regular quantize feature, the way they've implemented seems to totally overcomplicate it if you're not working in the session view... Anyway, if anyone could give some advice on any of the above I'd appreciate it!
I'm aware that I need to use a groove pool to apply the swing, but if I record a midi track where I tap in a swing rhythm, and I want to tighten this up with quantize while keeping the swing feel, I'm having the following issues:
- which of the swing presets should I choose from the groove pool? Like what is the difference between say 'swing 8-15' and 'swing 8-99', and how do I know given that there's no audition feature?
- I'm not sure the groove is actually having any effect on the midi, as some parts still sound out of time - to test this I quantized a midi part to remove the swing totally, and applying the groove didn't seem to make a big difference
- The grid doesn't reflect the swing timing, so if I want to move individual notes with reference to it for any reason I can't see a way to do that
- if I use the quantize function in the groove pool, which apparently is to pre-quantize notes before the groove is applied, it seems to completely remove the groove feel the more I go towards 100%
I'm aware that I'm atypical in the way I use Live but I don't see why they couldn't just add a swing function to the regular quantize feature, the way they've implemented seems to totally overcomplicate it if you're not working in the session view... Anyway, if anyone could give some advice on any of the above I'd appreciate it!