Recording and Quantizing MIDI Instruments

For this week's assignment in the Introduction to Music Production class on Coursera, I'm going to show you how to record and quantize a MIDI track in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

To record the track, follow these steps:

1. Select an instrument and assign it to a track.  Often, this involves dragging an instrument from an instrument browser onto a track in the arrangement view.
2. Arm the track for recording - this prepares the track to receive and record MIDI data when recording starts.  Some DAWs automatically arm the track when you assign an instrument to it.
3. Set the tempo, turn on the metronome, and set the metronome count-in to at least one bar.
4. Press the Record button, wait for the count-in, and start playing.

The following video demonstrates these steps using Ableton Live.  I chose to try to record an entire drum kit in one take, in the hopes that the performance would be in need of some quantization.

As expected, the performance was a bit sloppy.  To quantize the track, follow these steps:

1. Select the clip in the arrangement view.
2. If you plan to quantize to the grid, make sure that the grid is set to the correct spacing.
3. Select all of the notes to be quantized.
4. Set the quantization amount to a low number (such as 20%) and perform the quantization.
5. Listen to the quantized track.  If it still sounds too sloppy, perform quantization again.
6. Repeat step 5 until you like how the track sounds.

The following video demonstrates quantization in Ableton Live:

My hard-learned lesson this week is that screen capture software (I'm using Camtasia) can have a significant effect on the performance of the application you're recording.  I was trying to record the track using my computer's keyboard, and Camtasia introduced enough latency to make that impossible. Switching to an external MIDI keyboard solved the problem.

I hope this was helpful - thanks for watching.