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my name is john and i'm coming to you from Sooke british columbia in canada
and what i will be teaching you today is editing an imperfect MIDI audio
recording to correct for timing errors using cakewalk sonar eight point five
producer edition
so here we are in sonar's default track view
for this lesson i have created to MIDI tracks one as a drum track and the other
is a jazz organ it will be the jazz organ track that we will be working with
for the purposes of this lesson
so while the track view is great for setting up your tracks
it really doesn't help us much when it comes to editing midi
so what we need to do is switch to the piano roll view
and there is the button for the piano roll view there so let's have a look
here we are in the piano roll view
which is ideal for MIDI editing
if you need to move around on the midi keyboard on the right is the scrollbar
as well at the bottom right to you have the zoom tool which allows you to zoom
horizontally so that you can focus in closer on your timeline
before we start editing MIDI notes, we should have a listen to our recording
as it stands to see what's actually going on here
so let's have a listen
so to tighten up this performance which was sloppy in some places we're
going to take a two-pass approach
where we're going to manually correct the really big errors
and then we're going to use quantization to tighten up the whole performance and
bring it closer to the grid which is the division in musical time
that we are working with in our performance
in our case, we're using sixteenth notes
in this recording there are three things i want to edit manually before i do
quantization
these three notes are
too long
and there's an extra note over here that we need to delete
i held the end too long so i want to shorten that up
so let's start with deleting the extra note
there are two ways to do this one is to use the erase tool
and the other is to select a note and then hit the delete key
i'm showing you how to do it using the delete key because this allows you to
select multiple notes at a time and delete them all at once
so to manually edit notes that are too long, we're going to do it in two steps:
We're going to select the notes as a group
so that their edited together
and then we're going to edge-edit them
using the PRV Draw Tool
now we want to make sure that the snap to grid is off because we do not want
all of our notes to line up with the grid
we want to give it that human feel still so we start off with the PRV select
tool to select them
we click and drag to select the votes
and then we switch to the PRV Draw Tool
to drag the edge in a bit
now we want to compare with
the next set of notes because the next set of notes was right so let's move a little
forward and have a look
and yes it needs to be shortened just a bit more
so now that we've cleaned up the worst offenders i want to show you how we
can quantize to bring the notes closer to the grid
so the first step is to select all the notes that we want to have quantized
and in this case i want to select them all
so we use the selection tools select all the notes
and then we go to process
and quantize and a pop-up window gives us the quantize dialogue
for the duration we want sixteenth notes and under change the two key things we
have to look at are the midi event start times which should be selected
and the note durations which in this case we should not have selected
and lastly we want to look at the quantization strength now this is the
amount that the system will pull the notes towards the grid using a
quantization strength of one hundred percent will result in the notes being
pulled all the way to the grid but in this context we want it a little more
human sounding so we're going to set the quantization strength to twenty percent
so let's do that and let's have a listen