quantizing question

[josep skitto]

why people do quantizing? does pro do that? and popular pop song do quantizing? i don't know the reason. help

[David Nahmani]

Sure, the pros use it when it's appropriate. Quantizing is time correction. It's just another tool. You use it when you need to correct the timing of a performance. 

An example would be recording a live acoustic drummer for a pop song. You love the sound and feel of the live drums, but you need impeccable machine-like timing. Then you can quantize the performance. 

Also note that it can be tweaked so that the notes don't end up perfectly on the grid, if you're looking to keep a human feel to a performance. So let's say you've recorded your MIDI keyboard to play a cello and you'd like to tighten the timing a little while keeping some of your human feeling, you can set the Quantize strength (Q-Strength at the very bottom on the image below) to something other than 100% to get the notes closer to the grid but not perfectly on the grid: 

[des99]

Some music genres, etc EDM, trance and various electronic music genres are very dependent on a hard quantised feel. Other genres have a looser timing. But it's your music, so it's up to you to use the tools to give you the results you need. If you don't need to tighten up the timing of your MIDI recorded parts, that's fine. If you want to tighten them a little, you can quantise to say 50%, or you can quantise to strict perfect notes if that's the effect you want.

[MikeRobinson]

Another thing to note about quantizing is that it is "non-destructive."  The original performance-timing data is still there.