Align and quantize MIDI that has no known tempo

Hey guys. I decided to give you a tip on how to find the tempo of a MIDI riff when you just played it randomly. It can be useful when you play something and forget to play it with the metronome or something. The video is at the bottom of this post.

Important note: when you watch the video, remember that I played the last note as the first note of a new measure. If your riff doesn't have that last/first note, make sure you add it as an "anchor". It HAS to have that first note of a new measure, otherwise it won't align properly.

Also, when you quantize, make sure you know what quantize grid you need. On my video I had a triplet at the end that wasn't kept because I chose the wrong quantize grid... but anyway, it was just to show you what you can do

Hope it's helpful. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE: as mentioned by Eric Cardenas, instead of adjusting the tempo manually you can use the Edit > Tempo > Adjust Tempo Using using Region Length and Locators. To do this:

1 - Cut the region on the left of the first note of the riff. as I did on the video

2 - Do the same for the last note of the riff, so the first note of the next measure. That means cutting the region and deleting that last note. You end up with the loop you want

3 - Drag the region to beat 1 of bar 1 as I did in the video

4 - Lock SMPTE as I did in the video

5 - Starting on beat 1, bar 1, set the locators to the number of bars your loop has (the region and the locators will not match when you do this)

6 - Select the Region. Go to Edit > Tempo > Adjust Tempo Using using Region Length and Locator. That will make both region and locators have the same length.

7 - Unlock SMPTE

8 - Quantize the notes (if you feel you need them quantized, of course)

Watch the full video here:

It's a great tip.

Instead of changing the tempo manually you can use Edit > Tempo > Adjust Tempo using Region Length and Locators.

It's a great tip.

Instead of changing the tempo manually you can use Edit > Tempo > Adjust Tempo using Region Length and Locators.

Yeah that works too. Gonna add that to the post. Thanks for the tip

Where's the video?

Sorry, I guess I deleted it...