Audio quantize

- One of the things that I think is really cool about Reason, is the way it deals with quantizing audio, and editing audio slices. I'll show you what I mean here. I have a little track with bass, a couple of Dr. Octo Rex's for percussion, and a keyboard track, and it is the bass audio track that we'll be working with in this lesson. (beat playing) Okay, if I double click in this track, you can see the individual audio slices.

It has been automatically sliced on the transients. I didn't do anything to make this happen. If you double click on any audio file in Reason, you will see this, unless it is a comp edited track, in which case you'll need to bounce that comp edited track first, and then you will be able to see this view. If I press the Command key on my MAC keyboard, or the Alt key on a Windows keyboard, I can listen to these. You see that this little speaker icon has appeared.

(guitar notes playing) So we can hear the individual notes, more or less. Now since there are some sort of junk transients that aren't directly related to what I want to edit I'm gonna try to remove some of those before I edit further. So I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. And as I play this, I can sort of hear what the notes really sound like and maybe I can identify some of these junk transients.

(beat playing) Okay, I don't think I need this. So I just selected it and now I can delete it. I'm clicking on these to select them. Once one of them is selected, I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard to move back and forth. Which can be nice, especially in dense clusters of slices. I think I can remove this because I think this is actually the transient. This is the start of the note. (beat playing) It'll take me just a second to go through all of these.

(beat playing) I can also see in relation to the grid where these notes are falling. And that can help me figure out what I'm doing here. (beat playing) I think I'm doing right here.

If I make a mistake, it's not the end of the world. I'll show you how to get out of this. Actually right now. Because we're gonna adjust timing and position of notes. And if you're doing that with your own track and then suddenly you start to have the fear overcome you that "Oh I actually had "a really nice group before I started messing with it". You can right click and Revert Slices. And it will remove all slice edits. So basically we'd be going back to the beginning. Okay, just a few more of these to go I think.

(beat playing) Okay, I'm going to let that go for now. And now I'm going to select all. And hopefully we've done a good job cleaning up the little junk transients. And now I can quantize every one of these slices if I want to. The groove already sounds pretty good to me. But I can click this Quantize button here. But I don't know what the percentage quantize is. So I'm gonna click F8 and look here.

And I see the amount's gonna be 100 percent. To preserve any kind of feel that I like that's already there I might wanna reduce this percentage of quantize that I'm gonna apply. But just so you can see what happens I will do 100 percent. Click Apply and let's hear what this sounds like. (beat playing) Okay, I was fine with the feel before.

I'm gonna undo the quantize, but you can see the note shift. They did all shift closer to the nearest 16th note. But that's just the beginning of what we can do here. Now that we have these individual audio slices to play with. So let's listen again. (beat playing) Okay, I'm going to select just a few of these. And I'm going to Shift click. Now I've selected two of these. And you see that there's a slice handle in between these.

If I move this handle, both of those slices are going to move. So, I'm going to select just a few more of those in the same way. Shift click and Shift click. And just so it's firmly in your head I'll play a little bit of the groove one more time. (beat playing) Okay, now I'm going to move all of these at the same time. And hear what that sounds like. (beat playing) Okay so I just played a different groove now without actually picking up my bass again.

And it's not only timing that you can impact. Let's listen to just the start again. (beat playing) Okay, I'm gonna select these two slices. I'm again Shift clicking to select multiple slices. And now I'm going to right click and Split at Slices. So now I have a new clip here that's just that single slice. And we'll hear that. (beat playing) Okay, I'm gonna transpose that a full step.

(beat playing) Okay, so I can actually change the melody as well as the timing if I want to. Now I'm showing you this again because I wanna show you the stretch type. This is set to All Around Stretch. And what I mean by stretch type is, there are different flavors of the time stretching and pitch changing algorithm that can be applied here.

This is All Around right now. But if I heard some kind of funny unnatural artifact, I could try another type. Melody is basically for monophonic instruments of any kind. So that might actually work well for bass. Also, if it's a vocal, then obviously I'd wanna try the vocal stretch type. That's how you wanna access the stretch type if you need to. Now I'm gonna undo the little slice that I just did. And I'm going to select all again.

So all of these slices are selected. And I wanna show you another fun thing you can do here. Which is right click again and I can Bounce. And Bounce Clip to REX Loop. Now the browser opens and a REX Loop that I can load into Dr. Octo Rex has been created of this bass part. And in fact, if I double click here and go to the rack I see that there's a new Dr. Octo Rex here with bass in slot one. And if I play a little bit...

(beat playing) You can hear it. And lastly, I will double click on this again, and select all these slices again. So I'm gonna go back to the beginning here. And right clicking again, I'm going to Split at Slices. And then I'm going to Select All and right click again and Bounce Clips to New Samples.

And now I have individual samples of all of these bass notes. Now you can imagine, if this were a drum part for instance, and I selected a few snare hits, now I would instantly have variations on a snare that would sound very natural if I then put them into a multi-layered sample on a Kong pad or in a sampler. So I hope this gives you an idea of all the cool things you can do with sliced audio and audio quantize in Reason.