Quantization
In this installment of our ongoing series on modern music production techniques (see previous ones here and here), we looking at quantization, a term you may never have encountered.
Basically, quantization is a function of modern digital audio workstations that allows you to take a musical performance that is poorly performed, timing-wise, and make it better, even perfect. For example, suppose I record a piano track but I play very unevenly, holding some notes too long, coming in too late or too early at times. I select all the notes, select quantize from the menu, and–voila!–all the notes I played are now perfectly timed.
However, perfect timing in music = boring. The best performances are not perfect but have a certain feel or groove. Some musicians play slightly behind the beat, creating a laid-back feel, or slightly ahead of the beat, giving a more aggressive feel. Well, fear not! There is also a function called “groove quantize”, which lets you match the feel of your performance to a preprogrammed groove. So now my performance, which was originally crappy, now sounds like Ray Charles played it!
In reality, quantization has technical limitations and my example is a bit simplified, but you get the point. You don’t have to be able to play well (or really, at all) anymore in order to create a decent-sounding song.