Groove-Quantise LFO Problems

Production
1

So I’m in Ableton live. Once I make a drum beat I get the Groove-Quantise going so you really want to get down to it.

This is causing me problems though. If I make a bass sound say in Serum with a LFO pattern and let the note play out. Even if the midi clip is Groove-Quantised beucase the LFO is repeating perfectly on beat it sounds slightly out compared to the Groove-Quantised drum beat. Once you have set a decent rhythm the last thing you want is for some sound to come in and mess up everyone’s dance.

I know that if I was to re-trigger the note quickly it would solve the problem. For some sounds though I want the phases to play out so this is not an option.

2

Either add a sample delay to the drums or bass to bring them into the right time. Or…

Bounce your bass sound and drag the new audio region bak & forth till you’re in the sweet spot.

3

Dont use the groove feature imo, its limiting and you can get much better results with your ears and brain

2 Likes
4

As in it’s better to shuffle your stuff around manually?

5

Yeah, you should build the groove from the ground up imo. That way you are in control and dont run into the problem that the OP is talking about. I’m not some purist type, I use loops, fx, anything I can, to get what I need but using shortcut methods usually leaves you trying to tame that method’s mistakes later on anyways.

6

I think the groove feature is cool. You can grab grooves from other tunes and save them as templates. You just have to know what you’re doing when you quantize shit.

OP, in your situation I would probably bounce the audio down with the LFO applied and then put on the groove quantization to your track if you want to have the same quantization as your drums.

7

With that said, I rarely quantize my basslines or other parts because I usually play my parts in live and if the drums are swung, my other parts are played against that.

If that makes sense, it’s late.

8

Thanks guys there is some good stuff in here. I might try bouncing to audio and then applying the grove. Seems like the simplest solution. All I would have to do is freeze the track and then drag and drop the grove. From there is its still out I could go in with time stretching markers.

I was just thinking today though. I could bring the LFO rate way down and then redraw the pattern slightly out where it needs to be. It might to be hard to draw some of the more complicated curves smaller.

@cyclopian Yeah I do created my groves to a point. Once I have Groove-Quantised I might push and pull different track in and out by a few milliseconds untill the drums are sounding tight. I also like right now having one or two of my hihats not Groove-Quantised. So you get rhythms and counter rhythms going on in the hihats.

9

I’m with cyclopian just turn snap off and move bits around

10

Not much more to it than that

Move it forward it generally sounds more lazy move it back a bit it makes it more frantic