Please help. Midi lines

[my-name-is-thanos]

So basically I'm zooming in and out with the trim tool to make sure every midi block is directly on the line. Between the bass and the drums if I do this to one song it would take a whole day. There must be a simpilar way. Is there a way you can do it all at once by highlighting? I've tried highlighting in slip and grid mode to move midi all at once with trim tool. Doesn't work. Somewhere in the song the midi notes are still not directly on the line. Here's a picture just to be thourough.

[Carl Kolchak]

So you've tried "Quantize To Grid", with the grid set to the appropriate value?

The other thing to be aware of, is the much misunderstood "Sample Rounding".

Samples per second (ie the sample rate of the session) is an absolute.

Pro Tools makes all it's time / positional calculations based on the individual sample number.

MIDI is completely variable, and calculated in ticks (furthermore, different DAWs use differing numbers of ticks to define a single beat), which are described as beats per minute.

A 44.1kHz session is going to have 2646000 samples per minute, but even a session with a static MIDI tempo could have any number of beats per minute (could be 80BPM, could be 120BPM, could be anything you require).

Translating the positions events on the variable beats scale, to the absolute samples scale will almost always require a degree of rounding off (the sample being a significantly finer, more accurate measure, than the coarse, broader measure of the tick).

The MIDI event will be placed at the nearest sample (a degree of difference so small, it cannot be measured using ticks).


Perhaps sample rounding would be better understood, and less feared, if it were known as "Tick Rounding", though that implies a much more significant degree of inaccuracy.

Pro Tools is somewhat unique, in that it displays the rounding - as you're seeing - whereas other DAWs don't, their graphics displaying based on the MIDI grid.

It's really only an issue if it's actually triggering events in the wrong place (as opposed to displaying them slightly off grid, when zoomed right in), and in that case there are a couple of things to bear in mind :

Quantize is important to get to grips with.

Depending on how you select an object, and paste / repeat it, can either ignore those rounding errors, or capture, and compound them as the repeats deviate further from the grid.

Making a timeline selection, and using repeat, will avoid the copied events being placed off the grid.

Using the Loop Trim Tool to repeat a clip that is already correctly placed on the grid, will avoid copied events be placed off the grid.

Grabbing an event, and dragging / copy-dragging it to a new position (without subsequently quantising it / trimming the start) will maintain, and exacerbate any errors.



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[my-name-is-thanos]

Thank you Carl. Is it better to have the blocks directly on the line or offset?

[Carl Kolchak]

Well, obviously you'd ideally start with the notes / blocks on the grid line, but as I said, depending on how you copy and paste / duplicate the notes / clips / blocks, will potentially shift them off the grid.

If you're playing something live, you probably want to keep that feel, and not quantize every note etc.

In that case, look at "Relative Grid" mode.

The other thing you can do, is move the clip where you want it to be, and then just tap the start of it with the trim tool, to clean it up to the grid line (you may have noticed that when you zoom in, it's possible to have a clip, that has a note that starts, or extends beyond the end, of the clip).


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