**Quantize: Tap this to enable or disable quantization. When enabled, time-based features like triggering cues and
loops will snap to the beat grid according to the Cue/Loop Quantization setting in your Profile. **
Assuming I have the grids set correctly and I’m using sync, I can’t think what the quantize being on would improve.
Can any of the long term users please explain the advantages or disadvantages of having it enabled as the manual doesn’t really explain it at all.
If you do some cue pad drumming etc it’ll keep them all in time with the beat, up to 1/4 beat accuracy, or tapping the cue point, it’ll also keep manual loops in time I think.
I switch it off as I find it annoying, largely due to me not really prepping tracks.
Quantizing is the way to keep your songs perfectly sync when you hit a hotcue, which is very hard without it (with 1/4 setting) and mostly when you hit hotcues several times, except if you are James Hype
Sync will synchronise your beats up if you have your grid in place, but it wont keep cue presses in time.
There is of course an argument for non-quantised cue presses being more ‘organic’, and practising them to get your timing nailed is far more satisfying than the machine doing it for you.
The same applies for manual looping too, a lot of us older DJs will have grown up with manual looping on the original CDJs so we are pretty good at activating it, but its a difficult thing to get exactly right. To be honest though, as long as your BPM is correct on the track, you can set an auto loop without quantise and itll sound right, even if its not hang on the peak of the beat, in fact you can be half a beat out as long as the music pattern from one bar to the next is the same, it’ll still work as it’ll just leak into the next bar by half a beat and the sound will flow correctly.
I find it useful to turn off quantize when I want to loop a vocal part of a track, if the vocal part is not aligned to the beats and therefore not aligned to the grid.
My tracks are all analyzed and with a perfectly aligned grid, I also adjust the BPM and the grid in the case of tracks with variable BPM. But if quantize is on and I want to loop the vocal as I wrote above, then the best result is with quantize off.
