Be a nudger

Do you use the “nudge” feature in your DAW?

Because you absolutely should.

Nudging, if you’re not familiar, is where you can select events and then use keys on your computer keyboard to scoot them left or right by an increment of your own choosing.

In Pro Tools the nudge keys are comma (left) and period (right); in Logic on the Mac it’s command-left arrow and command-right arrow. Every DAW has it; you can google yours if you don’t know it offhand.

After years of experimentation, I have my nudge amount set to 500 samples. I’m generally working at 48kHz, sometimes at 44.1kHz, and 500 samples works out to about 1/100 of a second in both cases.

(You could also just set your nudge amount to 1/100 second.)

The reason I like this size of a nudge is that it’s large enough to be audible (about 10ms), but small enough to be granular.

Why do I like nudge so much? Because it’s precise, and because it allows you to home in, in an incremental and logical fashion, on where the note you’re moving wants to be. Dragging notes, by contrast, is maddeningly imprecise; you might as well just be guessing every time you move the waveform. And that’s no way to live your life.

Precisely — jamie