yeah. I think you do show a knack for coming up with basslines and drum parts, actually. Just get to where you can trust your hand more than the machine.

I can relate a moment I had when I was first getting to know Cubase.
it has a 'warp the timeline to the music' feature. the tutorial I found for 'time warp' or whatever was to show how to determine what the BPMs are from a piece of audio. It used some Pretenders track. Find the downbeat and drag a barline to it, find the next downbeat, et cetera.

what was discovered in this process was this 'rock solid' beat wound up being a number of BPMs, in fact. Conforming the beats to what was played showed there was breathing room not only bar to bar but beat to beat.

when I make something, I don't quantize the music. I quantize the timeline to fit the music after I have the time like I like it.

I made a couple pictures for you. This is a reggae-styled track.
First is the tempo track as a list, then some piano roll with the clav. part [highlighted], which was the basis for a scratch track for the rhythm guitarist before I had him do his bit:




I could have further warped the tempo track to fit everything inside the bar but it's close enough for rock 'n roll. Since I didn't do that, you can see how the backbeat, 2 and 4, at times hit behind the tempo a smidge.

Wow! Thanks for such a detailed example!! It's a cool method, so it's just moving the timeline to the notes, is it foolproof? I mean you definitely know much more than me in music. I'll try it anyway, thanks!

This, and the whole way they have the tempo track's operations and interface is why I stick with Cubase. initially, and before they introduced this feature, I played around a bit with 'groove quantize' but for me that was more trouble than rehearsing and recording. Once you know how to work it it's quick work. NB: you have to make sure a bar before and after a warp move is fixed or you are warping that part of the timeline as well. That at first is a bit of a PITA. You can just fix those bits arbitralily to avoid that problem and address the later bars as you get to them. Left to right is the way to proceed, methodically.

you can get away with literal reiteration of previous groove phenomena, but people doing music for real don't have the luxury of that and that isn't a bad but a good thing, it amounts to more variety. I'm a fan of the human feel too much to let the machine own the thing.

in that particular track I did begin with a notation file, totally quantized midi, but once I made parts for it - a guitar solo and then drums - I re-did the tempo map to fit the real feel.