kev11111111111111
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humanise midi arrangement ??
hey
I wrote an arrangement and I've inputed the notes using the mouse.Is there a way to humanise the 'performance' or do I have to record each part on my midi keyboard ??
Many thanks
Kev
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The Maillard Reaction
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 09:01:26
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Thoughful editing of slight variance in note duration, and careful editing of accented note velocity will trump any automated randomization process that you can find.
Think of the things that composers and conductors speak to musicians about and then tell the MIDI to do that.
best regards,
mike
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Guitarhacker
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 09:04:29
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Quantize I think.... can be used to do that to one degree or another.
I don't very often create midi like you described.... but I do recall that in Quantize there are adjustable settings for how accurate you want the notes to be. By experimenting, you can use a randomize the notes setting that will move them off the main beat by varying amounts with each note at a different amount within a parameter that you select.
One of the programs I have does have "humanize" function but I do not recall which one it is right now. I think quantize, properly adjusted will get you closer to what you are looking for.
My website & music: www.herbhartley.com MC4/5/6/X1e.c, on a Custom DAW Focusrite Firewire Saffire Interface BMI/NSAI "Just as the blade chooses the warrior, so too, the song chooses the writer "
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 09:08:41
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mike_mccue
Thoughful editing of slight variance in note duration, and careful editing of accented note velocity will trump any automated randomization process that you can find.
Think of the things that composers and conductors speak to musicians about and then tell the MIDI to do that.
best regards,
mike
hi mike Im getting the velocity thing,for sure that makes a big differance.Ure prob right,editing is the way to go,lol it might just be less time consuming to record the parts on the keyboard :-) Thanks for your post Kev
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 09:13:23
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Guitarhacker
Quantize I think.... can be used to do that to one degree or another.
I don't very often create midi like you described.... but I do recall that in Quantize there are adjustable settings for how accurate you want the notes to be. By experimenting, you can use a randomize the notes setting that will move them off the main beat by varying amounts with each note at a different amount within a parameter that you select.
One of the programs I have does have "humanize" function but I do not recall which one it is right now. I think quantize, properly adjusted will get you closer to what you are looking for.
i tried the quantise setting,its still to rigid as it quantises everything by the same amount :( I'm prob going to record the parts in with the keyboard,cheers !! Kev
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RobertB
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 12:45:01
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kev11111111111111
I'm prob going to record the parts in with the keyboard,cheers !! Kev
Go for it, Kev. "Humanize" introduces mathematical imperfection, but does not get the inflection that you may really want. Deliberate variations, such as that slightly ahead of the beat note, or appropriate changes in velocity, are much more satisfying and effective if you play it live. You can always clean up stray notes in the PRV if needed.
My Soundclick Page SONAR Professional, X3eStudio,W7 64bit, AMD Athlon IIx4 2.8Ghz, 4GB RAM, 64bit, AKAI EIE Pro, Nektar Impact LX61,Alesis DM6,Alesis ControlPad,Yamaha MG10/2,Alesis M1Mk2 monitors,Samson Servo300,assorted guitars,Lava Lamp Shimozu-Kushiari or Bob
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 14:48:34
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RobertB
kev11111111111111
I'm prob going to record the parts in with the keyboard,cheers !!
Kev
Go for it, Kev.
"Humanize" introduces mathematical imperfection, but does not get the inflection that you may really want.
Deliberate variations, such as that slightly ahead of the beat note, or appropriate changes in velocity, are much more satisfying and effective if you play it live.
You can always clean up stray notes in the PRV if needed.
yep,this is what I'm thinking too now ;-)
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bitflipper
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 15:35:45
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RobertB's right on the money. There is no way to humanize a performance other than to let a human perform it. So-called "humanize" functions only add randomness, but human variability is not random.
It's always better to play a part, even if your keyboard skills are sub-par. All you have to do is concentrate on the timing, not the actual notes - bad notes can be fixed after the fact.
 All else is in doubt, so this is the truth I cling to. My Stuff
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Jeff Evans
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 16:36:00
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...careful editing of accented note velocity will trump any automated randomization process that you can find. Incorrect Mike. Here is a great plugin I got onto: http://www.midi-plugins.de/mplug/mplug-hum.html I had a tribute band come to me with a whole lot of midi files they wanted made to sound great. I assigned all the sounds to very good sounding synths etc. and the resultant sound was excellent. Except the drum parts. They were all quantized. I used Session Drummer 3 to play the drum parts and it did very well but they sounded way too quantized. Manually editing to humanize would have taken weeks! So your approach of manually editing is fine as long as the part is not that long but when you had as much as I had to do it was not an option. This plugin did a very very good job. You can fiddle the settings easily. It can go from sounding perfectly quantized to a drummer who is quite drunk and not playing well! It was just a matter of finding the right settings and I got the drum tracks to groove very nicely and sound very human. I used it mainly on hats, kick and snare of course as they are they tend to sound the most quantized. I am not sure about fast bouncing as I had to print everything in real time due to the external synths being used.
Specs i5-2500K 3.5 Ghz - 8 Gb RAM - Win 7 64 bit - ATI Radeon HD6900 Series - RME PCI HDSP9632 - Steinberg Midex 8 Midi interface - Faderport 8- Studio One V4 - iMac 2.5Ghz Core i5 - Sierra 10.12.6 - Focusrite Clarett thunderbolt interface Poor minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas -Eleanor Roosevelt
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The Maillard Reaction
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 17:03:18
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Hi Jeff, May I refer you too http://www.theodorkrueger.com/music.htm http://www.theodorkrueger.com/player/ His work is done in PRV, and when you watch him do it it seems faster than most folks would play all the parts. He seems to have great knowledge of how to express what he wants to express via the PRV. Also, I do not believe that humans play both randomly and effectively, In my personal opinion it is one or the other. They may groove off the beat, but, in my personal opinion, if it is effective it is not random but rather a reflection of some intent. Often times the intention is expressed intuitively and I have a great admiration for intuition. I personally believe that it is a great source of awareness that simply seems hard to describe in detail. I think intuition does not preclude awareness or suggest randomness. In my personal opinion, even intuitive decisions are the result of subconscious intent and one can learn to recognize the building blocks with care and study. Could it be the case that the plugin you have suggested has less randomness and more intentional programming? best regards, mike
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Jeff Evans
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 17:11:27
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Firstly that Plug-In I suggested is a bit complex and you need to read the instructions carefully before jumping in and setting it. It took me a little while to get around it. But yes you can do things like get the snare to always play early for example but still randomize the amount by which it is doing it.
You can set very precise windows for example. eg I want all my snare hits to be early but randomize such that the earliest hit is say 10 ms max and all other random early hits are within 10 ms.
What is cool about it is you can balance between being random and intentional. Or you can go either all random and extremely intentional.
Being a drummer also helps too as it gives you insight as to what things to adjust etc..
Specs i5-2500K 3.5 Ghz - 8 Gb RAM - Win 7 64 bit - ATI Radeon HD6900 Series - RME PCI HDSP9632 - Steinberg Midex 8 Midi interface - Faderport 8- Studio One V4 - iMac 2.5Ghz Core i5 - Sierra 10.12.6 - Focusrite Clarett thunderbolt interface Poor minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas -Eleanor Roosevelt
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dmbaer
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 17:13:13
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Tempo may be the key here (he said, pulling out his well-worn soap box  ). Randomizing can get you only a short way to being non-mechanical. It can help a little, but only a very little. Of course, I have no idea what kind of music you're working on, so the following may be fabulous advice or totally off the mark. I'm a big believer in elaborate tempo mapping to make a step-entered or heavily quantized MIDI arrangement sound non-mechanical and legitimately musical. We don't have great tools in Sonar (or any other DAW as far as I know) but we have OK tools. The tempo view gives you all the control you could ask for, but drawing in tempo is about as far from intuitive as you can imagine. Take a look at the fit-to-improve process in Sonar. It's actual function is to take a performance freely recorded (without metronome) and align it with measure markers while creating a tempo track to keep the original timing. If your starting with a quantized MIDI performance already, you're not using it as intended but can still take advantage of it. Create a click track, one note per beat, lock all the existing MIDI tracks, apply the function, and unlock the MIDI data. Or, wait a couple of months and I'll be posting a free conductor utility that you can use with Sonar to do this sort of thing in a more controlled fashion. Stay tuned.
post edited by dmbaer - 2012/09/29 17:14:23
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Jeff Evans
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 17:23:48
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David brings up a very good point and I totally forgot to mention it. With the pop music I was working with (midi files) I was programming slight upward tempo changes through verses so that by the time a chorus came around the tempo was little faster and I mean a little. eg going from maybe 110 BPM to say 112 BPM etc. You do not need to change BPM much to feel the difference. Then during a chorus you can ease the tempo back down so that by the time the verses come around you are back at the original tempo again.
You never go slower though, that sounds not so great as we all know how a slowing down drummer sounds! That sounds like the brakes are being put on and that is not so nice.
Keep the tempo changes quantized to quite a large value eg quarter notes. Very fine tempo changes can cause problems with some DAW's.
Specs i5-2500K 3.5 Ghz - 8 Gb RAM - Win 7 64 bit - ATI Radeon HD6900 Series - RME PCI HDSP9632 - Steinberg Midex 8 Midi interface - Faderport 8- Studio One V4 - iMac 2.5Ghz Core i5 - Sierra 10.12.6 - Focusrite Clarett thunderbolt interface Poor minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas -Eleanor Roosevelt
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The Maillard Reaction
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 17:29:39
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"and I mean a little. eg going from maybe 110 BPM to say 112 BPM etc. You do not need to change BPM much to feel the difference."
+1
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timidi
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/29 17:39:15
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Kev. You could try the groove quantize feature by playing in the part and just concentrating on the feel and nuance. Then, copy that to the clipboard and use that as your groove template (using start time and velocity) applied to the quantized track. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/30 06:18:37
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bitflipper
It's always better to play a part, even if your keyboard skills are sub-par. All you have to do is concentrate on the timing, not the actual notes - bad notes can be fixed after the fact.
yep,this is most likely true :-)
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/30 06:19:41
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Jeff Evans
...careful editing of accented note velocity will trump any automated randomization process that you can find.
Incorrect Mike. Here is a great plugin I got onto:
http://www.midi-plugins.de/mplug/mplug-hum.html
I had a tribute band come to me with a whole lot of midi files they wanted made to sound great. I assigned all the sounds to very good sounding synths etc. and the resultant sound was excellent. Except the drum parts. They were all quantized. I used Session Drummer 3 to play the drum parts and it did very well but they sounded way too quantized.
Manually editing to humanize would have taken weeks! So your approach of manually editing is fine as long as the part is not that long but when you had as much as I had to do it was not an option.
This plugin did a very very good job. You can fiddle the settings easily. It can go from sounding perfectly quantized to a drummer who is quite drunk and not playing well! It was just a matter of finding the right settings and I got the drum tracks to groove very nicely and sound very human. I used it mainly on hats, kick and snare of course as they are they tend to sound the most quantized.
I am not sure about fast bouncing as I had to print everything in real time due to the external synths being used.
looks interesting jeff,Ill check it out.Thank you !
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/30 06:24:48
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Ive messed with tempo maps before and it does defo help humanise the arrangement.Ive posted the piece in question on the songs forum.Its quite quirky,maybe it even beneficts a little from the mechanical feel in a funny way :-)
dmbaer
Tempo may be the key here (he said, pulling out his well-worn soap box ). Randomizing can get you only a short way to being non-mechanical. It can help a little, but only a very little.
Of course, I have no idea what kind of music you're working on, so the following may be fabulous advice or totally off the mark. I'm a big believer in elaborate tempo mapping to make a step-entered or heavily quantized MIDI arrangement sound non-mechanical and legitimately musical. We don't have great tools in Sonar (or any other DAW as far as I know) but we have OK tools. The tempo view gives you all the control you could ask for, but drawing in tempo is about as far from intuitive as you can imagine.
Take a look at the fit-to-improve process in Sonar. It's actual function is to take a performance freely recorded (without metronome) and align it with measure markers while creating a tempo track to keep the original timing. If your starting with a quantized MIDI performance already, you're not using it as intended but can still take advantage of it. Create a click track, one note per beat, lock all the existing MIDI tracks, apply the function, and unlock the MIDI data.
Or, wait a couple of months and I'll be posting a free conductor utility that you can use with Sonar to do this sort of thing in a more controlled fashion. Stay tuned.
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kev11111111111111
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/30 06:26:41
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timidi
Kev. You could try the groove quantize feature by playing in the part and just concentrating on the feel and nuance. Then, copy that to the clipboard and use that as your groove template (using start time and velocity) applied to the quantized track. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
thats a cool idea,thanks !
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Guitarhacker
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/30 08:46:03
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I do agree that the best way to get a "human feel" into a song is to have humans record it.
I have never successfully used quantize to randomize a part. I have used it to try to pull a sloppy keyboard performance together and that was less than spectacular as well.....I ended up going back to the original part as played.
Quantize in my DAW collects dust.
My website & music: www.herbhartley.com MC4/5/6/X1e.c, on a Custom DAW Focusrite Firewire Saffire Interface BMI/NSAI "Just as the blade chooses the warrior, so too, the song chooses the writer "
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Janet
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/09/30 22:58:48
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Mike...you mention Theodore Krueger and said 'he's fast, i.e. 'when you watch him work in PRV'...I can't find the file you must have been watching.
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Rus W
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 10:29:51
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I'm with the "let humans play it" crowd. Now, the are other ways to humanizing a piece with absolute on the spot timing (dynamics, arrangement, etc.) I think it may serve you better to humanize it that way then worrying about timing.
I think if you write it, so that it is off (ie: syncopation by anticipation and duration) in the first place, there wouldn't be a need to skew it afterwards.
Most often, the instruments in isolation are off-beat (if written that way), but hearing them altogether makes for a nice glue effect. There's the issue of counting correctly; however, it can be done.
What you don't wanna do is if/when you're composing is place a human behind the instrument because there's no way of knowing if something is playable. Likewise, if you're playing a part yourself and can't do it like you hear it, maybe someone else can and that person will tell you.
iBM (Color of Music) MCS (Digital Orchestration) "The Amateur works until he (or she) gets it right. The professional works until he (or she) can't get it wrong." - Julie Andrews
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The Maillard Reaction
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 10:59:31
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Janet
Mike...you mention Theodore Krueger and said 'he's fast, i.e. 'when you watch him work in PRV'...I can't find the file you must have been watching.
Hi Janet, Here's one example. He has a video channel on YouTube and many of the videos are examples of how he composes while others are simply music videos. You have to sort of pick through them. Here's one on orchestral composition. It starts slow and then picks up speed: http://youtu.be/3vXcjlxK4DQ?hd=1 I think the point he demonstrates is that a human composer can think much like a human musician, with intent to express a sensitivity that we associate with musicians playing music. best regards, mike
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The Maillard Reaction
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 11:13:30
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Janet
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 22:36:18
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Thank you Mike! WOW!! That's FUN watching him do that. He thinks SO differently than I do when composing (probably more like someone who knows what they're doing!) :) Ron F. (rolifer) said this is how he does it too....vertically, a measure at a time. I tend to work horizontally, an instrument at a time. I don't even know if I could do it this way, but it might be fun to try. Thank you for introducing me to him!
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Janet
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 22:47:19
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I should do a video of me working. That would put someone to sleep soon! lol
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julibee
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 23:35:46
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Nah, Janet, I'd watch it. :)
dmbaer, just for arguments sake... I have some experience using Reason and what Reason calls ReGroove I don't know the algorithm or anything, but it's a tool specifically to humanize a track or the whole song and it's quite effective. I imagine it's at least somewhat similar to what Jeff mentioned, and yeah, it can get kinda boozy if that's what you are after. It has "slide" and "shuffle" that work independently of each other and are fully adjustable (via virtual knobs). Plus, it can have multiple tracks routed to it and each track effected differently via faders. It's pretty interesting anyway. When you have one of your programmed drum modules already set to Shuffle and you add on a ReGroove instance with more shuffle and the addition of slide... It can get pretty far out. I just thought I'd mention it.
I DO completely agree that there is nothing like a human performance though for more traditional music making. But in a club, it's gotta be head on.
Please don't anyone throw tomatoes at me. I still mix in Sonar. :)
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Kev999
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/01 23:52:54
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mike_mccue
Here's one on orchestral composition. It starts slow and then picks up speed:
http://youtu.be/3vXcjlxK4DQ?hd=1
He's fast on the Piano Roll. More than once I have tried to write a bass part with the mouse in real time during playback, but couldn't keep it up for long. I kept thinking of the scene from Wallace & Grommit where they were placing pieces of track in front of the moving train.
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bitflipper
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/02 00:04:12
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Wallace & Grommit are my main inspiration, too.
All else is in doubt, so this is the truth I cling to. My Stuff
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Janet
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Re:humanise midi arrangement ??
2012/10/02 06:34:21
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