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..

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. 

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. 

"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

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.

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 :-)

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 !

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. 

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 !

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.