My human touch ruins everything! No amount of micro timing can help!
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What is a sample? Its just a recording isnt it. Can be anything really, it can be a tiny click lasting a few milliseconds, up to a whole musical composition lasting several hours. IMHO your definition of a sample feels a bit… limited…
Sure enough, browsing through a sample library service such as Splice can feel daunting… millions of sounds at your disposal! What will you choose? Analysis paralysis and all that…
but you can also DIY your own samples, at which point they become a blank canvas, which can serve your artistic needs precisely. Several possibilities come to mind:
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Think of a perfectly mixed kick drum you have spent days tweaking to perfection. You have “field tested” this kick at clubs etc, you know it cuts through in a mix and gets a dancefloor moving. All this work can be reused, and recalled perfectly at any time, just by sampling it and loading the sample into whereever you need to play it back from
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You might have an idea for a motif/sequence, and you want to experiment on it using “found sound” techniques. So you record this bit of music, load it into an octatrack, and start mangling it utilizing the possibilities OT affords, creating new content in the process
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Samples have their own idiosyncratic tonal properties. Take a synth pad, play a single note, sample it into a crusty old sampler, loop it slightly imperfectly. Now, play back the sample melodically, the janky loop point of the sample can create new moods/textures to the pad sound
these are just a few examples that come to me mind…
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If you’re looking at this from a recording perspective rather than a live perspective and you have the option of multitracking try sequencing as little as possible (or not at all if you want to go full baller mode). Think of all parts the way you would if you were recording “traditional” instruments. Play to a click if it helps, or don’t. It might take some practice but being a musician takes practice.
Also the human voice was mentioned a couple of times as a standard to aspire to so once you have a good chunk of your track built up imagine what a vocal line would be like and then play that on a synth as exactly like someone would sing it as you can. Again, practice makes better.
Another thing I’ve found to add that human vibe is playing live with others. The less synchronized (by midi, gate, cv, din, etc) the better, tap tempo is king.
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What music sounds very human and emotional might be fairly subjective. I think you should consider what music sounds very human and emotional to you, and emulate that as a starting point.
If so far all the music that sounds very human and emotional to you is made outside of the constraints you’ve put on your own music making (for example, it all has vocals or samples, and you don’t want to use either), then you should probably accept that there is no close model for what you want to do. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try—but you have to acknowledge the actual nature of the challenge you’re setting yourself, and embrace the challenge.
Human touch:
- change velocity of every high hat step
- set swing to 55
- add one polymeter element
Done:) now just start the loop and tweak your LP filter for 10 minutes
More serious check this out
I think the “human touch“ in music has a lot to do with expression and is often not very subtle. I think it’s not just about small imperfections, which also a worn machine has, but about telling a story.
Imagine a robot voice: straight, equal, boring. Even announcements of train delays incorporate some up‘s and down‘s nowadays (at least in Germany) to sound slightly more human. Now imagine someone building a dramatic scenery in the listeners ears, going from very quiet, some details here, some details there, using the voice to paint a picture into the listeners‘ minds, boom going loud, quiet and slow again…
The same applies to music: level 0, hasn’t practiced enough - imprecise notes, no expression. level 1, practiced the notes but not the expression - robot-like (can be an intermediate goal in music to get the techniques right). … level 9, concert level - of course no interrupting wrong notes, and so much expression that listeners might even stop breathing to not disturb the magic.
In electronic music, one dimension is often heavily underestimated/ignored: tempo changes. I also think slow LFO‘s with large depths, drifting against each other in different lengths, can simulate a much more human feeling than all those small random “humanizers“, but of course nothing beats well done manual knob twists including the tempo.
Edit: of course, not practicing enough, just throwing stuff into a soup without sticking to a recipe, random talk that not necessarily makes sense, maybe even worn machines are human as well. I just wanted to point out that it’s more than just little bit of off-grid here and there. In sum, expression and imprecision, sometimes this sometimes that.
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Captain Pikant’s tutorials on swing, accents, and humanizing hihats might help. It’s all about drum programming but everything they say can also be applied to tonal elements:
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Floating Points makes a practice of trying to humanise his synth playing and drum programming, to the point where it seamlessly merges with non-electronic.
Cinematic Orchestra have incredible instrumentals, full of story and atmosphere. Not much synth, more a jazz band rightened up by editing The heat and tension in this is exquisite:
Jean-Michel Jarre used to get wild emotion out of synths. This one is bombastic. He “cheats” by adding a choir at the end (to push the drama up to 11), but there’s quite the rolllercoaster before they turn up:
If you can take a bit of prog, this Vangelis album is also electrifying journey with a delightul soft landing at the end:
https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=vangelis+albedo+0.39
(Some cheese here but hopefully also some good instrumental emotional trips, without being straight-up classical music)
this thread was such a good idea. so good
if you’re using an elektron box, i think that creating a closed hat, then playing with the envelope decay or hold in realtime (with some slight attack movement if you want a shaker effect) and recording that into the previously recorded or manually created step sequence via “motion sequenced p-locks” is a good way to add human feel
on another note, related to @MK7 's point; my favorite music when i was a teenager were things like The Birthday Party’s ‘Junkyard’ or Daughter’s ‘Hell Songs’ album. where everything felt like it was on the edge of falling apart. that’s very exciting. i think that tempo shifts, the idea of almost exponential organic slowing dragging, then rebuilding or manic-pacing might be somethign worth exploring. im going to make note of that. very cool thought
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TLDR;
- record yourself playing the synth
- add ghost notes to existing lines
- play with conditions trigs to add subtle variations
- make different velocities as a human would play (random LFO at a low rate can do the job)
- move notes/hits around using micro timing
- slight delay on the hi hats helps to render a more human feeling
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If we are speaking Elektron machines specifically, I think Jogging House coaxes nice feelings from his Elektron boxes. Check the sounds he made for the digis for example. He has a lot of stuff on bandcamp, certainly worth a listen - I especially like the album he dedicated for his late father
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Kind of hard to boil your post down to a simple enough question. I also get blocked by too much choice and focused on sound design but after getting DT2 I find that I only need so many samples in the end. I find it’s the same with laptops: first there are too many of them, then you figure out what you need and it turns out that there only are 2-3 choices once I compare with what’s available. The hard part is spending time finding them, not so much in using them but humanizing any sound is an interesting feat in itself.
Adding high rate amplitude modulation can help a lot in subtly changing a sample’s tonal quality over time. Same thing with frequency modulation of the filter, especially if you add a second LFO to modulate the first ones. [FUNC + Arrow] in rec mode is vital to humanize stale rhythms.
Not exactly sure what you’re after with the music recommendation. Can you show such a track?
Edit: BTW, categorizing this phenomenon will only be useful to a point. Remember that you/we are making the categories up so there is no real dichotomy between humanized and not, but theres something here worth exploring.
Here is a simple 4x4 floor beat with a humanized sound on top using multiple mild modulation sources, if this is what you mean. It’s the comb filter being excited by a perc sample that’s pitched down until it’s mostly noise. AMP decay is modulated by one slow LFO which speed is modulated by the second LFO. The third LFO alters LFO 1’s depth at twice the speed, causing stutters if the value is low enough to reduce decay to 0. Most FX are applied to some degree but only the chorus is going to the delay. Comb feedback is also nice to modulate and there really is no end to the variation with probabilistic and conditional trigs.
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I knew a pianist who played flawlessly but without any emotion. My sense is that there was no reflection in their playing…a real-time feedback loop where the musician is influenced by what they just played. For example, different acoustics or a different piano might have a different decay on a certain note, and that might affect the timing of their performance. Organic performance, rather than linear. Performance where the moment is created out of the creative tension between what happened before and the expectations of what are to come.
Machines are bad at this. Humans using machine methods, also.
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