I've heard this effect on NIN's With Teeth album as well as a few recent dubstep songs.

Let's say there is a synth or piano melody playing, and each note will have small subtle effects on it like a tiny fragment of the note gets detuned/pitched down/up. It kind of has the feel like your playing some old, almost out of tune, piano, if you catch my drift
Last edited by beatsmyth on Wed Aug 22, 2012 3:15 pm; edited 1 time in total

I'd be interested in what song from With Teeth you're referring to.

Besides.. simple automation?

You could simply use a very slow vibrato after the instrument.

Audio Damage has Automaton and Big Seq2 which are great. IL Grossbeat can do a few things when you learn what you're doing.

Seems to me that you mean Pitch Bend...

Maybe MIDI Key tracking and Velocity tracking could give a subtle effect on a Sampler or a Synth...

Random LFO to pitch in subtle (or cleverly modulated) amounts is your friend for making keys sound old. I like to push this almost to the point where the track sounds out of tune on it's own, but combined with the rest of the mix it's just very 'drifty' and gives an etheral feel like a lot of BOC stuff. Note the difference between a free-running random LFO, and one that assumes a new value with each keypress.

Hey Sendy,
Thanks that's pretty much what I was looking for.

BOC uses this alot in their songs and on the With Teeth album I believe its the last song, or pretty much any song on there that has a piano uses this to an extent

And it doesn't have to even be as complicated as that (not that using LFO modulation is particularly complicated). A lot of synths have one or two kinds of random value modulation sources: unipolar (zero to 1) and bipolar (-1 to 1). You get a new random value with each "note on". Use it to modulate pitch, cutoff, or anything else you can dream up.

Modulate transient attack with LFO technique.