Grooves, humanizing, feel, push/lag... Ideas?

[jonljacobi]

I've been using the groove function in Live for imparting feel to my lamely played keyboard and drum parts. It works quite well and eliminates a lot of tedious editing.

If you do impart feel or groove to your MIDI or audio parts, what do you use and how do you do it?

[jonljacobi]

If you notice that the previous post was edited, it was because I discovered I was grossly in error about a couple of things.

[jancivil]

groove function

If you do impart feel or groove to your MIDI or audio parts, what do you use and how do you do it?

My own sense of it developed over years of being a musician.

I have however explored the groove template or whatever it's called in Cubase. I mean taking my own groove from playing it in, taking a reading of it in the key editor and applying that 'groove quantize' or groove 'over-quantize' to parts, to see how effective it would be. It's ok. For exactly as long as the groove I put in was.

Here's the thing: real groove changes over time, it's dynamic and organic. Quantizing shit ain't groovy. It's antithetical to the thought. You may get the right feel for a couple bars, four bars even, but to expect that to suit you over a whole track... this is why so much music today sucks. Two bars exactly the same over and over and over and over.

I hate 'humanizing' which is just a pseudo-randomizing algorithm. A mindless routine (not saying that the designer of one is mindless, only that algorithms are by definition). It adds slop, so that's as good as the value of slop over robotic is, per se. Not that slop is a bad thing in itself, only I don't know why one would expect particularly good slop by it.

So it's time-consuming and not fun at all for me. I wouldn't recommend expecting quick fixes to this problem. YMMV.

[jonljacobi]

To be honest, I wish I didn't have to rely on it so much, but I often have to. I'm a bad drummer and only passable as a keyboardist. I do a lot of monkeying slightly with tempo as well.

[Straight2Vinyl]

groove function

If you do impart feel or groove to your MIDI or audio parts, what do you use and how do you do it?

My own sense of it developed over years of being a musician.

I have however explored the groove template or whatever it's called in Cubase. I mean taking my own groove from playing it in, taking a reading of it in the key editor and applying that 'groove quantize' or groove 'over-quantize' to parts, to see how effective it would be. It's ok. For exactly as long as the groove I put in was.

Here's the thing: real groove changes over time, it's dynamic and organic. Quantizing shit ain't groovy. It's antithetical to the thought. You may get the right feel for a couple bars, four bars even, but to expect that to suit you over a whole track... this is why so much music today sucks. Two bars exactly the same over and over and over and over.

I hate 'humanizing' which is just a pseudo-randomizing algorithm. A mindless routine (not saying that the designer of one is mindless, only that algorithms are by definition). It adds slop, so that's as good as the value of slop over robotic is, per se. Not that slop is a bad thing in itself, only I don't know why one would expect particularly good slop by it.

So it's time-consuming and not fun at all for me. I wouldn't recommend expecting quick fixes to this problem. YMMV.

Good post. It's possible to get a nice groove from a loop of a couple bars, but it won't ever be a human feel. You'll always get a dance, hip-hop or other electronic/sample based rhythm in the end. It can sound real nice, but if the goal is to make live sounding music then every beat and bar would be ever so slightly different. At that point it's likely better to just learn to play the drums rather than tediously editing each and every midi note.

[jonljacobi]

Great drummers are rare birds. Assuming I have the talent to do it, becoming one takes a lot of practice. I'm not a natural and have a pronounced tendency to lag behind the beat that took me forever to drill out of my bass and guitar playing.

Regardless, my MO is to play it the best I can with the click, extract the feel from the best passages, then apply those throughout at whatever percentage is required to get it there. As there is already a high degree of variance, no measure is ever quite the same.

Then redo anything that sucks and repeat. If it's something I just can't get the hang of I may peruse third party grooves.

Finally, I'll spend some time subtly altering tempos. Unless it's flat out dance music or I want an industrial feel.

[Googly Smythe]

I use Cubase which has a Logical Editor. Using this you can randomise notes within certain parameters eg +/- 10 clicks, or +15/-5 etc. This is good for things like hi-hats and rides, tambourines and the like. And do it for, at a minimum, each section of the track. Do the same for velocity values.
An old trick is to push back after the beat, or pull forward before the beat, the snare by a few clicks. Drummers do this naturally.
This stuff works for any instrument, not just drums.

[jonljacobi]

I use Cubase which has a Logical Editor. Using this you can randomise notes within certain parameters eg +/- 10 clicks, or +15/-5 etc. This is good for things like hi-hats and rides, tambourines and the like. And do it for, at a minimum, each section of the track. Do the same for velocity values.
An old trick is to push back after the beat, or pull forward before the beat, the snare by a few clicks. Drummers do this naturally.
This stuff works for any instrument, not just drums.

I often push the kick. But I find that a limitation of grooves is that there doesn't seem to be a way to push the 1 on the first bar. The first note can be so important. I'm glad the discussion is finally moving along!

[Lotuzia]

Drummers don't humanize, they just groove. If they play the snare 'ahead' in a beat, they wont play the snare three times ahead in different positions, then one time straight on the beat or laid back, all of this more/less cycling thru random algos : They will play the snare hits exactly at the same place in the rythmic schema.

In this regard, Googly's solution is simple and more similar to the way drummers play/think than the solutions most often offered by more subtle randomizers algos.

Then the -traditional sense- groove is for all instruments in the orchestra playing a track. Totally Quantised music is most often totally boring and lifeless-imho- There are -a lot of- exceptions of course, when the style requires a somewhat robotic feel. But I hear 99 times more failures in this than great tracks. Might be only me though, it doesnt seem to be annoying for listeners. So ...

[jancivil]

The thing that's missing in all of these assessments of things to alter is what I brought in to begin with, though. It's dynamic. You cannot truly reduce a lot of it, what these posts are doing is trying to formulate algorithms. Sure you can arbitrarily change it up, but what are the rest of the players doing? The happening drummer is RESPONSIVE to the musical climate and environment. And the music is not mechanical, unless that's either what you're specifically after or all you can manage/can't be arsed.

You can humanize by making the machine do it, or you can make your own mistakes. Or you can note how mistakes happen in the world. I've spent a LOT of time futzing with how right vs too right. Total correctness will, I think, tend to feel odd. But one thing we must avoid is everybody on the beat, on the downbeat. It_never_happens, it's absolutely nowhere near possible so every music you've ever heard by musicians has differences.

If you're doing larger type of arrangements, you have to take into consideration how quickly instruments speak. A tuba is not heard as quickly as the drummer, not by a long ways so the tubist is pushing his/her time all the time. So your placement here is before the bar typically. etc.

So I'll leave you with a notion of Bob Wills, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, western swing dance band. He felt you had to increase the tempo as the song progressed 'to keep the dancers' blood boiling'. Now, people tend to do that according to the excitement of the experience performing the track but he wanted to ensure shit doesn't get dull. Just food for thought. To get into more detail with that notion, it's 'musical' to get a little excited and rush right before climax, of a section I mean.

[lfm]

As wisely said already - math is not a replacement for human feel - even if it says so by name.
So I learned to play the drums, and practizing hundreds of hours of tedious rudiments to metronome.
I like the Yamaha eDrum engines in having good practizing assist to see how much in pocket you are etc.
At some point you suddenly start to feel something happended to the groove you play.

But if to experiment with one thing in editor.
Select all snare hits - and experiment with putting them a bit early or late(no snap of course).
That one thing make a lot of difference to a beat.

It creates in interesting tension to it all. Our brain is really incredible in building expectations from a pattern, and if you deviate from that, interesting things happend.

[Jafo]

The best answer is to just learn to be a damn musician, but that always isn't feasible (you might not be recording your own parts, after all). +1 to everybody earlier in this thread.

A quick, half-ass "fix" is to change the bpm by a couple of bpm each couple of bars. This only gets you so far, but it does help. Faster for tension, slower for relaxation.

Play with the snares -- it's a huge cue to feel. Listen to some Stones, Who or Zeppelin (or hey, even somebody not so ubiquitous) for the basic idea. Move the snares to be a bit early for a tighter, more aggressive or energetic feel; or late for a looser, more relaxed feel. Bonzo and the other drummers live for that shit, man... dig how their kicks are mostly right on the damn beat, but their snares play with and against them. Do like they do. You could grab midi notes and yank them around, or even use separate tracks for snare parts -- you're doing this already, right?

It can be especially cool when different parts are charging forward and others are laying back a bit. One reason people like the Stones is that each person is in his own world, but it all syncs up. If you look hard enough, you can find multiple ogg files (also called .MOGG) of classic rock stuff, ready for your rock band. Open them up in your DAW (Audacity works just fine, btw) and you can mute and unmute to your heart's content, discovering how the magic is made.

See, it's all about tension and release. You need to play them against each other. As an artist of any sort, you're a programmer in a language called Feel. Your basic tools are repetition and variation, expectation and surprise. Use them.

Anyway, humans simply can't do perfection. Don't use it. (Unless you're that drummer guy in Rush... for years, I thought he was simply a stunningly well-programmed drum machine. As a counter-example, I doubt Keith Richards could play the same bar twice in a row -- or once perfectly -- if his life depended on it. Guess who my musical hero is!)

[jonljacobi]

Did not know about .moog files. Love the Neil Peart reference.

On topic, I am talking about when you have to go it alone and are starting with a click track or similar, and don't have a ready group of stunningly fluent musicians handy.

And, I don't use BPM generally, but small percentages. I've really just gotten into the tempo thing recently. Watching Melodyne being able to pull tempo maps out of a song got me interested in getting more granular with it.