Does anyone happen to know if such a plugin exists? Like, you have the drums of a song in perfect timing and you want to add a little randomness all over the song (some midi notes a little off the "grid"). It can be a pain to do it manually, like pushing or pulling midi notes off the grid. Just wondering.

If no, what would you do to achieve this? (any workaround?)

Thanks.

 

Last edited: May 31, 2019

Every DAW can do this. Humanize.

 

^ As said, you can humanize many parameters in all DAWs (afaik), like offset/timing, velocity, pitch, etc.

 

Last edited: Jun 1, 2019

As already mentioned...every DAW has a humanize function that exactly is doing what you asked for. You just have to find out whats its name and where you find it in your DAW. You dont need a plugin!

 

Mod's and admin's prerogative, afaik.

 

You can also use swing-quantization or play the drums in realtime and use aproximatively (%) quantization (some DAWs like Cubase can also exclude 'close to grid' notes).

 

Thank you guys! Gonna find it out.

 

Your ability to delete has been "de-humanized".

 

Some DAWs have "Groove Templates".

 

Yeah, thanks. I had totally overlooked this feature.

 

Here is a tip:

Randomise each line individually, e.g. kick, snare, hi-hat, etc., and vary the randomisation amount.

This means you can have a looser snare beat with a tighter kick, or maybe you just want to randomise the hi-hat. You can have any combination you like, just experiment and think like a real drummer.

 

Last edited: Jun 1, 2019

Maybe call your band The Humanise League

 

Thanks for the tip!!!

 

I recently came across a detailed interview with Roger Linn, of Linndrum fame. Talked a lot about groove in his boxes, and what makes them so special.

He did a massive amount of experiments back in the day with every type of humanization you can imagine. The bottom line take-away he arrived at was that the grooviest results can be gotten by delaying every second pulse of the beat, and tuning that delay very finely till it starts to groove. Which of course is the simplest form of swing. It may interest you, I thought, because random humanize seems like a great idea on paper but is essentially a rhythmic dead-end in practice often. Linn came to the same conclusion, and eventually abandoned his randomness-based attempts entirely because the results weren't that good.

Apparently the brain/ear treats added randomness as "meh" but consistent groovy delays on alternate pulses are exciting to it and meaningful.

 

I'd use it sparingly, just enough so that it doesn't sound completely mechanical. If you play with the timing bias and new random seed, you can get some control over over the results (Reaper). I would like to see more options for things like swing, rushing & dragging, and other interesting timing algorithms though..

 

Last edited: Jun 1, 2019

Don't know if I understood it 100%: is this achieved by using a delay fx (100% wet) to make a snare drag a little, if the snare is the second pulse in a beat?

 

Good observation, useful reference, soo true.. keyboard player here, but the same applies. "Humanize" feature - throwing notes left an right randomly is in fact as robotic as quantization. A (good) real human performance consists of so much more, like "catching" the beats, being "randomly" late/early, playing similar phrases in the same way aso, aso..

When in a rush, I use the humanize and then at least move everything in front or behind the beat. I was sometimes dragging the midi, note by note, knowing what I wanted to achieve. Never satisfied with the result.

The only "musical" ways are IMO extracting/applying a groove ..and of course the ultimate thing - (lots of) practicing and then recording the performance.. No shortcuts, unfortunately.

 

@jennyblack, yes it's a very simple change but has surprisingly interesting rhythmic effects. Imagine 4 regular kick drum hits on every beat. If you moved every second hit into its own clip/track and used a tiny delay after it, you get the effect. Since you're doing tiny shifts and might want to shift "backwards in time", it's convenient to use a specialized delay like Eventide PrecisionAlign. It's got very fine adjustment and can do forward or backward delay, by introducing plugin latency.

You can also do it by manually shifting beats in the piano roll, but you know how fun that is... Or use the DAW "swing" option, it will automatically delay every second pulse this way for you, but you get less hands-on control. The delay/separate track approach also helps if you want to start doing more weird and complex delaying, only on select beats in your groove.

There are certain sweetspots. Not all delay values sound equally good, you'll find some are consistently good, some only good on certain rhythms, and some don't seem to ever sound good.

 

Thank you very very much! Now I got it!!!

 

I believe the big problem we've got with groove is due to inflexible western music theory concepts. To wit, every "groove function" I've seen treats groove as deviations from the exact metric grid. Nice for maths, but this is musically wrong. You can capture a particular groove with it but then you're stuck, it doesn't breathe, doesnt' change, it's a dead snapshot. You can't make more of the same from it. It should be considering the RELATIVE squishy distances between each pulse in each groove, including its internal sub-phrases, and then applying THAT to arbitrary programmed rhythm, to be able to generate infinite grooviness.

The first company to apply AI neural networks to groove is gonna make a million bucks, because AI does not care about western music theory and will make short work of the entire problem.