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Share Your Favorite Tips for Non-Cheesy MIDI Arrangements!


Anderton

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The subject of the cheeziness and MIDI was brought up in another thread, but I thought this would be a good place to present a plethora of tips. For example:

 

With bass lines, use pitch bend. Bass players slide around a lot, and playing bass on a keyboard tends to discourage that. One of my favorite techniques is when there's a held note at the end of a verse or chorus or whatever, I'll slide it down. Also, set the bend range to an octave or so...bass players don't just slide a semitone or two.

 

Another bass bend trick is to bend up to a note.

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I usually write in my midi arrangements (I'm not a keyboard player by trade), and the best thing I learned was to turn off any "snap to grid" functions. I manually place notes on the beat... but they may drift a bit. It works out a lot of the robotic timing.

 

That, and I work in a lot of velocity variation.

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Here's another one: When quantizing, use quantize strength to quantize what you play by 85% or so. This tightens up your part while retaining a bit of the original "looseness."

 

 

Going further, don't use any snap to grid functions when drawing in events. Works well for piano, leads, some drum kit fanagling.

 

EDIT: thunderpuppy beat me to it. That's two people who say it works!!!

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With bass lines, use pitch bend. Bass players slide around a lot, and playing bass on a keyboard tends to discourage that. One of my favorite techniques is when there's a held note at the end of a verse or chorus or whatever, I'll slide it down. Also, set the bend range to an octave or so...bass players don't just slide a semitone or two.


Another bass bend trick is to bend up to a note.

 

Wind controllers are great for bass lines :thu:

 

As for quantizing - in 20+ years of sequencing, I've never had quantizing improve a track. Just say NO! :D

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In the 80's I had a MIDI arranging software for....my ATARI computer!

 

This software was cool in that it made it very easy to:

 

 

do legatos, in which the time length of each note could be perfectly butted up end-to-end with only one simple command, and

 

do tuplets of any value, even lengthy ones like 27 notes over the course of a half note or quarter note...It amazes me that SONAR 6, as advanced as it is, cannot do these two simple things... These were two tricks I often used to get a more natural sound in the MIDI domain...
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Always combine a midi source with some real world source tracks to liven things up and make em real.

 

100% midi, even on one given part, is verboten.

 

For instance, I will often track a tamb and/or other perc instruments to complement programed drum sounds.

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Here's another one: When quantizing, use quantize strength to quantize what you play by 85% or so. This tightens up your part while retaining a bit of the original "looseness."

 

 

I agree wholeheartedly about using the quantize strength feature. However, even if you're as rhythmically challenged as I am, I think 85% is too much.

 

I set the quantize strength differently depending on what the smallest note value is. For instance, when quantizing 16th note triplets, I run it way up to 50 or 60 percent. But when quantizing to 8th notes, I only use about 25%.

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The best MIDI trick I've ever encountered....since the dawn of MIDI itself? Use the new Audio-Snap feature in Cakewalk SONAR 6.

 

You basically drum in your groove (preferably with MIDI drum pads), and drum it in with your total individualistic feeling, with no metronome at all in the background, and paying no heed to measures.

 

Later, you can use Audio-Snap to quantize both your MIDI and your audio to the groove you drummed in. You literally can throw metronomes and measures to the four winds, if you are so inclined, and just work off of your pure feeling. It's great if you want to have freely shifting tempos....(like in the "real" world.... What a concept!)

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So about this audiosnap thing...if you play in midi drums freestyle to no grid or metronome, and then overdub stuff and then use audiosnap to line all the overdubs up with the freestyle drums.....then nothing lines up to measures because the original drums didn't either, right? So if that's the case, how do you handle cutting and pasting sections later on when editing? If nothing lines up to measures, it would seem almost impossible to do routine cut and pasting of parts.

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So about this audiosnap thing...if you play in midi drums freestyle to no grid or metronome, and then overdub stuff and then use audiosnap to line all the overdubs up with the freestyle drums.....then nothing lines up to measures because the original drums didn't either, right? So if that's the case, how do you handle cutting and pasting sections later on when editing? If nothing lines up to measures, it would seem almost impossible to do routine cut and pasting of parts.

 

 

Yeah, you're stating it right!

 

Audio-Snap is so flexible , you can make quick selections according to the rhythmic separations you've created freestyle... You can even "slip-stretch" an audio clip to shrink or grow in any space you paste it in... With no perceptible loss of audio quality. You just grab the clip's corner then drag it to instantaneously, automatically shrink or grow (rather than perform any mathematical calculations). It's way kewl. You can make audio bend to your will, not the other way around.

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Craig has written several articles about creating realistic drum patterns that I think are excellent. I have one of those articles in a Battery manual.

Craig, maybe you could post one or more of those in this thread?

 

 

I'll do better than that: I'll put it in the HC Confidential newsletter (you all do subscribe, right?) then shuttle it over into the library. Thanks for the suggestion!

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Layer sounds with different qualities. For instance, I did a fretless bass line with two different samples. One sound was very heavy on the fundamental, the other was very tilted towards the fretless "buzziness" I ran both sounds at the same time and worked the balance manually to create a performance that blended the fundamental and "buzz" to my liking.

 

Be smart with velocity and accents. Not every MIDI instrument has the same response curve to velocity data. So as you work through different sounds and modules to create the sound, check that the velocity response is still where you want it to respond with the performance dynamics you want. One synth might come across really peaky and spiky and require a different velocity levels for accented and softer notes, while another may have flat response and require more drastic velocity differences to create accents.

 

Again, you could use two sounds in layers and manually blend them to create a final performance that takes advantage of the different dynamic responsiveness (as in the first tip I described)

 

Treat the sounds as you would an actual instrument. I've taken to reducing everything to audio for the mixing stage. It lets me start the mix with a clean slate. The big thing though is that I treat the sounds as I would the natural instrument. And yeah, turn off those built in effects. Sounds from the synth/sampler makers tend to be BIG, so that they sound fancy on the demo rack and on their own, but they often don't fit a mix. If I'm using a sampled piano, I'll treat the audio exactly as I would a live piano recording (EQ, reverb, etc.) - not just use the sound that comes out of the MIDI unit, because that is probably going to sound really hyped and forward.

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Find out if the module or sound library you're using allows you to create more realism through the use of midi controller commands... It takes a lot of tweaking, but in the end, you will have a VERY realistic sounding performance... Right now, one of the best libraries for this type of control are the ones put out by Gary Garritan... However, even something as humble as the edirol orchestral library allows you to gain a lot of control over the performance of the instrument to make is sound more realistic...

 

People have spoken about not using quantization, another way to tidy up notes that are out rhythmically is to use the piano roll editor in your sequencer and just move slightly the offending notes, while leaving the rest of the performance intact...

 

Last but not least, do not limit yourself to any one library... Try to use dedicated pianos, dedicated drums, dedicated bass libraries, etc to get the most realistic and best sounding recording possible...

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Guitar controllers always really helped me with the midi. Even back in the very slow tracking days, I would tune my b string up a half step and then use a capo on the 7th fret and play bass parts on the middle 4 strings. You have to transpose down a couple of octaves, but it tracked great. No other way for me to get realistic vibrato and slides and shakes and such.

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"Sounds like MIDI" is the kiss of death for those who listen at certain levels.

 

Run your mixes by some buds who are hypersensitive to the "sounds like MIDI" disease. See if they spot the telltale signs of MIDIocrity. They'll probably notice things that you, as composer and player, are too close to in order to see clearly.

 

Zero in on what they hear and redo it 'till it's cured.

 

nat whilk ii

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Play a midi controller rather than drawing in notes or using a drum machine.

 

This gives it the groove and feel that only a human can impart.

Then, once you have the feel & groove, avoid destroying it by tweaking and quantizing.

 

If you feel you must tweak notes:

0) Consider doing a re-take (the same basic rule as in audio: a single 3 minute retake = 1 hour of editing).

 

1) Turn off the time grid (in Sonar, you can set the grid color = background color to make it disappear). This forces you to edit with your ears instead of your eyes.

 

2) Worry only about note start times. Note length is generally irrelevant to timing.

 

3) Similar to quantizing, avoid wholesale editing of velocities. The dynamics of the performance are captured in that data, and if you use an edit pencil to overwrite it, you can't get it back. If there are trackwide problems, consider a midi plugin that compresses the data. If it's just an occasional note, it won't hurt anything to tweak a few by hand.

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2) Worry only about note start times. Note length is generally irrelevant to timing.

 

 

Bzzzt. I disagree. Timing maybe dependent only on the start time, but note duration is one of the biggest elements in creating a groove. Imagine if the bass player pumping out 8th notes never varied the durations. Imagine the piano player held every note to full and equal duration. Etc.

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