First of all, humanization is simply randomization. A little bit? Yes. A lot? No. Does it make it sound human? Not much.

Many of the older MIDI styles are step-entered and/or quantized. Even after the advent of "live drums" many styles continued to use the quantized drum grid.

I've always preferred to play my music live into a sequencer and then import the snippets of MIDI into the style-maker, so they are not quantized, and sound live because they were played live. And ever since the 'live drums' were introduced, I've done the same with the drums.

That's why my styles don't need "humanizing"

Back to humanizing.

What a real band does is not randomizing. Sure, everybody can't hit every note at the exact same time, and that's why a little bit of humanizing does help. But it won't do the job you are asking.

When a band plays, certain beats and/or sub beats are actually played a little bit before or after the place where they are notated. The second pair of the eighth notes might be rushed or dragged a bit, the 2nd and/or 4th beat of each measure might also be either rushed or dragged a bit.

This is commonly called the groove.

I was first introduced to this when I was in school band. The band director played a number of different recordings of Strauss waltzes and told us to notice how the second beat of each measure was rushed. It came before the beat and that gave the dancers a little lift or push. He also called our attention to the fact that different conductors rushed this in different amounts and the proceeded to have us rush the 2nd beat of each measure in the waltz we are learning.

So you can go through each measure and shift notes -- this is a lot of work, and in the very early days of sequencing with my Atari that's exactly what I did.

But there is a better way -- IF you have a sequencer with a groove or change filter, you can easily manipulate the beats.

For example, in Master Tracks Pro you can go to the change menu, select slide data, and then use the dialog box to slide the data 4 clicks to the left, but that would just move all the beats to the left, so click the "Use Change Filter" box and then select the second beat of each measure.

Here is the Change Filter in MT Pro


Other sequencers that have change or groove filters allow similar manipulations. I've been asking for something like this in Power Tracks per years, perhaps some day my wish will be granted. Many of my older wishes have already been granted.

Different styles of music use different grooves, and two songs of the same genre can have a different groove. What we pop/jazz/country/R&B musicians generally do not do is play everything quantized. There are of course exceptions, Techno is one, and there are a few others. These types of music are supposed to sound stiff and putting a groove into them will make them weaker.

So the solution is to (1) use my "live entered" MIDI styles (2) export to a sequencer with a groove filter or (3) export to a sequencer and manipulate the data measure at a time.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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