Nekujak
My muse is demanding better working hours
Reason has a built-in tool that's quite useful for imparting realistic human feel to drum, and other, MIDI parts, called the ReGroove Mixer. I'm guessing other DAWs probably have something similar.
Basically, you feed a reference audio or MIDI clip that has the desired feel into the ReGroove Mixer, then adjust how much of that groove to apply to individual MIDI tracks in your project. The ReGroove mixer then applies the reference clip's timing offsets and dynamics to the track based on your settings, and voila! instant human feel.
The cool thing about the ReGroove Mixer is you can feed it up to 32 different reference clips, and choose how to distribute them among the tracks in your project. You can for example, take a snippet of a Herbie Hancock piano solo, and apply the same feel to your keyboard parts. A Bill Bruford drum groove and apply it to your drums. A Paul McCartney bass line and apply the same timing and dynamics to your bass parts. And so on... Obviously, if you go too crazy with it, things can get a little messy. But used judiciously, it can breathe instant life into quantized MIDI parts.
The only problem I have with the ReGroove Mixer, and why I don't use it all that often, is there's no easy way to know in advance what kind of effect a reference clip will have. It would be great to be able to browse through some sort of visual reference to get an idea of what kind of timing offsets and dynamics each reference clip would apply. As it is now, there's a lot of trial and error listening involved in finding the right groove(s) for a particular piece.
But still, it's a pretty effective tool, and one of the better "humanizer" gadgets I've worked with.
Basically, you feed a reference audio or MIDI clip that has the desired feel into the ReGroove Mixer, then adjust how much of that groove to apply to individual MIDI tracks in your project. The ReGroove mixer then applies the reference clip's timing offsets and dynamics to the track based on your settings, and voila! instant human feel.
The cool thing about the ReGroove Mixer is you can feed it up to 32 different reference clips, and choose how to distribute them among the tracks in your project. You can for example, take a snippet of a Herbie Hancock piano solo, and apply the same feel to your keyboard parts. A Bill Bruford drum groove and apply it to your drums. A Paul McCartney bass line and apply the same timing and dynamics to your bass parts. And so on... Obviously, if you go too crazy with it, things can get a little messy. But used judiciously, it can breathe instant life into quantized MIDI parts.
The only problem I have with the ReGroove Mixer, and why I don't use it all that often, is there's no easy way to know in advance what kind of effect a reference clip will have. It would be great to be able to browse through some sort of visual reference to get an idea of what kind of timing offsets and dynamics each reference clip would apply. As it is now, there's a lot of trial and error listening involved in finding the right groove(s) for a particular piece.
But still, it's a pretty effective tool, and one of the better "humanizer" gadgets I've worked with.
