Tip of the week: 3 Humanise Your Instruments
1 min readHumanising is a great way of adding a bit of life to your music, it adds a random error to the timing of notes, to make it more human. While we want notes to be in time, we expect the musician to have tiny deviations from the exact time value for both expression and simply because we aren’t perfect.
While in a lot of electronic music we want the kick to be exactly on the beat, sometimes humanising a synth or drum flourish can add a good amount of character. Consider what elements of the song need to be precise and what don’t, work from there.
Your song may have a house-y piano riff which would be a great point to add some humanisation alongside dynamics to really give the feel of someone playing. Play about and see how far you can push it before it sounds bad.