Humanising Percussion
During a collaboration session with Kuda, he made a comment was about the percussion in the tracks feeling to computeriSed and needing more of a human feel. From this comment, I decided to conducted research into this topic and tested out the different techniques found. However, there seems to be a lack of academic research on this topic, so I searched websites and tutorials instead and came across an article by Micheal Cusack (2017).
An article in Mixdown Mag Micheal Cusack (2017) talks about various processes which will assist producers when ‘Adding The Human Element.' The article talks about sampling different hits velocities when at the initial recording stage. This technique was used by myself when recording the found sounds and was incorporated within my productions at various stages. However when using sounds that were not recorded by yourself and are either from a sample pack or created at an earlier stage can sound rather computeriSed. Cusack (2017) explains methods for adding variation in velocity by using a sampler to rout the hit velocity to various parameters such as the attack, decay, sustain, release, volume, and tone. This will determine how hard the sound it played depending on the setting which the velocity is routed to.
This technique will be tested out and will feature three different audio clips in the next blog entry.
Reference http://www.mixdownmag.com.au/adding-human-element