I used to do a lot MIDI programming (placing the notes into my DAW with my mouse) rather than recording the MIDI from my keyboard playing (whether it be keyboard parts or drums.) I found this to be a faster approach to get what I wanted because I’m an awful keyboardist and have a lousy sense of rhythm.

While this approach gave me technically correct results, the sound was very robotic. There are a variety of techniques one can use to try to get the of programmed notes to sound more “human” (such as varying the timing and velocity of the notes) but I don’t think that’s the best way to go about it.

Instead, I’ve decided it’s better to play my keyboard and drum parts. I’m still not very good at it (although I get better the more I do it) but I find if I take enough passes (which is of course very easy with MIDI) that I can get it close enough. And if it’s still not quite good enough then I can use quantization to improve the timing.

Quantization



You may be thinking that quantizing the notes defeats the entire purpose of recording my playing in the first place but that’s not true. First of all, a lot of the “human touch” is in the changing velocities, not just in the not perfect timing. Secondly, you don’t have to (and you shouldn’t) quantize 100%. Instead, I play around with the quantization percentage (and other settings, with REAPER – my preferred DAW – there are a variety of quantization settings to manipulate) until I get the feel that I want where it still sounds “human” but it’s not overly sloppy like my playing tends to be without it.

Playing One Bit At A Time

If you’re a bad keyboardist like me then you may want to borrow my technique of playing one bit a time. For example, instead of playing both the left and right hands of a keyboard part – I may play each one separately and then add them together. Or when playing drums I may do the kick and snare in one pass and then the hi-hat in another.

Looping

Another technique I use to make the process of getting a “human” sounding MIDI recording a bit easier is looping. For example I may play 8 bars of my hi-hat playing and then just loop that to wherever it needs to be. This tends to give enough of a “human feel” while not taking a huge amount of time.

Keyboard

I think it’s essential to use a velocity sensitive keyboard if you want to get a “human” sounding MIDI recording. And it’s preferred to have a weighted key keyboard. I use the SL-990 MIDI Keyboard and I definitely highly recommend it. It comes close to the feel of playing a real piano and it’s not crazy expensive. No, it has no built in sounds – but so what? Built in sounds are crap anyway in most cases. It’s meant to be used to control the drum machines, samplers, and synths you have on your computer and it works wonderfully for that.

Pianoteq

Combine the above weighted key keyboard with Pianoteq piano software for an extremely realistic piano playing experience. It’s really an awesome combination.