MASTERCLASS

Learn how to capture and program the nuances and subtleties behind real instruments – all with the right sort of fakery in your DAW

In today’s production landscape, where computers rule the roost, the pursuit of crafting tunes that sound genuinely human can often feel out of reach. Our DAWs and precision-oriented sequencing tools were designed for creative liberation, but they can sometimes produce lifeless, mechanical music.

Virtual instruments and software synths are forever becoming more advanced, housing massive libraries of painstakingly sampled real-world instruments. But despite the technological solutions, the best way to craft music that breathes with life lies not in the software, but in the user – we need to understand the instruments we want to emulate.

The devil is in the details. It’s not just about hitting the right notes at the right time; it’s about capturing the subtle imperfections, nuanced variations, and unexpected turns. Timing, for example, is the backbone of music. It involves the space between notes that adds suspense, and accounts for subtle variations in rhythm that give rise to that elusive ‘groove’. To achieve realism in digital production, mastering timing is essential, and there are plenty of functions that can help us to do so.

Nuance is the essence of music. It’s the slight bending of a guitarist’s string for a bluesy touch, the subtle vibrato in a singer’s voice to convey emotion, and the delicate touch of piano keys for depth. In a DAW, nuance could be the difference between one automation curve shape and another – it might feel like a small difference, but when small differences add up, they lead to the authenticity we’re after…

In the following pages, we’ll dive deeper into these fundamental aspects of human performance and how they can be translated into the digital realm.

Our first port of call is velocity. This property of MIDI notes and files is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to emulating realism – in fact, the reason velocity was built into the MIDI spec in the first place was for MIDI controllers and instruments to offer the feel and responsiveness of real instruments – not simply as a modulator.

Velocity has some predictable assignments in most synths and instruments, and some more leftfield ones in many instances too. The two crucial and obvious assignments, which you’ll find practically everywhere velocity is hooked up, are volume and filter cutoff.