You need to add errors to your productions to make them sound better. Humans make errors. They make errors as nature does, of which they are the result. These errors are in fact ambitions, a necessity of coincidence and spontaneity. To receive a dose of randomness has therefore often a salutary effect for the human who listens, who looks, who touches, who feels.
Perhaps our digital world is missing a form of salutary randomness. This randomness is absent from the algorithms and artificial intelligences that think and act more and more systematically in our names.
We must cultivate error, randomness, spontaneity as nature makes us find them beautiful. I personally have always had a great admiration for error. Error makes things appear even greater in their deep weaknesses.
Well, we’re done with the philosophical side of things. You’re here to know how implementing “errors” in your productions will make them sound better.
What do I call errors here? I call here errors all the inevitable imperfections of music played by humans. So we’ll talk about tempo, time placement, tunings, nuances. But we’ll also talk about some of the knowledge that composers have developed over time to bring relief to their music. And we’ll end up with the simplest way to humanize your music and make it personal: the touch.
Time.
“What makes this big difference is the intention of the performer. He doesn’t play a note to play a note. He plays a note that is part of a whole, of a story. With its words, its punctuations, its sentences and its paragraphs.”
Add errors to your productions by using the time. To compose music is to sculpting time, to extend it, to contract it, even to freeze it. Everything is subject to time and in all musical scales. From the duration of an album, to the duration of a track, its sections, its bars, its silences but also its notes.
Let’s take things one at a time and start with the smallest time scale and go to the bigger one.
Lengths of Notes & Silences.
At the time where DAWs have become the indispensable tool for most producers, composing with the piano roll that allows us to write notes in a grid has become unavoidable. (By the way I talk about The Hidden Side Of DAWs related to how finish a track here). I don’t have anything against the idea, it could be assimilated to the same process as the classical writing of a score. And I would be tempted to agree with you, except for one important difference which is the following:
The score, unlike the piano roll, is not meant to be played by a computer but by an instrumentalist. This changes a lot of things in the final musical result. And I think that here we will all prefer to listen to Chopin Nocturne Op.9 No.2 played by a pianist than interpreted in MIDI by a computer. Here are two videos to convince you.
The MIDI version:
The Human version:
What makes this big difference is the intention of the performer. He doesn’t play a note to play a note. He plays a note that is part of a whole, of a story. With its words, its punctuations, its sentences and its paragraphs. Like an actor would interpret a poem in a completely different way than a computer would. First of all, by working on the internal time structure. Shorter and longer notes, exacerbated or dodged silences. Plated chords or scattered chords. A strict or stormy tempo. All these parameters that we instinctively like can easily go wrong when we write music on grids. Where all notes have the same duration, all silences are hammered and the tempo cannot breathe.
So do not hesitate. Adjust your note lengths, extend them or make them spicy. Use this as a new or forgotten parameter. But don’t forget that it’s not only the stretching or contracting of the notes but also the placement of the beginning of the notes. Why do you have to place it on the grid? Add flexibility to your track by moving your notes slightly forward or backward and you will see that your track will start to groove.
Drummers use a lot this technique of Laid back. By being late on the beat, which gives a very heavy groove, a bit drunk, much used in jazz. But also playing in front of it creates a lot of tension. Because it feels like the song is rushing while the tempo is not moving. Used a lot in funk.
I’m not even talking about the fact that you’ll save yourself a lot of technical issues. Like masking. You will create a more beautiful separation between the instruments and at the same time a more beautiful stereo field. I would even say that the compression, if needed, will sound much more musical and natural. Your tracks will breathe again.
Quantization.
Most of us are adept of quantization, to the point that it becomes an automatic and instinctive process. Because the music must be as perfectly on time as possible. But if you have read my lines above, you will probably want to make better use of it than usual. That is to say, quantize yes, but with flexibility please. Indeed quantization allows many possibilities often ignored.
Like the “strong” function which is in fact the dry/wet of quantization. It will allow you to quantize your rhythms with more or less intensity. Ideal to keep your personal groove while getting closer to an ideal rhythmic placement.
You could also adjust the “swing” (also called shuffle). Subject on which I will not spread out here as I already feel how much this post will be dense. Swing is typical of jazz music, but also still used in modern music like house or techno.
Swing is a rhythmic phrasing. To generalize (because there is a multitude of forms of swing), it is about retarding the second 8th note of the beat. It’s a middle ground between binary and ternary feeling. If you don’t know what ternary is, I might write about it.
Tempo.
You, who have already read me and who use automations to bring life back into your music. Have you ever thought about automating the tempo? Yes, in recorded music like classical music or progressive rock to take a more modern example, there are sometimes changes in tempo. Slower parts, faster parts. But there are also possible movements in terms of tempo. Acceleration and deceleration (accelerando, ritardando).
But you can also use these possibilities in a more subtle approach. Like slowing down the tempo linearly by a few bpm points before a drop, to go back to the initial tempo. Or restarting with an extra bpm point or two on the last drop to bring back the intensity. In other words, the tempo gives us a lot of things to imagine and experiment with.
Velocity.
“Velocity allows to “reproduce” the richness of expression of a real instrument played by a real musician.”
Add errors to your productions by using the velocity. Velocity in music production is a somewhat abstract term, and does not refer to how quickly a musician is able to play notes at an extremely fast tempo. It does not refer to the volume measurement of a midi note either. Even if the result can easily mislead us on this subject. In reality, it is a virtual measure of the force applied by the musician to the key of a piano (or a MIDI keyboard). The force of impact to be more exact. And you will agree with me that this parameter does not only have the effect of playing the piano more or less loudly.
The Simulation of Acoustic Instruments Richness.
Indeed, it is the whole spectral richness of the piano that will change. Depending on whether it is pressed hard or not hard on the key. Weaker yes, but smoother. Stronger yes, but more metallic. Now you understand much better where I am going with this. Velocity allows to “reproduce” the richness of expression of a real instrument played by a real musician. And it’s time for you to use this possibility to your advantage.
Music Writing Techniques.
“The human ear does not particularly like when everything is perfectly uniform and symmetrical.”
Add errors to your productions by using the music writing techniques. In terms of errors, the notion of variation could be a synonym in its deliberate version. To surprise, punctuate or even nuance musical colors. To do this, we have tons of writing tools at our disposal, many are used in classical music, but also in jazz. I would like to focus today on a few notions. Melodic variation, voicing and tuning.
Melodic Variations.
To vary in some details your melody all along your track can have several effects and functions on your audience.
The first one is to surprise. You can easily trick the audience into remembering a melody. And the moment you make a variation on a note or two, you will renew their attention.
The second one (I quote only two here but there are an infinity of others) is the Leitmotiv effect. Indeed “Leitmotiv” is a musical technique consisting in relating a musical phrase to a concept. Much used in film music, The Lord of the Rings composed by Howard Shore is the perfect example. Indeed, there is a theme for each concept in the Lord of the Rings, like the theme of the ring. And there, you will tell me why it has anything to do with the melodic variations? Because the principle of the Leitmotiv is to repeat the same theme. Yes you are not wrong. But as the concept evolves, (in a movie to take this example) the musical phrase associated with it can evolve too.
The theme of the verdant Shire at the beginning of the trilogy has nothing to do with the one at the end of the trilogy. Because the adventure has changed the characters and the concepts and therefore the depth of this same musical phrase.
The first theme of The Shire heard in The Lord of The Rings:
The last theme of The Shire heard in The Lord of The Rings:
Voicing.
Voicing is a process of harmonization. It is widely used in jazz and is also known as chord inversions in classical music. If you are used to compose chords progressions where the notes are superposed in an “academic” order, meaning: Root, third and fifth or more if you use four-note chords.
Voicing consists in flipping this order. A first inversion would give: Third, fifth, root and a second: Fifth, root and third. I suggest you to do this experiment on your side and you will see that you will be able to give new colors to your chords progressions. And why not vary this voicing along your track? Or even have a different voicing during the chorus, the verse or the break?
There are indeed keys in music theory to elaborate perfect voicing. According to classical or jazz rules but I won’t talk about it here. I’ll talk about it soon in a new post. (But this is technical).
Tuning or Detuning.
Here I would like to point out a phenomenon that only exists for those who are used to listening to live instrumentalists. Which also exists in the productions of artists who have this phenomenon in mind. Consciously or unconsciously. And adding this kind of errors will make your productions much more spacious, filled, musical and natural.
The human ear does not particularly like when everything is perfectly uniform and symmetrical. When all the notes are exactly in tune. And this is where tuning or detuning can be a great tool. Indeed, have you ever wondered what a symphony orchestra would sound like if every instruments were perfectly tuned to each other? It would sound extremely flat. And I think that our brain would even have the impression that the orchestra has been drastically reduced in size.
I encourage you to try it on your own, especially when you are working on synthesis. Why not slightly detune an oscillator or one of the two synths playing the same part? You’ll see that the instruments will stand out better and your music will start to have internal movements. Those famous oscillations that we hear a lot and that we like in ambient music.
This being said you have at your disposal a multitude of ways to do it. A simple detune as seen above but also an automated detune. By an LFO, an envelope, or a random generator.
Conclusion.
Add errors to your productions by going even further. I could add chapters and chapters to this concept of musical errors, which I will probably do someday who knows? Why not a part about sound design? Add errors to your productions by implementing randomness in your synthesis, by using sound field recordings to texture your tracks and bring oxygen. I could talk about layering and stacking. Add errors to your productions by playing your music, by interpreting it, by using a controller, by using your hands to record automations, in latch mode why not ?
Finally if I had one sentence to conclude, it would be this one:
The more you put yourself in your music, the better it will sound.
One response to “You Need to Add Errors to Your Productions.”
[…] And it’s also nice to admit that imperfections can give life to your productions, I talk about it in this post: You Need to Add Errors to Your Productions. […]