How to achieve more realism with NOTE VELOCITIES

hi paul thompson here with five tips on how to program velocities better the first tip is don't be too pianistic in your performance i'm going to show you exactly what i mean [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so excuse the clams which i'll just remove so what do we got here well if we look at the velocity profile if we look at the kind of way i'm playing it's all over the place i'm being really really pianistic i'm exaggerating obviously kind of for effects but i've got this kind of really quite violent skew up and down in the dynamic and it just doesn't sound very realistic when you do this kind of thing on the strings and to show you i'm actually going to put a total straight line across and play that okay and while it sounds unmusical like that it sounds more realistic because you haven't got these kind of gigantic leaps in dynamic that would just not translate to such a large group of players so what are we going to do to make this better well the first thing we can do is to try and kind of lessen the amount of um of dynamic variance that we've got here and we can do that by just kind of flattening this slightly and if we wanted to we can then just kind of move that compressed line up and down let's see what that sounds like [Music] so again you'll see that there are a couple of places where the meat and potatoes of the piano where you can do sudden and dramatic drops from one note to the next in dynamic like here that kind of thing just sounds terrible on the strings so let's go in and start evening a few of those things out so we can move that one up uh are there any other really dramatic points well maybe let's take this group and move those up a little bit just to even the line out i would take any outliers that are again a function of piano style of performance where you might have you know you might be accenting a certain note instinctively on the keyboard um so i just even a few of the really big outliers from the chords out so that you end up with a slightly more condensed and i'm not being really rigid about this because i want it to still sound realistic and slightly human so um what does that sound like okay it's sounding a lot better already now there's something else that you need to think about and that brings me to tip number two which is to think about the instruments idiomatically think about how they play and how that might affect the way that you're gonna program so for example a common way to play this kind of passage on a stringed instrument would be to use down and up bows and typically because we're starting on the beat you would start with a down bow that would be the most common thing you could also do down down down down up up up up but probably the most natural thing i would imagine a string player to do would be to go down up down up down up now the down bow is going to sound slightly stronger or fuller than the up bow and obviously good string players can make this so even that you almost can't tell but let's say for the purposes of our of our demonstration here we're going to make it so that we're we're getting a a nice kind of rhythm to it and we want the down bow to be slightly more accented well as you can see these smooth lines that we have here these are not helping us so let's take all of the second parts of each couple and let's drop them all so i'm not pulling them way down i'm just dropping them relative to the first note in each pair and if i just look along the line i can see where there might be a couple of anomalies but what i'm going to do is i'm going to play it first and see if you can hear where the anomalies lie [Music] so the obvious one is here now i know that there's a note missing let's pop that note back in but even with that note it sounds a bit odd and what we need to do is we need to just bring this chord back up slightly and again you can see that i'm just i'm not being rigid about it i'm dragging them all up roughly to where they should be [Music] here again we've got this anomaly here um which is the top note and the second note and they they are just um not following the this nice gentle pattern that we've established so as you can hear it's a really straightforward thing to do to think about how the instrument plays idiomatically and how that might translate to your velocity programming in this context now how does this compare to woodwind instruments and brass instruments for example well let's do a similar thing with the clarinet and have a look at that [Music] now again if we straight line this then you can hear that that is um you know although it doesn't have again it doesn't have the kind of musical flow to it it definitely sounds more realistic than the pianistic version that we were just listening to so so what are the problems that are going on here well one of the problems is the overall um swell as before which we will control by doing the same kind of move we'll just compress the line and then bring it back up a little bit let's have a listen to that [Music] now there is an element and again i know that great musicians work hard and every day to try and eliminate any of these kind of differences in their playing so that they can play as smoothly as possible when they're double tonguing when they're bowing ups and downs trying to make them sound as close as possible but there is still something inherently which doesn't sound quite right i'm going to show you on the clarinet now when you're repeating notes probably not at this speed but if you're repeating notes even slightly faster you would end up with this and i'm doing takata [Laughter] as you can hear i'm a tiny bit rusty but there is a a kind of inconsistency it's not it doesn't just follow a kind of flow now we can we can use the same kind of trick as before to simulate this by taking the second group of each pair and moving those down slightly in the dynamic and that would sound like this [Music] now that's definitely sounding better it's not too extreme if we did it too extreme we'd end up with this [Music] which just doesn't sound right it doesn't sound realistic so the answer is to program that slight inconsistency but also again to look for any kind of outlines some signs in the velocity profile that kind of suggests that something's not quite right and if we go and even those out a tiny tiny bit we'll get an even better result [Music] it's about thinking and especially if we uh play that faster then that's going to sound much better than what we originally played in so again it's a combination of thinking idiomatically and thinking about not playing pianistically but what would happen if we were doing something on the trumpet now the trumpet also plays double tongue says takataka or dakkaka it's almost like a d and a g as opposed to an occur with different kind of that gives you a slightly rounder sound but the key thing that i find much very different about the way that the trumpet reacts as opposed to the way that most woodwind react is that it has a more explosive start to the note and this does really iron out um the kind of timbral difference or the dynamic difference between the two different sounds that are producing the double tongue now what do i mean by that i'm going to demonstrate by playing in something a kind of typical trumpety part [Music] okay so slightly all over the place there let's just tighten that up and we can see an obvious problem area there already but let's just play that back now if we just put a straight line across that [Music] now weirdly although that sounds unmusical it kind of sounds more like trumpets so what's going on here well again we've got the we've got the rule the tip number one which is about the pianistic playing but we've also got this consideration of what happens when we're double tonguing and what happens um idiomatically with the instrument now if we did the same as before and we pulled down the second so that we got the first of each pair accented what would happen weird doesn't sound quite right and the answer and the reason for that is because of the explosive sound of the trumpet and the way that the notes are produced you don't you you know you don't tend to characteristically get this kind of difference between the notes they are much more even so if we go back to our straight line the way that we might do it is the first note of each of each passage and i'm going to just split them up a little bit the first note of each kind of group would have a stronger accent and once the airflow once the kind of um the player has got nailed the first note things might settle down a tiny bit so we might have a tiny bit of a difference here where i'm just gonna i'm just gonna make them slightly less even and i'm gonna accent the the last the last note of the group that sounds like this now that sounds better already let's put a slightly stronger accent on the second one because we're repeating so let's have that and also we'll make sure that the top note is slightly louder then we're going to drop things for the for the semi-quavers because there's not quite as much air coming out there um and then we'll put a little bit of a kind of gradual drop down in those so what does that second group sound like [Music] now there's lots of different ways you could do this we could have a kind of we could have a power up towards the end and here you know there is this kind of rise that we that we argued against before there is a kind of you can do a kind of rise like that because the trumpet is less idiomatically accented on the first of each group we might even get them to just blast those last three notes and that sounds more realistic again so it's all about playing with how you know picture the sound of the instrument in your head and then try to translate that using your dynamic using your velocity programming to get something as close as that and how you might imagine the trumpet to play and youtube again is a fantastic resource for watching um especially uh people teaching an instrument so if it's if you don't know much about the trumpet for example then you can jump on there's some fantastic stuff on there there's our own bbc so video um which shows a huge amount of detail about the trumpet with martin harold as well so check out the resources on youtube now that brings us to our third tip [Music] whoops drifting a little bit out of time there towards the end let's just pull that all back in okay so um as you can see again my velocities as i played it in slightly all over the place let's just do a straight line and see what that sounds like [Music] again it starts to sound a little bit more realistic but i'm not going to go that way i'm going to try and alter what we have and keep some of the humanity in the performance there so let's do again our kind of similar thing of evening out so that we've got down bow up bow down bow up bow there's a bit of an anomaly here it drops away a little bit uh then a little bit strong there that's okay uh that's probably jumping out a little bit oddly because it's not uh you know it's the last beat of the bar that was me thinking about the jump up in the next bar and then let's just even those out a tiny bit sounds like this [Music] now we could actually exaggerate that by widening that gap and pulling it down again widen it a bit pull it down again let's put it about there [Music] okay and if we really went to town and really pulled those down that doesn't sound right so getting too much of a difference there is not good um but what would happen if we tried a different kind of pattern well what about doing something like this where the third beat is actually below that sounds like this doesn't sound good at all does it but we could bring the second note down and then creep back up so we got the second note right down and then we're building back up like this second note down build up let's see what that sounds like it's interesting it still sounds slightly lumpy and weird now i'm going to go over to programming on drums the sixteenths and show you what the difference is here so again we're we're kind of these are all slightly interlinked but we're talking about the idiomatic feel of the instrument and it's actually you can't really stray too far away from the way that the instrument traditionally plays and the way that a player would play this kind of thing before it just starts to sound wrong lumpy etc however the rules change slightly when we go to percussion right now we're going to use the bbc uh symphony orchestra snare one and i've gone in for a kind of close sound now if i hover over the key you can see that these are basically uh the same hit on c3 and d3 so i'm just going to use that because it's slightly easier to play and i'm going to play in a 16th pattern okay so let's see what my let's put it pull it in a little bit but let's see what my pattern sounds like now where are the anomalies well first of all again our dynamic range is just too wide but falling away in this manner towards the beat is quite characteristic for drum programming and let's just even this out slightly um so okay so you can hear where it's working and where it isn't that's working that one is a little bit lumpy again that that shape not quite so good here we need it to kind of fall away a bit and again the growing up shape here so this is very very different we're finding interesting new ways to make shapes now what if we took something like this section and just made the whole pattern all about that okay so what are the options here we can do a strong three let's see what that sounds like sounds lumpy and horrible we can do a week three sounds very nice we can do falling away also sounds very nice or we can do building up again very very nice and it gives you a slightly different feel and a slightly different musical intention and meaning as to what's going on on the falling away we're we're emphasizing the one of each of each beat if you like it but if we're building up in this way it's a slightly different intention it's it's building up to the to the beat instead of dropping away from it so it's kind of pushing us forward it's a very different thing and you've got to be really intentional about the way that you're using velocities because this is what it's all about this is where you get you know a lot of the musicality and the interpretation of the part you've put in is coming out through these tweaks which brings us to the next part and that's tip four and that is what about ghost notes now most obviously you have ghost notes on the snare but you have them on any drums but you also do get them in orchestral instruments as well but let's look at them in the snare as we're here for now um and what we're going to do is we're going to just have the two and four i'm going to put them really low down like this and we're going to use those as little ghost notes or it could just be something like that it could be um that you have a pattern like this and those little extra ghost notes in between um are really really key to the uh to the kind of groove of the part now if i pull them down a bit more they're just becoming a little bit too quiet here because it's quite a wide dynamic range on this snare yeah not quite working if we had a quieter accented beat it would work but it's being blasted out by the by the accented part by the kind of if you like the audible non-ghost or the visual non-ghost part so that's another consideration is the relative dynamic between the ghost notes and the keynote if you know what i mean what about on orchestral instruments like the violin or the trumpet well so let's take our virtuoso soloist from solo strings and let's do some little pickup ghost notes in a pattern here [Music] okay so i've got it roughly programmed right let's just bring that onto the beat let's give it a a little bit of uh quantization but we'll just pull the strength right down just pull it slightly closer to the beat now let's look at what we've got so far [Music] okay so you get the idea now the way that i've played it in and obviously you can't really play in ghost notes um unless you have a very very sensitive keyboard and you're exceptionally good keyboard player um it's much much easier to kind of get them roughly right and then kind of tweak to taste so let's try that [Music] okay wrong way around those ones in fact we'll leave that there [Music] give that one a little bit more strength so it's like the end note we could pull these even lower so let's pull these ghost notes right down down down down [Music] sounding good that was an anomaly there let's pull that down so it falls away [Music] okay so as you can see you can use the ghost note concept with your orchestral instruments as well i mean obviously the snare is an orchestral instrument but you know what i mean the strings of woodwinds and brass because as opposed to playing in a pattern of sixteenths where you're kind of doing your down up down up down up if you're doing this as a grace note um which is which is almost what a ghost note is to a certain extent then you all bets are off because the player can can concentrate on that in isolation even even if it's as part of a pattern when it's not a continuous pattern that's where it becomes incredibly hard to get these kind of gigantic differences in dynamic because it just locks up your brain when you're trying to play a continuous pattern like that so we looked at violin let's just pop up onto the trumpets [Music] okay very close let's just uh give that a little bit of assistance from the quantize button and let's have a quick listen right well as you can see it's uh not quite working at the moment and that's because these leaps are just too big um let's pull those down a tiny bit make that that one's a slight anomaly that one's a slight anomaly uh let's remove that okay sounds like this okay some of them are disappearing a tiny bit so let's just give them a little bit of a boost i want it to be to sound kind of definite and what i'd actually probably do here is these notes just need to be a little bit closer to give them more of a grace note feel because players when they see that part they will instinctively play these maybe not quite so much at the end where it's more of a 16th pattern but they will instinctively play them slightly closer to the destination note just because it's slightly easier if you're going um it's harder to be metronomic you know and in which case we can pull that down again and that could be could be um but actually would probably sound better so if we go back to our original quantization of these whoopsie daisy uh if we move those back onto the grid and i think i would probably now that we're back into a pattern we probably need to be a little bit more even we could even do a little bit of a grower here at the end for our for our uh trumpet and as she's about to embark on this final phrase maybe this one wouldn't be quite weak um let's try that okay i'm getting carried away and we're also using the atu which makes it even harder because these players are desperately trying to keep him in lock with each other but actually why don't we put this on the uh oops on the single player and check out what it sounds like okay a lot clearer and a lot more defined something to consider and think about when you're writing these parts however i think that that demonstrates quite clearly our kind of ghost notes idea our 16th programming when we're doing these ghost notes again you can tighten them up you can have the slightly wider ranges in the in the velocities but as you go into a more steady pattern it all evens out again for the brass and you kind of it becomes uh more of a kind of continuous and much less variable line of velocities so turning this into a crazy tritone takes us to our fifth little tip on velocity programming and that is doing builds uh and doing builds in pairs now for for this kind of uh thing where you've got the orchestra all growing through a kind of pattern of everyone's stepping up how do you program that stuff do you program it as a straight line do you program it as you know the normal kind of way we've been looking at things with the drop on the twos well um i have a theory that about how this works best if we put a straight line in it sounds like this [Music] not too bad um but actually i like to put things in pairs so if i show you exactly what i mean let's look at this now i'm not i'm not dipping because i don't want to drop the power for the second part of each pair but if i if i add to that um on the strings let's pick an ensemble patch and i'll just quickly whack a part in to mix roughly the same [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so let's just tighten that up a tiny bit and let's again do straight line sounds kind of weird let's do our pairs [Music] and solo [Music] now we might tweak that a tiny bit to get an accent on the first note and let's add in some woodwinds [Music] [Applause] okay so let's have a listen to our woodwinds [Music] i'm just going to even these out a tiny bit and do them in pairs [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay starting to sound good let's add in some low strings going down [Music] [Applause] a little bit uneven [Music] okay so you get the idea what i'm doing is i'm stepping them in pairs now my thinking behind this is that it's very very hard for um for a player to do a very even um and gradual uh increase across a fast-moving passage it tends to be groups of notes that that you're thinking about and you gradually get louder over groups of notes it's slightly cod science so i'm sure that if i analyze this in depth scientifically i might find out that i'm totally wrong but it's my experience from playing in groups and from just the way that i've observed when i've written things and i've expected it's come out a certain way and it hasn't come out certain way and i kind of think why is that and i realized that i'm i'm placing a kind of unreasonable expectation on um on a group of players to to play a certain thing in a way that's that's kind of awkward to think about an awkward musically to play so if i if we did uh the straight line theory across everything that we're looking at here and we just went um and we just went in and straight lined absolutely everything in an uh perfectly balanced and even line it would sound like this [Music] [Applause] and it doesn't sound right now i know i'm exaggerating slightly but my theory again is you have to think about the way that these instruments are being played and you have to think about what what the player is going to find comfortable and logical to do and stepping up in groups it might be in if it's a long phrase i mean even the way i just do that it's you hear it groups of four it's the way that your brain works you we have to subdivide things to be able to get through them we have to kind of make patterns of things to be able to um you know to make sense of them and so i would think about that as well when you're programming your velocities now i hope that some of that was interesting um and useful to take away and use in your own tracks um do dig into this stuff i always find that these tiny little percentages here and there these little tweaks that you make as you go through and as you refine things they all add up to a really really significant chunk when you get to the end and you might not think you might think i can't be bothered with that it's just it's too much grief but actually what you're going to end up with is so much more satisfying and so much more musical if you put these pieces of consideration in as you go along thanks very much look forward to seeing you on the next one bye-bye

Channel: Paul Thomson

Views: 6,822

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire, orchestra, composing, music, how to compose, orchestration, midi, daw

Id: TkLKKrzUkWo

Length: 33min 24sec (2004 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021