Just because your music sits under the ’electronic’ umbrella, that doesn’t mean it has to sound relentlessly robotic and mechanical. Here are six tactics to help you loosen up those MIDI clips and push your sounds in a more organic direction…

Play it live

Obviously, the best way to get a life-like, human-played feel into your dance and electronic choons is to record some or all of the parts live using a MIDI controller, rather than program them tightly to the grid in the piano roll. The idea is still to aim for perfect timing and consistency, naturally, but the subtle deviations that your nervous and muscular systems can’t help but introduce can make all the difference to the temporal character of percussion, basses, lead lines and chord sequences. Make as many attempts as you need to get a good take; put your DAW’s comping system to use, if it has one; and if a part is challenging to play, drop the tempo temporarily to make it easier (and the re-raised-tempo result tighter).

When it comes to the all-important drums, although we wouldn’t necessarily recommend performing your full house, techno or other metronomic dance music beats live, hammering out the hi-hats and snare drum on your keyboard or pad controller over a tightly programmed four-to-the-floor kick can radically transform the rhythmic foundations of a track. If, on the other hand, it’s a breakbeat vibe you’re after, live note entry is definitely the way to go. Play the kick and snare in one pass, then overdub the hi-hats if you can’t manage the whole thing at once.

The real deal

Taking the previous tip a step further, while today’s multisampled instrument libraries give anyone with a MIDI keyboard the ability to play their own amazingly convincing guitar, string, brass, etc, parts in real time, there’s still no substitute for the real thing. Indeed, the addition of just a single live instrumental line can bring transformative texture and interest to an otherwise-programmed electronic track.

Of course, most producers don’t have the chops required to simply pick up any instrument and lay down an effective track with it, but it you can’t bluff your way through a given recording and don’t have a suitably trained musician friend you can draft in to do it for you, there are numerous collaboration websites through which to get hooked up – Kompoz and ProCollabs, to name but two. And failing that, even buying in a sampled loop performed by a professional musician is often preferable to programming the equivalent ROMpler part yourself when human nuance is your goal.

MIDI humanising

Many DAWs feature onboard systems for applying guided randomisation to the timing and dynamics of programmed MIDI parts in order to imbue them with the variability of human performance. The likes of Logic Pro’s venerable MIDI Transform dialog and Cubase’s MIDI Modifiers panel enable instant independent modification of note timing and velocity, which can be very effective when constrained to small ranges of variance. And if you find that the displacing effect on note timing is too strong even at low settings, use your DAW’s iterative quantise feature to nudge everything slightly back towards the grid.

Warts an’ all

Part of the excitement and energy that comes from a live performance lies in the crucial element of jeopardy – the possibility of natural imperfections and insignificant mistakes occurring, and the beneficial impact they can have on the end result. How do you introduce that same element of peril into your electronic tracks? Simple: now that you’re playing your parts in live, as directed by our first tip above, be relaxed about correcting any very minor timing, velocity or even pitching errors that might crop up (careful with that last one, though). You’ll need to exercise judgment as to how ‘wrong’ is too wrong, but playing the track to other people and seeing if they notice anything untoward proves helpful in that regard. To be clear, we’re not talking massive bloopers or bum notes here, just slight mis-hits and stumbles.

Get your groove on

A much more flexible take on the MPC-inspired swing features found in most DAWs, groove templates (or MIDI grooves, groove maps, etc – the nomenclature and implementation varies) are without doubt the most effective tool for bring genuine humanity to existing MIDI parts.

In a nutshell, a groove template is a sort of timing and velocity quantisation ‘map’ generated from a live performance, a classic drum machine swing setting or some other specific rhythmic pattern. By imposing one on a MIDI or, in some DAWs, audio part, the note placements and velocity levels, or transients, in that part are snapped to or incrementally shifted towards those emphasised by the template.

Your DAW will ship with a variety of prefab examples, but the best thing about groove templates is that you can easily extract them from audio and MIDI files, enabling, say, your bassline and rhythm guitar to be mapped to the groove of your live drum loop. 

Play with tempo and pitch

As well as the organic note-to-note fluctuations inherent in any instrumental performance, rhythmically unguided (ie, sans click track) musicians are wont to slow down and speed up in response to the emotional contours of a piece as it progresses. Emulate this in software by automating gradual small – no more than 3bpm either way at the extremes – changes to your project tempo, perhaps speeding up a little into the drop, slowing back down into the verse and so on.

The same thinking can be applied to pitch, too: humanise a lead or keyboard line by setting a slow, unsynced LFO to very gently modulate the tuning of your synth or sampler – and play the part live, natch!