Add some dirt into your music

Okay I know this title sounds funny. But I’m serious. Throw some dirt on your computer as you’re making music … okay. No don’t do that.

But what I mean is add some grime to it. It doesn’t need to be super pristine playing to be useful and to sound good. Rick Beato has a video about “perfect music” where he talks about everything being quantized. I listen to a lot of electronic music, so I definitely hear my fair share of perfectly quantized music.

But if I’m making my own music I don’t perfectly quantize everything. I want it to sound natural and like a human made it. So often I’ll play it in myself and adjust it.

Or if I’m playing an instrument on something I won’t edit out some of the “mistakes.” If there’s some slight noise from the guitar or some slightly sloppy playing on piano I’ll leave it in.

Now of course this needs to be done with a lot of discretion because you want to get the desired result. If there’s too much slop then it’ll just sound like a poor performance. But if you’re playing electronic instruments then the tuning will already be absolutely perfect (unless you adjust it) so then maybe having some notes that aren’t perfectly quantized can add some humanity to your music.

This is one of the reasons why I haven’t been a fan of guitar sample libraries a lot of the time. They sound too good. There isn’t enough slop in the playing for them to sound realistic. If you’re playing guitar, no matter how good your are, there’s going to be some extra noise. Maybe that’s string sounds. Maybe that’s the sound of the pick attacking the string. Maybe it’s in between chords where you have some tiny amounts of noise. Stuff like that is exactly what makes it sound human. And without it, it sounds robotic.

You can notice this with string libraries too. A string library will sound like a perfect string section, but that doesn’t sound real … because it’s not real. No matter how good every single player in that string section is, they’ll never start at exactly the same time. They’ll start close enough together where it sounds like one group, but they won’t be exactly to the millisecond starting at the same time. This goes for intonation too. They won’t be playing exactly 440Hz.

And you don’t want them to be doing that. Because then they’ll sound like violin playing robots. They won’t sound human.

You want them to sound human. That’s one thing that’s so enjoyable and emotional about music is that it IS human.

So then if you’re creating music, add some dirt into it to make it sound more human.

Here are a few ideas I like to use:

• Play everything in
• Play a real instrument on it, even if it’s a shaker
• If you have an electric piano use a sound from there and record it
• Record “room noise” yourself and add it in
• Add a sample that you’ve recorded yourself … yes even if it was recorded on a phone
• Sing a line and layer that in
• Use your phone to record something, but lower the volume a little bit so it’s not front and center
• With strings – add multiple layers
  • Record yourself on violin. Even if you’re bad the noise of the bow will help.
  • Use a second sample library and play that in a second time so that you have two different attacks and two sets of mod wheel data
  • Layer in a cheap string patch
  • Record each section separately – violins are on one track, violas another, cellos yet another, basses another

I hope that helps you create some more realistic and more human music.

ISJ