Drum machines are notoriously mechanical sounding and it is very hard to simulate the dynamics and randomness of a human drummer. I just discovered a little trick in Live 8 for creating some humanization in your drum rack. Put a random velocity filter in front of your rack that intercepts velocity coming from in my case the sequencer in the SevenUpLive monome app. SevenUpLive only has 2 fixed velocities of light and hard. By putting this filter in, I can inject random changes to velocity, and even gate notes that are below and above a certain range, plus move the dynamics of the whole thing up and down. Here's a track and video where I do just that. The Lemur controls the humanization module as I call it.


Gleetched from barnone on Vimeo.