Do you use a MIDI keyboard?

L

ls2013

New member
I can play the piano however I find it difficult recording some tracks using a midi keyboard. For example if I am composing something that has an instrument like a saxophone, I load the saxophone sample and try to record a track using my keyboard but it sounds too much like it is being played on a keyboard.
I have seen people who make really good compositions using a keyboard and they can make every instrument sound how it is supposed to. They can play a marimba like a marimba, a saxophone like a saxophone, an electric guitar like an electric guitar, the drums like drums etc
I can make the instruments sound like they are supposed to if I click in the notes but this takes way too long.

I have a few questions:

Do any of you use a midi keyboard to record every track?

Do you play the whole melody in one go or split it into parts?

Do you practice what you play before you play it or play it straight away and get it right the 1st time?

Also how can I improve playing instruments how they are supposed to?
 
practice, practice, practice

playing a saxophone is about breath control as much as it is about individual notes

playing a violin is about bow control and bow attack choice

playing brass is about breath control and knowing what notes can be moved to easily from where you currently are (e.g. a trumpet or any other brass instrument consists of a set of tubes that essentially give you access to 6 dominant 7th chords (even though there are 7 valve combination 2 of them are the same - you choose one of them to be more in tune depending on what notes you are trying to get))

i.e. when you are trying to emulate an instrument on a keyboard you have to think in terms not only of the notes but also how long can I play a series of notes before I will run out of breath or bow...... only way to do that well is to practice
 
If you're emulating an instrument like a harp or something that plays 16th or 32nd notes do you still play it out with no mistakes and with the desired velocity for each note?
 
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Also, some virtual instruments will never cut it to reach the real thing. For saxophone, trumpet (various brass and woodwinds), samplemodeling.com has some pretty good vst, but expensive. I haven't found anything that comes as close as that. All other saxophone vsts just sound crappy or they just have to be samples, but then you can't really play it like the real instrument and have control over the breath, vibrato, etc.
Sometimes, you'll just have to make do.
 
ls2013 said:
If you're emulating an instrument like a harp or something that plays 16th or 32nd notes do you still play it out with no mistakes and with the desired velocity for each note?
Click to expand...

an orchestral harp is a unique beast in that is tuned in such a way that you can only have one of each the following notes per octave

Cb/C/C#
Db/D/D#
Eb/E/E#
Fb/F/F#
Gb/G/G#
Ab/A/A#
Bb/B/B#

i.e. it is tuned to the required scale to play. This means that you can actually tune it to specific chords as well because Cb=B, B#=C, C#=Db, D#=Eb, E=Fb, E#=F, F#=Gb, G#=Ab

so for example you want to play an E major arpeggio

your tuning is Cb, no D, E, Fb, G#, Ab, B

make that a dominant 7th chord and it is Cb, D, E, Fb, G#, Ab, B

make that major 7th chord and it is Cb, D#, E, Fb, G#, Ab, B

make that minor 7th chord and that is Cb, D, E, Fb, G, no A, B

and so on

as for playing it out do your best as always to get what you want, if it doesn't quite take investigate whether it is case of needing to play it all again or if you can just edit some things
 
If you use fl studio you can use the quantize option in the piano roll , you also have alot of presets for quantize wich will help make it sound better and more natural . I also have the same problem when recording melody but once i quantize everything and adjust the velocity/panning it sound way better and cant really know i made it with a keyboard , same for the drum.

Hope it help
 
I usually end up quantizing every note and also the velocity and note length depending on the instrument. But for some instruments the point of playing it out on a keyboard is to easily emulate the instrument you are using. So quantizing it will make it too obvious it was played out on a keyboard.
 
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