Piano and Velocity

[SimonT]

What would people do here? If you played/recorded some piano into your DAW, would you level off or even the velocities or leave them as they were for a more human feel?
Would it differ it were a house or an electronic track say, than that of say - indie?
Is there any tricks people use here to make it sound human, but at the same time, has a pattern to it?

 

[scrapheaper]

You have to imagine how you want the riff to sound, then give the notes which are emphasised higher velocity.

 

[Yumid]

Ironically, the best way to give it a human element is to edit in the human element, even more so than just leaving it in as if you played it, obviously thats very situational too. you can just leave it but usually you can always find a couple notes to edit.

Close your eyes and picture playing the piano(or drums whatever), you should be able to tell which notes you hit harder or press down on harder. In drums for example on a snare fill, most programmers would put the first note down and gradually get higher and higher with each note until the end of the fill. But picture a drummer, one strong hand and one weak hand. The first strong hand hit is going to be more then the next few hits even. When editing velocity visualize how you would be making the hits/notes if you were actually playing. Not by what makes most sense theoretically, because if you were making a fill, in theory it make sense to go from lowest to highest. But as i just explained thats not the case.

 

[bandcoach]

without audio I have no ideas what I would do

I certainly would not just edit to fix weaknesses or limit strong notes without considering the overall issues first

there used to be some processes called "midi compression" which, similar to an audio compressor, would transform the velocities if they exceeded a threshold level - if you have a programmable editor for midi data you can still create your own "midi compressor" patches to apply as you need

beyond that each situation requires its own solution

 

[INVERSOUND]

you want the human feel. that's what gives it emotion.

 

[njm255]

I play the piano in and leave the velocities as they are. Always sounds the way I want it to.

 

[JRNova]

What I usually do is play the piano piece and quantize it after I record it, but I leave all the velocities the way they were when I played for that "real feel", then boost the velocities of a note or 2 here and there that need it.

But there are times when I don't even quantize and just leave it how it is if I felt it was a good performance or if its the intro or outro of a song.

It all really just depends on what you think sounds good.