When you play a keyboard (or piano), the way you strike the key determines how it will sound. When you strike a key, you can wiggle it left and right to add vibrato, or slide it up and down to change volume and other effects. The Osmose, made by Expressive E, is such a cool concept: Take a traditional keyboard, and add two more degrees of movement to it. Your software records these movements to control velocity, volume, pitch bend, expression, and/or dynamics. These devices have been engineered to capture natural movements as musical expression. They can be broken down into two categories: The new midi controllers move beyond traditional tools. These days there is a new crop of midi controllers that enable completely new ways of adding expression to your music. M-Audio Code 49 keyboard with faders and pads Through in a piece of gear with some faders and maybe some drum pads, and you’re set, right? Even if you’re not a gifted pianist, your work will go much faster with a keyboard. And some non-traditional controllers (check out the Akai Fire for FL Studio).īy far, the most common midi controllers for film composers are keyboards. We’ve already written about some traditional midi controllers (check it out here: The Best Small Midi Controllers). Like basic notes, expression and dynamics are more easily recorded with some sort of hardware in realtime. Usually called expression and/or dynamics, these are additional parameters that can be programmed. You can change the velocity of notes, shift things slightly so they don’t perfectly align, and program changes in overall tempo, among others.Īdvanced virtual instrument plugins layer different samples on top of each other, and will play different sounds based on input. There are all kinds of ways to humanize programmed music. But when music is too perfect, it’s a dead giveaway that it was made in a computer. Software is designed to make music perfectly in tempo, perfectly in tune, and the precise volume you want. A slight slow down, emphasis on certain notes in a chord, rushing the downbeat, etc. All of this gear talks to your DAW with the MIDI protocol, hence the name midi controllers.Īll of this is to say, you can plug a keyboard into your computer and just play the notes into your software rather than having to individually program each note.Īrguably, this “humanizes” computer-based music production because of all the imperfections that enter into it when an actual human is performing. Think keyboards, drum machines, mixing consoles. Traditionally, these have been based off of existing pieces of music production gear. The easier way to do this is with a “human-user-interface” or HUI: a piece of hardware that controls the software. And if you want to play with variations, you’re back in the editor, dragging things around, manually adjusting each parameter. When you’ve got a musical idea and need to write it down quickly, this isn’t the easiest way to do it. You’re adding notes one at a time, clicking around to painstakingly change the pitch, duration, and velocity of each sound. (note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)Ĭomposing music inside a software environment can be frustrating. A new generation of devices promises to add even more expressiveness to your film scores. Midi controllers are the fastest way to write music and program automation in your DAW software.
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