I was watching the latest installment of ITL with Dave Pensado and in it he talks about humanizing digital tracks and`how applying randomness to volume e.g. can be a good way to achieve that. He said that much DAWs have got a specific tool to do this but this doesn’t excist in Cubase does it?
If it doesn’t, it is probably a downloadable tool. My take on it though is that it is still a “machine” driven tool so the best way to achieve the human touch is to not quantize timing or volume. The only way that makes this difficult is step recording which will make you have to create a human touch manually. That will get you closer but it’s not natural.
This is a little different, it’s a tool just like the sine or parabola shaped curve tool, but instead creates a random automation curve. pretty cool and no, nothing of that sort in cubendo although maybe with some logical editor randomize trickery working on cc lane data, subsequently converted into automation data, could work. probably so user unfriendly though that it wouldnt be worth it…
I understand it may be a different technology but as you pointed out, it creates a random automation curve. Human touch is not random, it’s musical. Of course, I’m assuming that this theme is about humanizing musical tracks that have been originally recorded by a human even though it is on a digital recorder and may be with a digital midi instrument/sampler.
Therefore, I’m thinking the only reason a humanizer is needed is because the track had been rigidly quantized or step recorded.
The most usable tool for humanizing within Cubase is probably in the quantizization function. It is called “Part To Groove”. With this function, you can extract the groove from a selected MIDI or audio part and turn that groove into a preset. You can then use this preset as you would any other quantize function to apply that groove to any part of any MIDI track.
This of course would be a time quantizing rather than a volume.
yeah, but that’s a different topic, really. the use for this would be for instance to ever so slightly automate the cutoff of a filter on an instrument in say a ± 5 Hz range using the random curve to introduce slight sonic variation akin to what OTB processing would yield (‘mimic the mistakes’).
groove quantization and extracting groove patterns is useful, but as such unrelated to this topic.
I see what your saying and that is a cool concept and def more versitile than quantizing or groove extraction.
But seeing as the OP asked if this concept was available in Cubase, and it isn’t, then what I was suggesting is the closest alternative that is available in Cubase. I realize that it’s a different animal than ITL.