Photo courtesy of Roomic Cube

November 13, 2010 – We’ve all been there fleshing out a track and thinking “Oh this is the chorus”; Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. It happens in every genre, but especially to independent producers who do everything themselves. After all, if we want another chorus, we just need to clone another one and maybe add some new stuff on top right? Wrong.

Have you ever finished your production and it sounded a little flat. With stellar mixing and careful production, why doesn’t it sound as good as the latest record by so-and-so? The reason is groove. Of course, feeling a groove in traditional instrument music is important because otherwise it ends up sounding like cheap karaoke.

If you listened to the latest Taylor Swift track and it was a copy-paste affair, the production would be so generic that you would naturally tune the song out completely. However, she uses real session musicians who play the song through, even if a part repeats, allowing the nuances of their playing to keep the track interesting.

That’s all very well and good for big budget productions that can afford seasoned Nashville players, but what about the rest of us toiling away in our basements? It’s especially hard when we’re dealing with loops or with sequenced instruments.

Emulating the groove of a live performance is the best way to add interest to your productions. There are two main ways to do this in your home studio, play the instruments all the way through live (not an option for many) or to sequence the instruments and add groove templates.

Growing up, I was very fortunate in that my parents wanted me to be a musician. Over the years I’ve learned how to play enough instruments to be able to record a full session by myself. For those of us who are already instrumentalists, the process of adding groove is pretty easy: just play things all the way through instead of copy and pasting. You should also keep your quantization to a minimum.

This even works for hip hop tracks which may be built strictly with loops, and electronic music. Using a drum machine or a MIDI controller to trigger samples live adds the producer’s own groove. A lot of the most successful hip hop producers use a drum machine to play the samples in live, essentially making the loops an instrument. It doesn’t sound boring because the loops are triggered by a person and not by a square on a grid. For producers like Ninth Wonder, this is the bread and butter behind their soulful beats.

For electronic music, artists like Justice and Daft Punk play their electronic performances live and record them. Some parts may be sequenced, but mostly they are recording a band full of electronic instruments. In Justice’s case, they used Apple’s Garageband which comes free with the computer. I can guarantee you that the ability to add groove after the fact is severely limited.

So what about those who can’t play the parts in live? You can always add the groove of someone else. In most DAW software, there is an option to add a groove template which basically overlays MIDI timing from another person. You can buy the grooves of someone else, or you can sometimes extract it yourself. Then as a quantization option, you can apply that MIDI groove. Ever wanted to get the drum feel of John Bonham? Extract his groove from an old Zepplin track and apply it to your own sequenced drums.

Just the little bits of off-timing will add a whole new dimension to your productions. Your audience might not be able to put their finger on it, but they’ll know there’s a difference between one with live groove and one without.