I’m absolutely fascinated by Etsy.

A global
community of creators selling their work
online — for the first time in history, you
have access to an endless range of
personalized and handmade products at
the click of a button. How cool is that? As
humans, we are drawn to the handmade,
the bespoke, the custom fit. 

As electronic music producers, we face a

massive challenge. By using computers to
make our music, we can make perfect
sounds. We can create a perfect saw
wave, have a snare drum that hits the
same way each time, and quantize a
piano performance to be exactly in time.
So how do we use technology to our
advantage while keeping the humanity
alive in our tracks?

One of the most difficult skills I’ve had to

learn is striking the balance between
editing for professionalism and polish
while keeping a line of sight to the
imperfections that actually made my
music better.

To create a handmade, personal feel in

your tracks, you must be intentional about
creating the rightimperfections. In
essence, you are adding human variance
back into the electronic realm of music
creation. Here are 8 techniques to help
you do exactly that.

1. Edit MIDI to Add Imperfection

MIDI editing can make or make your break

your track. You’re looking for the sweet
spot between precision and natural
variance. Many of us will resort to drawing
in MIDI notes at some point during our
composition – just keep in mind that
clicking notes in with a mouse is
inherently unnatural, and your MIDI
performance will show that stiffness
unless you are deliberate about making
the necessary corrections. It takes active
effort to inject the nuances of timing, note
length, and velocity that would occur if a
human were playing the instrument.

When you create MIDI, start by quantizing

to get the performance you want, and then
humanize it. Add slight alterations to the
timings and velocities of each MIDI note
in order to create a more convincing
performance. Also, try to avoid copy and
pasting loops without changing anything.
Small edits to voicings (try inversions),
velocity and timing go a long way to
making the track feel like one continuous
performance instead of a loop stuck on
repeat. It’s really about taking a two-step
process to ensure you’re adding life back
into the MIDI. Ask yourself 1) “Have I
introduced human velocity and timing into
this” and 2) “How can this loop different
than the others?”

Certain elements require careful

humanization – our ears are especially
attune to the ebb and flow of acoustic
instruments like pianos, strings, and hi-
hats. Since low-end instruments serve as
an anchor in most electronic genres, you’ll
make life easier for yourself by keeping
your kick drum and sub bass at consistent
levels and snapped to the grid.

2. Use White Noise

White noise is immediately reminiscent of

analog gear and acoustic sounds. Adding
in some tasteful white noise can make an
enormous difference in taking a sound
from digital and brittle to real and full.
Many analog-style plugins like the
Soundtoys Radiator and the Waves Abbey
Road Vinyl add analog-style white noise to
a sound. The AudioThing Vinyl Strip takes
it a level further and allows you to get lo-fi
with turntable style compression, sample
rate reduction, and distortion.

There are two main ways to introduce

white noise: by using a noise generator
(like Credland Audio’s Pink), or high quality
samples. The Hyperbits Sample
Packincludes a collection of organic vinyl
noise samples that I find myself using in
nearly every track.

3. Embrace the Art of Recording

You can make some great sounding

music with sample libraries, VSTs, and
virtual instruments. But you’ll be missing
something, and you won’t know what until
you start recording your own audio.

If you have the means to record an

instrument that fits your song, do it! It will
make you a better recording and mixing
engineer. Even if you don’t play one
yourself, grab a friend who does and
collaborate.

One important consideration when

working with recording audio….you’re
coming from the opposite end of the
humanization spectrum compared to
perfectly quantized MIDI. Your edits are
not to add imperfection, but to clean up
and polish the track while retaining only
the most groovy imperfections. In other
words, you’re going for the same end-
result (human performance with swing
and feel), but editing the performance to
be tighter instead of introducing
imperfection.

There will be low-end rumble, so you’ll

want to cut the sub frequencies
somewhere between 100 – 150 Hz. You
almost certainly need a
little compression, and chances are your
track will benefit from pitch and timing
correction. Just don’t overdo it.

One thing I love about recording my own

samples is that you instantly feel more
connected with the track. Even including
an iPhone field recording as a background
layer will make you connect with your
music in a new way.

4. Field Recordings

Field recordings are one of my favorite

ways to make a track unique. There is no
better way to create a sonic space that
feels like it’s in the real world than by
injecting a bit of the real world into your
tracks. Grab a field recorder and take
some extended recordings (at least one
minute long) of the world around you. Try
to avoid recordings which have anything
too tonal — for example, a coffee shop
where music is playing — and instead look
for interesting, ambient soundscapes. The
sounds of runners on a running trail, the
subdued murmur in a museum lobby, the
sound of a trickling stream… These types
of textures add interesting movement and
real-life unpredictability to a song.
Field recordings are best when melted
into your existing soundscape and kept
low in the mix. You can trim a ton of fat
off the lows, and pushing down the
presence with a high shelf will help the
space feel further away and more natural.
Mix field recordings at a level where if you
mute them, you notice the absence, but
when they are present, a listener (at first)
couldn’t pick out that they are there.

5. Use an Analog Synth (or a Real

Instrument)

The analog vs digital debate is one we’ve

all heard before. Analog and digital synths
have their own pros and cons, but one of
the major benefits of using an analog
synth is the imperfections that come with
it. How long has the synth been turned
on? How stable is the power source? How
good are your cables, interface, and
preamps? All of this will change the sound
you get from an analog synth, and the
sound itself will have movement and
imperfections no matter what.

Analog gear will add the right types of

variance and imperfection to your music.
You can also develop a philosophy for
using digital synths in a similar fashion.

Don’t have access to an analog synth?

Buy a cheap, old instrument and start
messing around. Here are a bunch of my
favorite ideas (as well as me playing
guitar indoors with a scarf when I lived in
Brooklyn, just for good measure):

Weird Tonal Atmosphere

Record a random lead to your chord
progression (don’t overthink this), reverse
all the notes, chop it up, create a new
melody, add a ton of reverb, delay, etc. and
you’ve just written a weird tonal
atmosphere which can create a ton of
tension, width, and interest in an
otherwise mundane production.Ring Out
Some Chords
More isn’t always more. Try playing the
chord progression of your track and just
ring out the chords on the down beat.
Record separately for the left and right
side of your speaker for stereo
differences. Compress fairly heavily. This
can add life and color to a stagnant and
digital sounding track. Try reversing the
chords for some extra fun.
Play The Root Note
Just take an instrument and play the root
note of your track. You now have a very
analogue base for additional tension and
space in your track. Add reverb, weird
delays, distortions, experiment with FX
bundles like Sound Toys, and chop up and
loop a pad that no one else in the world
now has except for you.
Slow or Speed Up a Performance
Let’s pretend your track is in 120 BPM –
what happens if you slow it down to 90
BPM and record some guitar? What
happens if you speed it up to 150 BPM?
What you might find is that a new tempo
inspires all sorts of new melodies and
variations – and then the best part –
revert the new performance back to the
original BPM. Sometimes this can sound
really cool. Sometimes it just sucks, but
hey, it’s all about experimentation. 
Guitar Bends
Nothing is going to sound as organic and
real as a natural pitch bend with an
instrument – guitar, bass, sax, whatever –
record a pitch bend that resolves in the
root note of your track, distort it, warp it,
add crazy experimental delays – these will
act as AMAZING and unique transitionary
elements to place at the end of an 8 bar
loop or to enter a new section of the song.

6. Design Imperfect Sounds

These are the most effective ways to give

your software synth patches the type of
analog warmth hardware imparts
naturally:

Use random LFOs. For each sound, take a

few LFOs that oscillate at random rates
and assign them to parameters you want
to move over time. Start with the filter
cutoff, oscillator shape, individual
oscillator volumes, and any sort of FX
(saturation, modulation, etc). Keep it
subtle – you want this to be just barely
under the threshold of noticeable. Start
with each LFO affecting the target
parameter by 3-5%, and your synth sound
will immediately have analog-style
movement.Turn on the noise generator.
Most synths make it easy to dial in a bit of
white noise to emulate the hum of a synth
and the noise picked up by real-life
cabling. I’ve found that this works best
when the noise oscillator shares the same
ADSR envelope as the main sound.Detune
your oscillators slightly. Analog synths
have a natural tendency to pitch drift by
small amounts (1-3 cents). LFOs also
work to introduce a natural-sounding drift
to the oscillator fine tuning.

Note: Any of these moves on their own

won’t make-or-break your track, but a few
on each layer will add up to a final mix
with tasteful imperfections.

7. Introduce Movement and Automation

After sound design, employ a few

strategies for movement to bring your
music to life. This helps minimize the
stagnant nature of “perfect” electronic
sounds.

Panning modulations — grab a tremolo (or

the Soundtoys Panman) plugin and add
some random panning movement to your
sounds. Look for 10-20% movement at a
rate that isn’t synced with the tempo of
the track.Volume modulation — similar
concept as above, this will introduce
slight changes in the volumes of certain
sounds. Avoid doing this on major
elements in your track (vocals, leads,
bass), but definitely make use of this on
supporting layers, atmospheres, and FX.
Look for ~10% volume change using
either a tremolo with the L/R phase set to
0 degrees, or use the Soundtoys
Tremolator.

Be careful with this sort of movement,

though — movement on every sound will
make your mix feel cluttered and
unstable.

8. “Live” Automation

The greatest advantage of real instrument

and analog synths is being able
to play them.

Here are a few ways you can up your

interaction with software instruments:

MIDI map a few important parameters of

your soft synth (filter cutoff, resonance,
envelope parameters) to knobs or faders
on your MIDI controller.Set your track
to Write automation — when you click play
the next time, any movements you make
on your MIDI controller will be recorded
for your synth automation.Click play and
jam away. (Careful though, this will
overwrite all previous automation on the
selected track!)When you are done, set
your automation back to Read mode, and
your automation movements will be
saved.