Composing Film Music Tips: Imperfection

I’m continuing this series of tips for composing music with a post about imperfection.

I’ve been trawling through the ol’ music back catalogue to add to the new Music Store. It’s been a real trip down memory lane, listening to tracks I created when fresh out of music college.

(Edit: As of August 2010 the Music Store exists no longer! Instead, head over to Premiumbeat to get your mits on some tunes.)

In listening to these tracks with some of my earlier efforts with midi, sampling, recorded acoustic sounds and synthetic effects, it drew to my attention something which I thought might be useful to write about today: the imperfections in the pieces made them sound better than others that were spot on perfectly quantized, autotuned and aligned. A hit out of time by a few ticks here, a note slightly out-of-tune there… it made it feel more human.

This is actually quite an obvious statement – but is sometimes neglected as a particularly straightforward way to reduce that computery, quantized, precise feel that music created on a sequencer with midi and synths can often have.

The fact is that human beings aren’t perfect, and even the most able performer will slip on occasion. Whilst in performance these occasions are seen as mistakes, to be eliminated by further practice and improved technique, in music created mostly with a sequencer, slips fool the ear into believing a human being is playing. A human being with emotions; emotions thus more effectively conveyed by the music.

When you can’t see the performer, a too-precise performance sounds more computerised… almost robotic. There’s a coldness, a head-heart detachment that exudes from a piece played perfectly. The audience’s mind may interpret this as an intellectual distance created between performer and performance. An absence of emotion.

In composing film music especially, music’s primary function is to convey human emotion.

Anything you can do to put that more implicitly into your film music can’t be a bad thing.

So de-quantize, mis-align parts, vary velocities, detune parts, record samples a little off-key as well as spot on in-tune and tracklay them together.