Getting a faster attack sound from instruments without resorting to stacatto

cbx33

I've noticed that many of my lead lines often sound a little delayed in comparison to what I was expecting, is there a way to get a faster attack on longer notes?

Retroblueman

Think I have seen somewhere on this forum that there's a way to program certain DAWs to get the midi to play ahead of the beat for a whole track so the notes aren't "delayed". Alternatively, my considerably less sophisticated method is to turn off "snap" and drag the midi notes slightly (possibly just a couple of milliseconds) to the left until they land where your ear wants them to be (I'll usually put the section in question on a loop and experiment). Possibly interesting fact- I understand Deadmau5 does this with his snare hits so they slightly anticipate the third beat of the bar.

Retroblueman

PS - just reminded myself we are in the company of giants with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDJeo67LqWA&t=2s

(see 1:30:15ish onwards and particularly 1:34:04: )

Taron

Yeah, I also am still struggling with timing legato nicely. It's so tricky. I'm always nudging notes without snap, simply because the legato won't quite have a consistent offset for the "meat" of the note, so to say, for a number of good reasons. Since velocity will allow you to switch transitions, you can't have any quantized lines that way, for example. Currently I'm running a metronome for each line to move notes until they sit right. It's a little painful and makes me question my approach quite a bit. However, it sounds beautiful, yay! I wonder, if there is some sort of concrete information about either the delay of the notes/transitions or some way to adjust it, similar to tightness?

Anyway, I'll be watching this thread...🤓

Taron

Hahahaha, definitely emotionally helpful! 🤣 Thank you! 👍️

cbx33

Yeh- I'm thinking about using the freeze feature so I can see the waveforms and then from that can see which notes to drag back and by how much. We'll see how successful I am.

Francisco

In Cubase there's a feature called "delay compensation" which you can set a number of milliseconds so the DAW reproduces the VST that number ahead or behind. I know that there are anothers DAW which have similar features.

This "negative track delay database" might be helpfull: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/negative-track-delay-database-spreadsheet.105332/

cbx33

The problem is I don't think I want the pizz delayed