Ableton Forum

Iv noticed when I free style something on my midi keyboard and decide that I like it, I will then try to manually enter those notes in the piano roll and it sounds 100% different, tone and velocity. What I am doing wrong... I have to literally record it live manually via MIDI keyboard to retain the sound I want...

When manually entering notes, you have to manually specify the velocity

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/editi ... elocities/

It's easy to forget that "velocity" simulates the speed at which the instrument is struck, plucked, or hit. This means that it not only affects the volume of the note, but also its tone. Smack your hand on your desktop, softly and then hard, and you will notice the difference in the sound itself, not just how load it is.

So when you "free style" on your keyboard, you're playing naturally with all the human imperfections (i.e. different velocities) that make a melody sound natural. In contrast, drawing notes on the piano roll gives every note identical velocity (default is 100, I believe). So all the "human-ness" is missing, and you'll notice an almost monotonous volume and tone when compared to what you played on your own.

You can change the velocities of individual notes on the piano roll or even add a MIDI plugin that will add some randomness, but it will take a lot of time and talent to massage that piano roll sketch into something that sounds like what you played.

The MIDI handles in 9 make it quite easy to, say, conform a phrase to a bar while keeping any expressive timing present so you may be best off playing it in then editing the timing to tighten it up if necessary rather then trying to capture all that expression using velocity editing. If that makes sense.

It may not just be velocity either. Things like glide and polyphony may also change depending on when you naturally lift off the keyboard and whether notes overlap. If you're pencilling notes in you may need to take that into account.

Yeah I noticed after the fact that the velocity from the MIDI device was extremely adverse to what the natural input via drawing the notes in. I just had no idea that tone could be effected so severely. Thanks for the responses.