Recording MIDI at half speed for realism?

[Plendakor]

Do you guys record your tracks with a MIDI keyboard ?
I don't, I compose everything in a very formatted, square and quantized environment.
But I'm taking a look at those .mid I imported and I'm thinking, do I really want to adjust velocities/create timing imperfections/etc with the damn mouse ?

I can compose piano/orchestration stuff but can't play it so I'm wondering if playing it, even if 4 times slower, would be fine once I set the project back to the original tempo. If the velocities played slower will still sound fine and all.

Can't do it now so that's why I post here instead of doing it heheeh

 

[Trevoire520]

Sounds like a good idea actually.

 

[ze kink]

Yeah, I record with a midi keyboard. I don't do half speed, but I often record the left and right hand separately, and then merge those.

I've actually managed to "accidentally" learn some basic keyboard skills, and got into playing piano for fun through recording midi.

 

[Brender500]

If you are using a reaper as your daw, in the settings of the piano roll it has and option to humanize the midi by randomizing velocity and timing in a certain range by how ever much you want.

 

[anotherpaul]

I couldn't play keyboard if my life depended on it so I do MIDI overdub playing chords note by note.

 

[Nimvi]

Keep in mind that musicians usually have a certain "swing" in their personal beat when playing an instrument. This swing is influenced by many factors; BPM not withstanding. As far as I am aware, this swing doesn't literally scale with speed, as in, the swing on a 180 BPM track isn't necessarily twice as fast as that of a 90 bpm track.

So yea, slow recording is probably still going to sound more natural than filling it in by hand or humanizing through computer, but it may still feel a bit off when you bring it up to standard speed.