Nobody is ever dead on the beat consistantly.
If it were, it would sound mechanical and lifeless by comparison, in some ways like a piano with only one string in the mid and upper regiters would sound devoid of the sonic variety of summation and difference tones produced by strings that are not in perfect tuning synchonosis.
In the studio, I once played some very fast shred lines with a synthed guitar sound. The engineer was struck by the speed of execution, and as a keyboardist himself, asked me a few questions about the unconventional fingering of reproducing the guitar-like lines on the keyboard.
I was using what my mentor calls a "10 finger hand" technique. That is, the hands either locked together side by side or one over the other, any of the 10 fingers used more like a sax player does in sequentially producing the lines, eliminating the need for finger crossovers.
He played it back severl times and slowed it down as well to better hear the individual notes.
He also did one other thing. Qunatization. That is, he electronically altered the midi (input) so that each note was perfectly partitioned in its intended placment, eithe on the beat or a fraction of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, etc., etc.. In a bar of 32nd notes, 64th notes, etc., it will perfectly partion, subdividing the beat, shifting each successive note directly to the precise 32nd or 64th. Like binary code. It perfectly aligned what I had played into equal subdivisions of each beat and when shifted it, or quantized it, the character of the lines sounded nothing like the original. In fact, it sounded like a sequencer, with the give and take and character of the notes' placements eliminated.
Last edited by BJones; 03/09/09 05:56 PM.