“You can’t just play a pure electronic sound on its own – there has to be a human element”: Danny L Harle shows how to bring your synth leads to lifeThere’s one piece of advice producer and Dua Lipa collaborator Danny L Harle has when it comes to programming lead synths: find a way to make them sound more human.
Of course, synthesizers by their very nature generally sound more robotic than a more organic instrument like a guitar or grand piano, but if your track’s lead melody is played on a synth, it’s a sense of “uncanny humanity” that helps give it a little magic and bring it to life, Harle says.

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Harle shares the nugget of wisdom in a new episode of the Tape Notes Podcast. “When a synthesizer is playing the lead instrument, you can’t just play a pure electronic sound on its own, or some preset lead synth,” he says.
“[There] has to be some sort of human element to the performance. Otherwise it sounds quite blank and sort of unemotional. And I find tuning is a big part of that.”
Harle then dives into the automation section of a synth lead in Logic Pro, showcasing how he’s manually programmed a series of rapid fluctuations in pitch to give what would otherwise be a robotic lead performance a more human feel.
“There’s something – there are inflections, the ornamentation gives it a sense of an uncanny humanity” he says. “And it’s when there’s that uncanny humanity, but also emotion – for some reason that’s what I want to hear… It’s the sort of inflections you get in a [human] performance. There’s something about that in a mechanical, robotic performance that I just really enjoy.”
Elsewhere in the clip, Danny L Harle touches on the sometimes “controversial” topic of arpeggiators.
“There’s a certain type of producer – and composer as well – that loves arpeggios,” he says.  “Some people see it as a frowned upon thing to use an arpeggiator… And my response to that was that I sometimes do use arpeggiators when necessary.”
Harle demonstrates how he’s taken an arpeggiator and saturated it with reverb, rendering it less a standard arpeggiator and more an ethereal “cloud of sound”.
“That’s the context in which I think arpeggiators are perfectly reasonable to use,” he says, before showcasing how vastly different the audio clip is without the added reverb.
Watch the full Tape Notes clip below:

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