It's easy to take one of the greatest drummer's performances, quantize things, make it worse, and say "quantization sucks the soul out of music."
But what about the non-greatest drummers? The other 99.9% (or higher) of musicians who are tiers below Bonham? Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
Does it bother you that the drumline consists of two bars recorded on a synthesizer and then repeated over and over again with inhuman, flawless precision for the entire duration of the song?
Recorded on a synthesizer/loop machine by a person imperfectly hitting the pads, then repeated while two humans imperfectly sing and play instruments with the backing drum loop. It's not the same thing at all.
A lot of electronic music is also someone sitting on a loop machine and "playing" their samples.
One of my absolute favorite bands is a random street band I stumbled across in New Orleans some years ago, called Yes Ma'am. They had one album at the time, and it is... let's call it "loose". They must have been half in the bag when recording it.
Their subsequent albums got progressively more polished. Still have the street band energy, but they obviously put a lot more effort into the production.
My favorite album BY FAR is the first one. It's just FUN!
You do not need to be the greatest musician to make great music.
It’s just cheaper. It has nothing to do with it being more listenable. Same with auto tune. It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings. It doesn’t improve the music.
How about a situation where you're recording a song with your buds/bandmates and the drummer played a few notes out-of-time or singer didn't quite sing that long note in tune. You're not going to hire anybody to replace what they did. You can have your buds come back and try and try until they get something to your standard or tell them that they're bad musicians and need to study and practice for more years and years before they dare want to record a song again (purist). Or You can just live with the bad ("shitty is pretty"). Or you could hire someone to come in and replace their parts. Or you could just take a few minutes to fix it in cubase.
To me, the central question is: is this about the composition or the performance? Personally, I spent my university time getting a degree in music composition, so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better. But I could understand if other people feel differently (they are a purist or very performance-oriented).
I mean, there's a difference between nudging a few notes right and just running quantize over the entire recording.
> so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better.
Which also means you might even move things out of sync/tune if the composition asked for it, right? The point mentioned here is just the trend of lazy fully gridded mixes where the entire song is the exact bpm all the way through and nothing strays off the grid.
It's cheaper to do what? The thing they're getting for less money is precisely the improved quality or listenability. Their definitions of quality and good enough might be fucked up, but the intent and purpose is clearly to improve it up to some minimal level of quality, otherwise how are they judging a mediocre vs. great singer? How do they know when the great singer is done singing (sang a good enough take), or when they've tweaked the mediocre vocal track enough? The technological interventions change the ratio of cost vs. quality, they don't make quality irrelevant. If they did, you could just record the crappy singer as-is and save even more money.
This post's point is that musical "quality" is not a unidimensional feature and that mechanically optimizing for these "quality" metrics can kill something interesting in music.
Yes I get it, and I'm not replying to the post. I'm replying to the comment that said it was all about saving money and "has nothing to do with it being more listenable." Clearly that can't be true; these producers are trying for some standard of listenability (which I already said could be wrongheaded, to your point). If they weren't, they would not only save money by hiring mediocre talent, they would also save even more money by not doing any post-production interventions at all.
> It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings.
I think you're on to something, but it isn't quite what you think it is.
Corrections are largely a cost issue. But not because singers are so expensive.
The costs being saved are related to the rarity of finding someone who is a great singer at the same time that they're also a great dancer and stunningly attractive. It's much easier to find someone who's an outlier on one dimension than someone who's an outlier on two. If you want someone who is extreme on three dimensions (that you specify in advance), you probably won't be able to find that person at all.
Corrections in production mean that you can achieve something like this:
- Beauty: extreme natural talent, plus help from consultants, stylists, makeup artists, etc
- Dance: about what an average person can achieve through intensive training
- Vocals: extreme machine-supplied talent
at low cost. There are other possible approaches. You could look for a great singer who's willing to have tons of plastic surgery. You could look for a great dancer who's willing to have their singing and physical appearance 'corrected' for a trifecta. I don't actually think either of those would make for a cultural improvement - to the extent that we aren't already doing them - compared to what we have now.
This is a strange argument. It's not like there was a huge unfulfilled demand for good musicians before quantization / autotune.
I don't think anyone is saying music should all be recorded "raw" without any post-production. The argument is that the workflows used by most big record producers today encourages "sanding away all of the edges" of music, thru quantization, pitch correction, comping etc.
I'd argue that's only one problem (algorithmic music discovery, and how that removes gatekeeping and incentivizes bland "genre" music being a far bigger one). But the two go hand-in-hand. Lower barrier to entry (of "listenability") + lower barrier to distribution = a music landscape dominated by bland, samey bands.
Being consistent, playing in time, and executing your parts is baseline competency for any serious player. At least it was. You don’t have to be a great player to attain those abilities.
I’m not saying players have to be metronome-locked like a drum machine. Pulling/pushing the click is fine.
>It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
How is that a good thing?
Humans have limited attention and time, so most of us don't like to waste them on bad things. Human artistic history is suvivorship in practice. The best things rise to the top and are kept, and the worst fall away. This is a natural mechanism that produces a shared culture of good things. When everything is good, nothing is, which is exactly the place we find ourselves now.
Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Our culture celebrates mediocrity because we're afraid of the implications that certain people are naturally better than others. The result is we have no more heroes or aspirations, and computers can fix lack of talent and lack of effort at improvement.
Yeah. If you can’t do something that’s fine. I draw as a hobby but I suck at it. When I see some of the pre-post autotune performances I can’t feel that people are just feeling entitled to a paycheck.
> Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
It also gives musicians a false sense of skill if the producer just gives thumbs up and all they hear back is their own quantized drums. Instead of, you know, practicing and actually nailing the beat.
If all you do is quantize it to the grid, why even bother setting up a drumkit to record. We all know those hits are being sample replaced anyway, might as well just pull up the midi kit.
But what about the non-greatest drummers? The other 99.9% (or higher) of musicians who are tiers below Bonham? Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.