Comment by bitsinthesky
4 hours ago
When I was in high school our amateur jazz band went into a recording studio to make a fun keepsake album. My memory is fairly hazy, but the whole experience was a lot of fun! Everybody got their microphones and a headset. Maybe we recorded by sections and likely with a metronome track.
When we finished we got to go watch the sound guys at work. They meticulously gridified and autotuned every note. After it was all over I got the cd, I listened to my favorite tracks that I got to spend the semester playing with my friends, and it had no resemblance to what I knew our group to be. I think I threw the album away.
When I've talked to people about modern music in the past, it's only ever people who play music, or who have an intense interest in it, that seem to even be aware that the vast majority of modern music is autotuned (and "gridified" as this author puts it).
You hear but you don't recognize it. Rick Beato has a clip where he takes Jogn Bonham's drums from Led Zeppelin and gridifies them. As a non-musician, I can feel the soul being sucked out of the song in the process.
I dont know if there's a longer version of this video, but I looked it up.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/C9h9xpNOoEN/
1 reply →
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.
7 replies →
Lack of awareness does not mean that it doesn't impact how the music is received. Non-musician not having the knowledge and skills for analysis does not mean it makes no difference to them.
It's like a non-cook not realising the role of MSG in a dish: despite the lack of awareness, they wouldn't enjoy the dish as much without the MSG
To jump on that analogy: Try telling normal people that all (almost all?) restaurant food uses loads of salt. They will tell you "That's fine; I don't want bland food!"
Man fuck that. Audio engineers lost their minds snapping all these live performances. One thing to make dance music on the grid but a live high school band?
As the “exception that proves the rule”, there’s a fair bit of dance music that intentionally goes off grid to either build tension or sound more organic. There are even entire subgenres dedicated to sampling more acoustic and traditional instruments (usually percussion) while embracing underengineered sound.
Yeah, especially for a high school band. I'm sure budget was limited and they probably didn't have time for retakes. Playing to a click isn't easy, and playing to backing tracks not perfectly in time with a click is even harder. These are high school kids and professionals will tell you this isn't easy. Given that they probably didn't have time to go through and manually clean things up, you snap it to a grid so it doesn't sound like a mess.