Comment by jimmis

Pfft - this doesn't make a general point about quantisation - he completely altered the drum part. He didn't just shift things by minute amounts to hit the "exact" timing while maintaining the swing. Of course if you remove swing then it's completely changed - it could also be quantized while maintaining swing.

Music before quantization:

                soul | soulless
    listenable ______|_________
  unlistenable       |

Music after quantization:

                     | soulless
    listenable       |_________

Hmm, this “net improvement” of yours seems to have obliterated some important categories. I don’t think I care for it.

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.

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.

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.

>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.