Comment by coldtea
4 hours ago
>The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer
One could say modern music is not "musical performances" then. A sequencer or drum maching playing isn't "a performance", it's a programmed loop.
>Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human?
Yes.
Drum machines are instruments. Even if sequenced, drum machines are live instruments and they require skill. It requires time to master. It's not only "programmed loop".
When I play the drum machine, I program it live. I never play the same thing twice. It IS a performance. It applies for both vintage drum machines (such as E-mu drumulator or tr808) and new gen ones or grooveboxes (such as Electribes or Octatracks).
>Drum machines are instruments. Even if sequenced, drum machines are live instruments and they require skill.
Only if played live via it's pads or hooked to MIDI drum triggers.
If it's sequenced from some computer program like Logic or through step input, then it's not used as a "live instrument".
>I never play the same thing twice
99% of tracks however do. Are we discussing what rarely happens, or what's the most typical case in pop music, what TFA covers?
On top of that, not all drum machines are created equal. There are whole genres based on 808s, 909s, 303s combined with these… using DINsync, which involves retriggering internal hardware clocks on the machines at trigger rise-time speed. rather than sending a succession of MIDI notes. That stuff is still 'electronic clocks' but not in the sense of 'lives on a computer that triggers notes', in the sense of 'sequencers firing notes very simultaneously'.
That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.
Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.
> One could say modern music is not "musical performances" then. A sequencer or drum maching playing isn't "a performance", it's a programmed loop.
The drum machine is not all of the performance. In pop you'll have at the very least a singer. Even if all of the instrumental is machine-made, having a live singer definitely makes it a "performance".