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.
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.
It probably could. Point he's trying to make is that it very often isn't. Lots of pop music is just snapped to grid. Makes it easier to repeat and swap sections.
I'm not sure his demonstration is 'fair', as in someone really quantizing that track would probably do a slightly better job. But it does highlight the effect of over-quantization. Which happens a lot , together with the 'autotune-the-hell-out-of-it' fashion.
Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.
> Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.
Which is part of why people revolting against AI generated music is a bit weird to me. So AI music is too far, but so much over produced and changed in the bay is acceptable. It's interesting to me how arbitrary that line is. I abhor the over produced pablum as much as the AI generated stuff equally.
Amen to that! The difference between overproduced generic 'producer music' and AI music (which is basically a remix of that I guess) is often minimal.
Both are excruciatingly boring.
90% of the music I listen these days is recordings by musicians that I saw live, and bought the CD at their gig. And even then about a quarter of the CD's I buy are misguidedly auto-tuned making the CD very bland compared to their live performance. I much prefer live recordings, where it's much harder to fix a mistake by one of the musicians because everything is audible on all microphones.
On the one hand it's great for (indy) music that you can have the equivalent of e 70s EMI studio in your living room. On the other hand the editing possibilities make people too perfectionist, wringing all personality out of their music.
It does happen where drummers are recorded and it's just quantized to 8th notes in the DAW. Simply due to lack of communication between the musician and the producer, or because of some chase of rhythmic perfection. Especially in a lot of modern metal, where you will barely find a swung beat anymore.
Not really - gridification of swing usually defines a certain amount of swing and then gridifies to that exact amount - whether it's a pure triplet swing, something heavier, or lighter.
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!"
I buy that. Long-term salt negative effects of high-quantity of salt are questionable. Restaurant food will make me slug water, hold it, get bloaty, then go on a peeing spree a few hours later. It's a sneaky crutch they use to make the food "taste better".
See also: Using 100% refined flour for everything (That does have a long-term negative health effect not unlike the sugar one you mention), and make their seating uncomfortable to turn tables.
I grew up with songs like the 1975 list (was 5 years old at the time) and recent music has made me feel like it just doesn’t have a “hook” to pull you in or generate real emotion. Technically the modern songs are excellent. But I think it was this gridification I was tapping into.
In addition to the fact everything was just objectively better when you were 5-12 years old.
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.
Always appreciated this Beck song, that has what I assume is a programmed drum beat, for having a kick drum strike near the end of the loop that seems deliberately off the beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvGjG_cmecU
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.
It sounding like a mess is the entire reason it would be valuable. It represents an actual real thing that actually happened at this particular point in your life.
Like, why not just have ChatGPT redub over it at that point.
Parents want a nice recording of their kids because they've been paying to rent their instruments. This isn't some profound type of artistic expression.
They do. Suno markets itself to artists and producers heavily. Why hire session players when you can use AI? Why have a studio/SE prepare your masters when you can use AI? Feels gross to me, but that’s the pitch.
i load the images and movie data from TMDB, when you load a movie or show, it looks for the movie online and then picks the best available source it finds then it also looks for subtitle and if those fail it has some fallbacks too
Lake Michigan is famously terribly cold to swim in. However this year I’ve found it mostly comfortable, almost as comfortable as a swimming pool. Looking online, it’s above 70 degrees! https://apps.glerl.noaa.gov/marobs/php/data.php?sta=0
Up in Door County the lake would freeze enough to ski on, but nowadays, well good luck with that.
It’s like parroting the king in the royal courtroom but for the 21st century. Look what happened to Spain as a warning, next thing anyone knew, one day their whole country woke up talking with a lisp.
Let’s say they do alter the price based upon demand (which it sounds like they won’t do at a granular scale like the other commentators are suggesting). It will punish customers who come later, but reward early customers who buy in bulk. Imagine scalping ice cream in a parking lot on a hot day!
But seriously, i would like to see non linear scaling of prices for people who buy a lot at once, for scarce items. Everybody gets a little seems like a more moral way to handle scarcity, but Walmarts new pricing system won’t handle this. Oh well. Overall though still a fun development.
Interesting take! I like how the app embellishes the real world rather than replacing it. What’s more interesting is that old me would like this app way more than young me.
When young me had wanted to date and was lonely enough to use an app, just seeing an attractive person in real life could be stressful and therefore awkward if it felt like a high stakes, rare opportunity…something this app would make worse.
However, to older me who doesn’t care anymore but would want to meet an interesting somebody, no stress, this app could make a great ice breaker. A neet niche you’ve found!
How do you deal with partial matches of interests?
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.