alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
Replies
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.
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.
> 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.
Music before quantization:
Music after quantization: Hmm, this “net improvement” of yours seems to have obliterated some important categories. I don’t think I care for it.