meloco_go wrote: ↑January 2nd, 2018, 8:30 am
nobby wrote: ↑January 2nd, 2018, 3:42 am
Call me old-fashioned, but BD and AT are tools to be used to fix something that's broken. Like there's a note or beat that's bugging you in an otherwise perfectly good track. I don't see a point in using them on everything as a matter of routine.
I agree.
If the musicians are tight, there should be little perceived difference.
I think therein lies a rub. Tight performances are not necessarily on the beat and on the note. Great musician create tension by deliberately (or subconsciously) creating imperfections.
But the widespread application of AT and BD creates this "expectation" that everything HAS to be perfect.
I don't know. I hate to bring up the genre issue but maybe there are a couple of sub-genres that I don't deal with in which that's the case.
I might be imagining it. But I do believe that is the case. And I don't mean that great musician before were sloppy either.
The fact that you wonder if you're imagining it makes me wonder the same thing
To me, focusing too tightly on absolute precision
all the time indicates a problem in the music. The people in charge of writing and producing music have all these powerful tools to use to distract the listener from the occasional pitch or timing imperfection; Words, chords, melody, harmony, arrangement, production.
The listener isn't looking at a grid to make sure the beats line up perfectly. Who cares what mix engineers think? They are only .02% (or whatever) of the population
[...]
That's an interesting example. I feel it is precise to the point of unnaturalness. It's VERY cool, don't get me wrong. But that's actually my point.
People CAN be this precise. But would the idea of reaching this precision ever cross the mind of a performer before AT and BD were around?
Yes. When precision is important to what you're trying to express. That's why we used to practice to a metronome and do our vocal exercises to a piano.
Sometimes, as with the drum line above, precision is the name of the game. But when you have an actual song, that should be the listener's focus.
I don't want to get into genres, but some music may require a little more than others. Punk Rock can be sloppy. With Reggae, the intricate "riddim" can fall apart falls apart without a high degree of precision.
I was thinking of a Buddy Rich drum solo. He seemed to be hitting the hihat with absolute precision in terms of timing; the accents were what made it cool.
When I was using an early digital sequencer, I recorded a drum machine into it to make a model of a production. The "roll" feature of the drum machine sounded awful for a rock Song (this is widely used in Electronica where it's supposed to sound artificial as an effect. As is AT).
It sounded like a machine gun. At that time, the only way to fix it was to individually change the velocities of the notes. Later, software would allow you to feather in a percentage of imperfection globally. I don't think I actually changed the timing, though.
But any kind of human precision has been around since long before AT and BD. I'm skeptical about their having much impact.
