Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/23/how-software-sterilized-rock-m.html
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Rob, you are the best.
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Nooooo!!! Not Nickleback! !!
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Texas Schoolbook Mafia’s reaction when censoring that particular textbook:
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I’m hating it right now!
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Mr. Rick Beato did a follow up where he quantizes John Bonham of Led Zeppelin that was particularly on the nose insightful:
https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU
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And yet, we’ve still got Jack White and Beck making beautiful, unquantifiable noise.
Rock is dead? Long live rock!
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That was you?!
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“I have no plans to disclose them, but if you ever see, say, Henry Kissinger with mouths for eyes in a school textbook, you know who to blame.”
You’re the moustaches-drawn-on-street-advertisments enabler of our era.
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Metal’s doing fine though, so eh…
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An ongoing facination of mine is to try to find the dividing line between before computers and after computers in popular music. The drum tracks are the best place to start.
What is the last great album before digitization? Fisrt one after?
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This was one of the main reasons I left the music industry. I just couldn’t take it anymore, hiring the best studio drummer in the world to play on some crap pop artist’s song, then quantize the performance. Not to mention, going to one of the best studios in the world, with amazing mics and a great sounding live room and then replacing the hits with samples.
Just use a fucking drum machine and save yourself 10 grand.
At some point I had two versions of a pretty well know pop singer’s song. One with a raw take with Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, and one after it was all doctored up. The real Vinnie made the song actually seem likable. The version that was on the record I wouldn’t listen past the first 4 bars.
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I think someone is working on a robot-exoskeleton that musicians can wear on stage to quantize their music in a live setting, and OK Go have already signed up to be test subjects for a new video.
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KMFDM knew this like 30 years ago.
Our music is sampled
Totally fake
It’s done by machines
Cause they don’t make mistakes
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This is why my friends and I take a lo-fi approach - no quantizing going on here:
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Yeah, he and Ringo were my first thoughts. Ringo really liked to play around the beat and doing this would illustrate just how little credit he gets for the Beatles’ innovative sound.
@jab, my friend left for just the same reason after working on a Reggaeton album. Well, he quit working as a gun for hire and set up his own studio in a converted stables on his property.
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This is my jam! Prog rock grew up and became metal in all its glorious subgenres. I am personally a fan of Nordic symphonic metal (eg, Nightwish) but any intelligent metal is excellent, and played by actual musicians.
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In ye olde days, a band went to a studio where playing live was the only option (no overdubbing, sometimes only a single mic), and if they weren’t in too much of a rush, they got to do two takes. And yet they made records we can still enjoy today.
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One liminal point is the song “Are Friends Electric?” by Tubeway Army. The nature of Gary Numan’s composition seems to call for an electronic beat, but he knew better, and the analog drums “performing” a robotic part, never quite perfectly, is all part of the isolated man-machine vibe of the track. I bet quantizing the drums would ruin this version of the song.
Behold the aching arms of Jess Lidyard:
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Everything you hear on Youtube is pitch corrected anyway to avoid DCMA takedowns.
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