My first rock concert was Huey Lewis and The News. They did a bit of a set break, during which Huey came out on stage by himself, pulling an old school red wagon. He explained to the audience that the thing in the wagon with the blinking lights was s drum machine, and started building up a drum track while he spoke, extolling the wonders of modern technology.
He then very artfully pivoted to explaining the concepts we’re discussing here, that if the beat is too precise it lacks soul, etc. and so forth. At the height of his rant they lit up the drum riser to show the actual drummer playing what we were hearing as he kicked the wagon off the stage.
That was 34 years ago, and it was the second best drum solo I have ever witnessed.
The drumming on the first few Gary Numan albums is perhaps my favorite part of those LPs: funky, swinging, tastefully spare.
Metronomic, machine drumming is OK in some styles of music, but it’s not helpful in blues or jazz or most rock music (imagine Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” with perfect locked in drumming, the raggedness of that album is part of its allure.)
There’s loads of music being done this way, yes. And then there’s loads and loads and loads and loads of music that isn’t, and you can listen to that instead of making whiney generalisations like this. What a time to be alive! https://www.castlefacerecords.com/
Recording engineers HATE tempo changes. Long before computers entered the music production world, producers used tape loops and long delay effects to create repeating drum patterns that musicians would play over. If an engineer had to cut and paste a guitar part form the start of a song into the end, and the tempo was off by +/-5 bpm, it would be glaring. Most of the time, loops and delays were used as time-savers, when a recording session would get into the six-figure $ cost. Incidentally, Alan Myers (DEVO) was known as the “human drum machine” for his ability to keep the same tempo thru an entire song.
For sure. And there was a time when, even if the band didn’t play all together, and used punches (re-recording only a small piece of a song to correct a mistake) the musicianship was still there.
Now its autotune the vocals, chop the drums to the grid, etc…
Even before protools there are stories of extreme fixes being done. The example that comes to mind is Lars’ drumming on “and justice for all”. Apparently the tapes was so cut up and taped back together that it can no longer be played so they can’t remix it.
They literally chopped the multitrack tape up and made the drums sound in time.
To think I spent all that time in high school trying to master that double bass drum groove in the middle of “one” only to learn later that I could probably play it better than Lars the whole time.
interesting stuff… he mentions the fact that the tape is super cut up at 3:35, but this whole story is another reason i left the music industry:
I think producer Sandly Perlman said this about Topper Headon of The Clash as well.
I had heard that all of Metallica’s LPs were recorded using a click track, so they are more-or-less “quantized”, and they do sound kind of sterile to me.
You can record to a click and sound human. The click gives you the quarter note, and if you are human you will not always be right on the click. Good drummers will play ahead or behind the beat to change the feel. All drumers have a natural style of being either behind or ahead of the beat, and it plays a big part in how that drummer “feels”.
That being said, if you are chopping drums to the grid, you are lining all the hits to be exactly on the beat, not just the downbeats. They are usually quantizing all the hits (eighths, sixteenths, etc) so it takes out all the human feel.
Ah yes, Rick Beato. I watched this video with amusement just a couple of weeks ago. But let’s be fair, the era that he is referring to is the dark ages of quantization. Most digital audio workstations have the ability to quantize audio in a deliberately “sloppy” way – 75% quantization with 15 ticks of randomity is a thing.
The real problem here is straight out of the 1980s: Production decisions that don’t serve the song or are ignorant of the genre. That’s why you can listen to Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones albums from the 80s that have snare drums that go “KHHHHHH!!!” The producers of the album were second-guessing what people would find acceptable as “current music.” You could say that the 90s were the period where most producers woke up from this cocaine-fueled mania and realized that not everybody needed to sound slick.
In truth, there are many production tricks that date back to the golden age of analog that are entirely artificial and present musicians and singers as superhuman. Because those tricks are very old, we accept them as “real” and all of this digital editing as super-fake. Music wasn’t born to come out of two speakers – the whole enterprise is artificially flavored.
When very few have the sort of resources to hang out in the studio to get “the take”, moving to widely available, generally affordable, and portable mediums in order to continue progress on a record is inevitable. At least I can tell Drummer in Logic Pro to push/pull a bit…
