Stressing about quantization is the music equivalent of stressing about photoshop. We used to believe that quantized beats are “too perfect” and that imperfect timing adds a human touch to the work.
But things are worse than that: these days machine learning systems can extract the characteristics of a given imperfect beat, and create new un-quantized work which mimics the original feel. It can create infinite new beats, all perfectly replicating the organic groove of the original. Imperfect timing itself is too perfect!
As with all new art tech, it will be interesting when it’s done on the margins and boring once everyone is doing it.
Rick Beato is pronounced ‘Beeya-toh’ and not ‘Beat-o’, as in ‘Beat-o, beat-o, flat on my seat-o, Hirohito blues’. He says it himself so he ought to know.
This smacks of another old dude who defines “good music” as “music made the way I like it”. Hey, buddy, guess what? People are still recording all types of music any way you can think of, and a few people (or a lot of people) pitching and pocketing some rock tracks (or pop tracks, or whatever tracks) aren’t ruining music. I happen to like tracks that people like Beato would decry as over-produced or sterile. It’s almost like music tastes are, like, subjective or something. Huh.
For me, it was increasing annoyance, not amusement, at this self-important ass.
I don’t know if he glossed over this or omitted it entirely. I gave up half-way through.
Bingo. And why does anyone listen to recent rock music if they don’t like it? Its been around for seventy years. Do what classical fans do – who have centuries of culling to benefit from – pick out the best music over that period and listen to that. Try different styles. It will keep you occupied for the rest of your life. I hate techno dance music – but I just learned about Caravan Palace, dance music combined with 30’s swing. Holy shit! Are they good!
I guess complaining (and even making a strident 20 minute video) is easier.
Whenever technology expands our capabilities, someone is there to moralize about how it just isn’t real enough. This dude would have been complaining about equal temperament tuning back in the day.
But since i suppose I did beg the question… Aerosmith in ’88, same venue (Blaisdell Arena in Honolulu). Joey Kramer did a big, bombastic, top notch stadium rock drum solo, the sort that starts out slow and exceedingly simple before layering up. He blew the crowd away and got a standing ovation.
Then he threw his sticks out into the audience and began again, barehanded. The same drum solo, or at least close enough to seem that way. COMPLETELY blew the crowd away, much bigger response.
He stood up to take a bow and it looked like he was wearing full motorcycle leathers, black and red. Quite stylish, if a bit warm for a night of rock drumming, but whatevs. He then started the same damn solo a third time, using electronic drum pads sewn into his outfit. As he played he worked his way slowly to the front of the stage. The crowd was… silent. Almost totally silent. I can’t speak for everyone there, but me and mine, we were just slackjawed.
I got to make a request that night, having a brief lip reading chat with Whitford and Tyler from the third row, and even that didn’t compare to the drum solo.
Yeah, when I see his videos he always comes across as an old salt who is selling the idea that he has what it takes to make a “proper” old-timey record, as though it’s impossible to turn off quantization or autotune and still get all the other benefits of modern digital processing.
Tomorrow’s AI may be ferret out today’s lies, but the same technological advances will also be used for evil. Bullshit will always be out the door and down the street before the truth gets its boots on.
not quite sure what you are saying here…computer recording? computer sequencers? does computer mean just PC? or do, say, an MPC or DX7 which are digital computers, but aren’t PCs, count?
pre- and post-computers don’t signify any division of note in music as far as timing and the feel of music. drum machines, sequencers and quantizing predate the digital, midi and PCs.
Yeah, trying to drum like a drum machine was a thing back then. He had it in Joy Division too. Of course the actual drum machines, and in particular the kind of thing that Martin Hannet had access to were utter shite. Listen to the synth drums on, say a Durutti Column record: primitive and shit.
And to be honest with you I think that’s the main reason that Gary Numan didn’t use drum machines on the early Tubeway Army stuff: they didn’t really exist. Early synthpop is barely sequenced at all anyway, most of it was played. They just played it to sound Motorik.
Also of course Gary wouldn’t have used a drum machine because Kraftwerk (and Bowie) didn’t!
This reminds me of a friend of a friend. They painted some butterflies in art school as a project and at the end of the term art show someone offered to buy those paintings. So next thing they knew they were making a living painting butterflies. They never really wanted to do that, but it was better than being a barista.
Still, you think if they could have pushed a button and made the butterfly paintings appear they wouldn’t have done it? If the clients didn’t actually care about the difference?
Music production is its own art form, and my experience of artists who make money from their art is that they often experience an awkward disconnect between what they think makes their art worthwhile and what the public actually wants. If grocery-store-radio-station-schlock sounds lousy and overproduced, well… what did we expect?
I don’t think the Beato video is some sort of old man rant about technology, as some in this thread are implying. (Ageism is not a good look, btw).
What he’s talking about are the subtle rhythmic feels of Rock music, and how quantizing in a DAW removes that feel, and substitutes a feel that was not generated organically in the performance. This is not a technology problem per se (though technology made it possible); it’s a producer and industry problem.
Rock is not the first music genre to lose its identity when rhythmic preferences changed. Look at what happened to jazz in the 70s, when swing-derived rhythms were supplanted by funk and rock based ones.
To your larger point, and the point of my thought experiment that occupies my mind while driving for work, is there some sort of watershed that seperates the time before the ubiqutous availablity of digital production tools (eg ProTools) and the time after, and are there popular albums that were produced on either side of that divide that serve as exemplars.
I’ve watched a number of Bento’s videos. He’s not ranting against the new as Seamo notes. His point is the human drummer is able to introduce emotion by going off of the quantized beat. Of course being able to continuously alter the speed of a performance is a way of transmitting emotion and removing that dynamic is going to result in a more sterile (or maybe more hypnotic?) sound. As far as before/after is concerned the change really isn’t drum machines as much as it is recording to a click track. The first use of that was… Fantasia… which is typical of early uses (timing for a 60 second commercial spot, etc) but doesn’t answer the question.
There isn’t any easy divide. The closest would be ableton live when it introduced audio warping. But that lead to mashups, not so mush changes on the rock side of things. The big change that came with digital recording for rock is cut and paste as seen in that metalica doco. You only need to nail one verse and one chorus.
I think the issue is this—any technology that allows you to push a beat around into a very straight rhythm also allows you easily push the beat into any swing settings and accents you want. so as others have mentioned, it’s a production decision not a technological one. It’s an issue of when that production decision became popular and that doesn’t easily correspond to any technological changes.
Chris Alge , the mega rock pop producer, has talked about his production work flow— it’s pretty interesting and not at all what you might expect. He still uses tape.
