Quantized and Auto-tuned music can eat a bag of dicks

I agree 100%. It starts to sound fake and then it's just backing tracks when you see them live. It's not organic. It's a machine.

That's why I love the studio we found so much. The guy let's you record each song multiple different times live, together in the room as a band. We had our amps in separate rooms but all stood together in the middle big room w drums. It sounds real, it feels real. I hate recording by myself, I can never get that same energy you get playing as a band. Dude is a wizard, he goes through each part of each track and finds the best bits, makes sure the tempo is correct, addresses any bleed and then puts together the best version. I can't wait to go back.
 
DrewJD82 said:
For some modern metal stuff where the intent is to sound like a pummeling machine, quantizing works.
Click to expand...

And don't forget pretty much any kind of electronic genre. Techno, trance and what not, pop stuff using elements of those, etc. - that stuff is pretty much built around the fact that you can quantize. It's a different aesthetic that nobody *has* to like, but as far as I'm concerned, I absolutely like me some Chemical Brothers, BT and what not.

Note: Please crank your monitors before clicking!



That couldn't even exist without quantizing.
 
DrewJD82 said:
I agree with this. For some modern metal stuff where the intent is to sound like a pummeling machine, quantizing works.

Overall, the majority of music we've heard for the last 30-40 years was played to a click and at most we end up hearing some speeding up/slowing down in fills, but the entire body of the song was tracked to a click and I have zero problems with the main body of the song being on the grid. Guitars/bass/vocals are a different story. I'm working on a song now where the tempo never changes, but the guitars are constantly shifting on top of/behind the beat and it changes the entire feel of the section with a pushing/pulling effect, regardless of the fact the drums are on a grid.

Every Pantera song is dead nuts in time, but man that sh*t swings and grooves all over the place.
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If you need to quantize the drums, what about the rest? Quantize guitars, bass, etc.?

If you need to quantize to be tight then you’re going to be a muddy mess live.

I do get the value of having quantize features in DAWs though - it allows a clown like to lay down some drums or keys via MIDI to use as reference tracks.
 
I remember when Drum Machines were first a thing and many were looking for work arounds
from the quantitized nature of the beasts/beats, because they were perceived as being too rigid. :idk

That said, a lot of cool music has come to be that would have never existed if not for that rigid
skeleton. Not a fan of it in every style or genre, though. And I do think that there is an over-reliance
on it in most modern music production standards, because it makes things so darn efficient and convenient.
 
Sascha Franck said:
And don't forget pretty much any kind of electronic genre. Techno, trance and what not, pop stuff using elements of those, etc. - that stuff is pretty much built around the fact that you can quantize. It's a different aesthetic that nobody *has* to like, but as far as I'm concerned, I absolutely like me some Chemical Brothers, BT and what not.

Note: Please crank your monitors before clicking!



That couldn't even exist without quantizing.
Click to expand...

That music is literally the sort of thing the thread topic is referring to. 😂
 
hippietim said:
If you need to quantize the drums, what about the rest? Quantize guitars, bass, etc.?

If you need to quantize to be tight then you’re going to be a muddy mess live.

I do get the value of having quantize features in DAWs though - it allows a clown like to lay down some drums or keys via MIDI to use as reference tracks.
Click to expand...

Ew, no. Quantized guitars/bass/vocals are the antithesis about what I enjoy about music. Did you not read everything I wrote about playing those instruments ahead/on/off the beat, intentionally to change the feel of the song? Quantizing would eliminate that. But with drums, unless I’m intentionally going for a classic rock/loose feel thing, I want them to be a solid foundation. I’m not talking about note velocities, only the timing, which is hardly unusual as the overwhelming majority of popular music for the last 40 years was tracked to a click. For certain genres, I absolutely agree that it’s going to ruin it more than enhance it; blues, jazz, jam band stuff, but rock/hard rock/metal/pop, all the majority of it’s been done to a click and everything is dead nuts in time unless you’re going back pre-1980 or bands that intentionally go for the live feel with their recordings.

And if I’m a clown because I can’t track drums in my apartment while I’m writing/recording entire songs by myself, I dunno what to say to that. Should I just not write/record anything and wait until some miracle occurs where I’m suddenly able to buy a house or have unlimited studio time to record everything I want with access to as many different sounding kits as I have available in my DAW, where I’m going to play everything to a click anyway?

If having all the drums perfectly in time makes something suck….well….here’s a few albums that suck-









And hundreds and thousands more.
 
DrewJD82 said:
Ew, no. Quantized guitars/bass/vocals are the antithesis about what I enjoy about music. Did you not read everything I wrote about playing those instruments ahead/on/off the beat, intentionally to change the feel of the song? Quantizing would eliminate that. But with drums, unless I’m intentionally going for a classic rock/loose feel thing, I want them to be a solid foundation. I’m not talking about note velocities, only the timing, which is hardly unusual as the overwhelming majority of popular music for the last 40 years was tracked to a click. For certain genres, I absolutely agree that it’s going to ruin it more than enhance it; blues, jazz, jam band stuff, but rock/hard rock/metal/pop, all the majority of it’s been done to a click and everything is dead nuts in time unless you’re going back pre-1980 or bands that intentionally go for the live feel with their recordings.

And if I’m a clown because I can’t track drums in my apartment while I’m writing/recording entire songs by myself, I dunno what to say to that. Should I just not write/record anything and wait until some miracle occurs where I’m suddenly able to buy a house or have unlimited studio time to record everything I want with access to as many different sounding kits as I have available in my DAW, where I’m going to play everything to a click anyway?

If having all the drums perfectly in time makes something suck….well….here’s a few albums that suck-









And hundreds and thousands more.
Click to expand...

Those albums don’t all have quantize drums! Playing to a click and having drums in time is not the same thing as quantization.

As for using drum loops, machines, etc to write and record - sure whatever. I suck at drums and keyboards so I’ve quantized those things myself to have reference tracks with the expectation that if the song goes anywhere the parts will be replaced by competent players that aren’t me.
 
hippietim said:
Those albums don’t all have quantize drums! Playing to a click and having drums in time is not the same thing as quantization.

As for using drum loops, machines, etc to write and record - sure whatever. I suck at drums and keyboards so I’ve quantized those things myself to have reference tracks with the expectation that if the song goes anywhere the parts will be replaced by competent players that aren’t me.
Click to expand...

Is the end goal of playing to a click and quantizing not the same thing?
 
DrewJD82 said:
Is the end goal of playing to a click and quantizing not the same thing?
Click to expand...

30 years ago I was writing music film scores. One project actually had a budget for an orchestra and I had developed everything w/ midi incl. complex tempo changes.

I was using Cubase by Steinberg at the time. Had a call with one of their top dogs one day about getting the arrangements to the composers and having everybody play to a click.

Guy made the most captain obvious statement of all…

Keeping time is keeping time, regardless.
 
I've been learning and playing a lot of Bonham stuff recently for some midi grooves I'm making for a product. That guy was all over the place - but in a really cool way!

I hate obvious pop/trap/hip-hop/rap autotuned vocals. But I'm not against the tech.
 
Orvillain said:
I've been learning and playing a lot of Bonham stuff recently for some midi grooves I'm making for a product. That guy was all over the place - but in a really cool way!

I hate obvious pop/trap/hip-hop/rap autotuned vocals. But I'm not against the tech.
Click to expand...

Hell yeah, and I fully agree that the charm of those classic rock songs is the imperfection within it all.



But that stuff was mostly tracked live with the band playing together. Every try recording along to something not played to a click? It’s a f*cking nightmare. I’ve had to do it in two different bands and I almost quit over it in one case. It was taking us f*cking forever to memorize the tempo changes and then nail them and it’s not like they were huge shifts, just enough that when you’re expecting something to be dead nuts in time and you’re used to playing in time rather well, someone NOT doing so f*cks it all up.
 
There are no rules in the studio. Producers and artists have been using tricks like sampling, looping, etc, since the 60's. More so than most listeners realize. Now it's everywhere, and more obvious to the point of being an instrument in and of itself. Like all music, it's how it makes you feel in the moment.
Live is a different story. A lot more variables involved and I lean towards playing actual instruments instead of adding samples and loops, etc. But there are those that do all that stuff and it still sounds great. No judgement from me.
 
DrewJD82 said:
Is the end goal of playing to a click and quantizing not the same thing?
Click to expand...
Not at all!

Quantizing is the process of manipulating a performance to shift notes in time to align with some sort of interval. A click or metronome is a guide for a human to play along with to keep steady time.

Being in time doesn’t mean you land right on the “grid”. Playing with swing for instance.
 
@DrewJD82 i promise you that if you were to examine the note placement of stuff recorded to a click that very few notes would land perfectly on the grid (unless they weee quantized).
 
You can quantize and still leave room for humanization. Simple setting. It gets it close but not too close. Still, I disagree with messing with drums or vocals at all.
 
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