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▲ lubujackson an hour ago

You hear but you don't recognize it. Rick Beato has a clip where he takes Jogn Bonham's drums from Led Zeppelin and gridifies them. As a non-musician, I can feel the soul being sucked out of the song in the process.

▲jsphweid 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's easy to take one of the greatest drummer's performances, quantize things, make it worse, and say "quantization sucks the soul out of music."

But what about the non-greatest drummers? The other 99.9% (or higher) of musicians who are tiers below Bonham? Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.

▲genghisjahn a minute ago | parent | next [-]

It’s just cheaper. It has nothing to do with it being more listenable. Same with auto tune. It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings. It doesn’t improve the music.

▲hoorayimhelping 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.

How is that a good thing?

Humans have limited attention and time, so most of us don't like to waste them on bad things. Human artistic history is suvivorship in practice. The best things rise to the top and are kept, and the worst fall away. This is a natural mechanism that produces a shared culture of good things. When everything is good, nothing is, which is exactly the place we find ourselves now.

Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Our culture celebrates mediocrity because we're afraid of the implications that certain people are naturally better than others. The result is we have no more heroes or aspirations, and computers can fix lack of talent and lack of effort at improvement.

▲pfranz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I dont know if there's a longer version of this video, but I looked it up.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/C9h9xpNOoEN/

▲nmeofthestate an hour ago | parent [-]

Pfft - this doesn't make a general point about quantisation - he completely altered the drum part. He didn't just shift things by minute amounts to hit the "exact" timing while maintaining the swing. Of course if you remove swing then it's completely changed - it could also be quantized while maintaining swing.