(Rant warning)
So lets say some drummer is hired to lay down live tracks for a head bobbing/swing flowing/trip hopesk project. Tracks get sent off & everyone loves the vibe. A month or two later the songwriter isn’t pleased. She asks why do the tracks sound so different after “joe the mixer” got his hands on them? I listen to the rough mixes for about 30 sec & say, “well he quantized the F#$% out of them. Killed all the swing/flow”. All drum & bass parts had been quantized & locked to a straight grid. Turned a swing feel into a rock track.
Moral of the story, Stop using Beat detective, Audio Snap, Audio Quantize, etc by default! The human swing & timing deviations are what help translate musical expression. Leave it be. When should you correct timing? When timing is a problem, that’s it.
This holds true with sequenced music as well. Loops can contain all the same little imperfections that keep music interesting. You can end up with some pretty lifeless content without the contrast between locked sequences & human feel. live interaction along with programmed elements is a perfect match IMHO.
As an example I hit the REC button & tracked two loose grooves with some imperfections pretty far off the grid. I then ran them thru an extreme rough & dirty uncleaned Beat Detective pass. You can hear how the bounce is stripped & creates a lifeless groove.
Loose Groove One Over Quantized.wav
Loose Groove Two.wav
Loose Groove Two Over Quantized.wav
Hey, very interesting article and I totally agree 🙂
However I think the examples are not quite fair… I am not proficient with beat detector, never having used it, but the originally tracked beats have a shuffle (triplet) feel to them, whereas the “quantized” ones have a straight 16ths grid… that doesn’t “just” correct the timing, but it changes the “swing”, making it inherently flatter. Is there a way to set a “swing” parameter or use a different setting than the plain 16th note one?
Cheers and let the grooves breathe 🙂
Ilski from Berlin
Your correct, this was quantized to straight 16ths. I was recreating the situation I just had to deal with. Many mixers don’t have an instrumentation background & seem to be unfamiliar with triplet/swing metering.
Also, there’s all those nasty artifacts…
Nice drumming + great sounding kit!
you hit the nail on the head…. I think over half of the mixers out there cut their teeth on dance music! too much drag and drop arrangements with this ‘generation’ , my friend.
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People like that engineer give mixing a bad name. Do you know how I handled re-timing on one of my favorite album projects in 2010? By manually making edits wherever required, nudging by samples without any view of the grid (sometimes blind) until I could “feel” things better, avoiding any form of stretching except where completely necessary, crossfading carefully with an eye towards where other tracks would mask the transition, etc.
It took hours upon hours of work but if you listened to the album, I doubt most people could guess which track had required such extensive editing. And that’s what editing of that nature should be – transparent in enhancing the vitality of the track, not mechanical in adhering to a grid (unless the genre is really, really mechanical).
I agree totally. Even not using a click track sometimes is really nice and human. Or add tempo changes for more humanness