Damn, that is perfectly said. Especially the part about collab and building a house, etc. You are a wise man, Greg.
To add to that, I am in the position of going back through all my tracks and adding real drums to them, but luckily for me, I fully ascribe to the above philosophy, so I have absolutely no qualms about quantizing the tracks and moving hits and stuff around if needed to lock it up with the originally recorded tracks. In a perfect world, I would have a killer four or five piece band, and we would be so well-rehearsed that everything would be as tight as shit, and then we'd record the rhythms live and get that "magical groove" Greg referenced above. But....I am just a one man band, sitting in my basement dreaming up songs and trying to translate what I hear in my head into a good final product. I don't care what it takes to get to that end, I am not trying to capture a performance, I'm trying to create a killer recording/mix of my songs. To me it's kind of funny that many of us have different limits that we set for ourselves regarding what we will and won't do to "fix" things. Personally, I know I can play the guitar, I can sing, and if I need to, I can play my shit live. Other than that, who cares? I say make the recording as good as it can possibly be.
Whew! Sorry about that...a little bit of a rant, but I guess that touched a chord.
Jason and Joe, you guys both rock and I love this song. The drums still seem a little off from the rest of the mix though, there are little timing things here and there. As I said above, if it were me, I'd probably fix it, but that's a personal thing. Overall, this is really cool and I'm going to be listening again just because I liked it
Best Regards,
Dave
SoundClick artist: Dave DeWhitt - page with MP3 music downloads
Thanks for the kudos, Dave.
I've always been torn about "perfection" in music. The tools exist now to make everything perfect, rhythmically and tonally. I'd guess that close to 100% of the stuff on the radio now-a-days has been put through a beat detector and auto-tuner. That's all well and good, and I generally enjoy listening to the stuff played on the radio from time to time....
...but here's the problem: It all has the same sound. When a computer alters the music, the alteration is programmatic, and therefore will mold all music using the same algorithms. If you ran two completely different different pieces of music through the same software 100 times each, they'd come out sounding a lot more similar than they did previously. This is inevitable, because it's what computers do.
For me, there's gotta be a balance. Dave, I hate to use what you did recently as an example, but it illustrates the principle so well... You recently created a wonderful piece of music, one with software drums, and one with a live drummer. When I listened to the two, the only distinguishing factor between the live and programmed drums were the cymbals. There was no human element to the drums at all. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, drum samples were even used to enhance the sound of the acoustic drums themselves. So, basically, software was used to enhance the timing, and the sound of the the drums. So one has to question - why use acoustic drums at all? Where's the human element of the rhythm?
...and then there's the other side. When timing sucks, and the sound sucks, then it's agonizing to listen to. Nobody likes that. Gotta fix that crap. Ideally, we would all be Greg, and be able to rip through a song, with no fixes at all, and rock so hard that all the timing "issues" are just the elements to remind us that he is indeed human.
I hate to ramble like this, but another fantastic illustration is the thread Keith started, asking us to post all our "first post" stuff. Stuff we recorded when we didn't have a clue what we were doing. Listening to all of that stuff made me almost hate all the electronic crap we put our music through. Songs by all sorts of people here made me grin from ear to ear, and the recordings, in some cases, were done all live. Little, if any, mixing at all. This, of course, is an extreme. Nobody is gonna put stuff like that on the radio, but on the other hand, very few cases exist where radio music has made me enjoy listening to music as much as that thread did.
So... Yeah.. I think music should be well done and fun to listen to. Whether or not that entails forcing perfection upon it is something I'm constantly battling within myself.
Forced / computerized perfection definitely comes at a price.