RANT: Over-precisionification of music

  • Thread starter Thread starter noisewreck
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I can't agree, playing to a click is harder than following a conductor, it has no humanity.

My opinion is based on my experience as a session drummer in Nash and having a performance degree in Trumpet and Cello (I have been principal in both), and experiences with three different classical groups, five different conductors.

P.S...I enjoy the conductor mood swings, it's my way of staying in line! :D
 
ez_willis said:
This whole topic is absurd.
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Thus it being a rant ;)

beezelbubba said:
I use a click because I like to, and don't give a fuck what you do or think! :)
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I was wondering when you were gonna show up :p

Micter said:
I have to say keeping time is harder than most of you realize. Put on a click track, start playing, have someone mute it and turn it back on in a few measures. See how far off you are.

There are very few people that can keep perfect time.
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And I say perfect time shouldn't necessarily mean "exact time". Perfect time can be "elastic time" if the musical piece at hand calls for it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to hard quantize the gawd awful performance I just recorded :p While I am at it, I think I'll fix up the botched velocities on some of the notes... Probably will end up spending more time making it sound "right" rather than if I just sat down and practiced the damn riff... but I am too lazy for that... I mean, I got all these wonderful features in my DAW right?

You can call this topic absurd, and you can disagree, and some with valid points....

But what I find absurd is that we want to be in denial about our human nature and constantly put ourselves in some arbitrarily set boxes. It's kind of like denying ourselves of sex because some religion says "it's bad"... We want precise timing... gotta be down to a milisecond, our dynamics from note to note must be within 1-2db of each other, all tunes from hereonhenceforthwith must be 4/4...

Aren't we just setting ourselves up for a losing battle?

Timothy brought up the torture the classical guys go through... listen to some old recordings of people such as Arthur Rubinstein. Talk about immensely musical and woefully sloppy stuff! But that kind of stuff actually MADE TO RECORDINGS! And people still get all googly eyed and tingly when talking about those recordings. Nowdays, no classical person will even make top 20 with that kind of sloppyness. Almost none of the top 10 though put the same kind of soul that someone like Rubinstein put into his performances.

Yep, we're going for all that precision, "perfect" timing... and all our music sounds like it has come out of some mass production factory, stamped out of the same mould. But at least it's got perfect timing down to the millisecond, and has a square wave for dynamics.

Cheers.
 
overly precise

Even though i said before that each song needs to be appoached differently and that what works for some may not work for others, i feel there is more to be said. If there is only, lets say 5 hours a day for a person to work on music, i dont think im wrong in saying that its alot of wasted time to spend on perfecting timing and quantizing and all that. Overly bad timing does blow, so those things should be improved upon, but people in my opinion would be better off just spending time on songwriting skills. Now thats pretty obvious of course, but if you are going to talk about what sucks about perfecting everything to the millisecond, one thing is that it takes time away from the shit that matters more. Youd be better off spending time working out a likeable rhythm rather than making a shitty one perfect.
 
Perfect time and elastic time are two distictly different things.

Keeping tempo is very difficult and most people can't keep time for more than a couple of measures. I don't think playing to a click track makes the music sterile. Quantizing/normalizing however does take all of the "feel" out of a song.

I guess if you want a garage band sound let the tempo float. If you want something that sounds pro and well done, easy to edit, and has even tempo let the click dictate the flow of the song. You can map out time changes, tempo changes and use them for changes in dynamics. Playing to a click track takes more talent than letting the tempo drift all over the place. IMO
It is however what you want out of the recording. If you are just having fun with a song vs. trying to get a record deal there would definately be a motivation to let the tempo drift vs. keeping the tempo tight. It's all subjective and this is in fact an area that I see as important but many apparently don't.
 
HERE IS THE REASON STUDIOS USE CLICKS

When a band comes in to be recorded you don't get to decide if they are good enough. You can tell them to go home and practice more but then you will have no work. So you use a click track so there is some type of reference to edit all the shitty parts together and come up with a listenable recording.
 
There is a difference between using a click track to hold a tempo over the course of a song, and using a click track because the performer has no rhythm. The first is excuseable and acceptable, the second is just plain stupid.

Unfortunately the increase in click track usage we have seen over the past decade or so has been mostly because of an increase in the number of people with more ego than talent.

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
There is a difference between using a click track to hold a tempo over the course of a song, and using a click track because the performer has no rhythm. The first is excuseable and acceptable, the second is just plain stupid.

Unfortunately the increase in click track usage we have seen over the past decade or so has been mostly because of an increase in the number of people with more ego than talent.

G.
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that is something i couldn't agree with more.
 
noisewreck said:
Plus, I want to expand this argument not just to click tracks, but other requirements for precision.

I hear a bunch of complaints regarding drummers that they can't hit their drums exactly the same way every time... My responce to that is ... "uh... get a sampler and program all hits at exatly 100 velocity."

What's wrong with a dynamic drum performance? Personally I love well performed drum solos where the drummer doesn't "beat the drums" "keep time" "be the foundation" and all that... but actually plays the kit like a musical instrument as it should be treated. He actually plays melodies with his kit, is dynamic, has wonderful phrasing...
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I agree, it would be terrible if the drummers hit the drum the same every time. That's all part of it.
 
Micter said:
Playing to a click track takes more talent than letting the tempo drift all over the place. IMO
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And I am saying that if you've got the talent, the tempo should not drift all over the place. I don't understand why that is such a hard concept to grasp. And I am sorry a couple of BPM here and there isn't a major fluctuation and most of music naturally calls for such minor fluctuations.
 
Each case is different. If I'm tracking a free form jazz group, I'm generally not going to use a click and will rarely ever overdub.

Almost every metal band I've worked with wanted a click. The drummer laid his parts down to the click, then use the drums as time.

Also, good musicians can play around with their time. If you play with a click enough, you learn how to play behind or ahead of it to suit your needs.

However, most of the bands I record arn't good enough to keep their own tempos. So on goes the click, and lots of time trying to get feel out of the dudes.
 
It seems to me you can still be a great musician and not be a human metronome. You may stray by a few beats per minute, and if you dont record to a click, and you are overdubbing and doing all the work yourself, then even that little variance can be aggravating... :)
 
metal, nine times out of ten works much better with a click. Even a few of the older heavy metal stuff like manowar or what not, while the music kicks ass, it's pretty sloppy, and doesn't have anywhere near the power of some of their latest metal hits of umm fire and steel (true heavy metal warriors are gathiering for the umm heavy metal battle of ...fire and um...steel.)
 
If I'm playing complex technical metal type stuff I will use a click. Anything that has more of an element of freeform, or anything where I feel it's beneficial to play slightly sloppy, I don't use a click.

The main reason to use a click for me however, is to get everything lined up perfectly on the sequencer. Makes editing easier.

Sometimes I just find it distracting in certain situations, and turn it off.
 
noisewreck said:
And I am saying that if you've got the talent, the tempo should not drift all over the place. I don't understand why that is such a hard concept to grasp. And I am sorry a couple of BPM here and there isn't a major fluctuation and most of music naturally calls for such minor fluctuations.
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Play then add a click track later and see just how far off you are. Even the best musicians can't stay within a couple bpm for very long. Playing to a metronome/click track just keeps everything a bit tighter.

Like I said earlier you can map out time changes and tempo changes very easily. Who ever said a song has to keep one tempo all the way through?
 
Blue Groove said:
Explain...
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I think the "precisionification" issue is larger than consistent tempo, click tracks, or following a conductor. It's about having a balance between technical accuracy and artistic expression. It's good to be precise. But it takes good judgement to know when to be tight and when to be loose with any aspect of the music. And on the production side, it takes judement to know how much to push the issue re a performer's accuracy, given what they're capable of... law of diminishing returns and all. BTW, regarding accuracy, there's a big difference between playing with expression and playing with no control, heh.

Re classical musicians, it's probably at the neighborhood teacher level where the biggest precisionification problem is... if the teaching is too academic and doesn't motivate creativity. But at the college level there are similar problems, especially with guitar majors, who, as a group, tend to get very mechanical sounding IME. And unlike what I've seen of pianists/vocalists/string players, etc, there's a large number of classical guitar majors who continually struggle with music that's too complex for them, focusing on precision but unable to get it... and struggling to keep one's head above water when playing usually undermines the ability to play with expression.
 
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Micter said:
Play then add a click track later and see just how far off you are. Even the best musicians can't stay within a couple bpm for very long. Playing to a metronome/click track just keeps everything a bit tighter.
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Sometime ago a couple of guys (bass and drums) sent me an mp3 of a recording they had done and had asked me to put some synth work on top. They wanted stuff that sounded obviously sequenced/arpeggiated as well as some orchestral/piano type work.

The first thing I did was to create a tempo map in Cubase so that I could then do the sequenced stuff to the grid, but keep it with what they had done. They had obviously not played to a click, and the tempo drifted from around 120-135bpm, with some nice ritardandi at the end of the phrases marking the end of a section.

Did it sound sloppy? HELL NO! In fact the sections sounded just right at the tempo that they were in and helped me figure out what kind of stuff would work and where they were going musically. It did take a bit of work to get the sequenced stuff to sound "on the grid" and "mechanical", but I'd rather have to do that then have some rigid nonsense that didn't flow with the needs of the music.
 
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