Beyond the metronome and quantisation

[simoncroft]

Sometimes, I just don't feel the groove where the DAW wants me to put the notes, so I vocalised what I wanted to hear against the metronome. Then I added bass and drum to the vocal. According to the piano roll grid, what I've done is a mess. But I'm using these two bars as the template for the rest of the song. My groove, not machine groove.

 

[Bowmap]

Definately more organic.

 

[Forpie]

Well, put that in a loop for 3 hours please
That's going viral
Earworm

 

[davidKOS]

I've done both off and on grid recordings.

I find to really get the "old school sound", sometimes it's best to not use a grid. But then you have to play pretty much in time, just no so exactly as with a grid.

Other times, I'm happy to have the precision the grid offers.

And I can see why your riff idea is hard to deal with, it's got a groove that at one point is something between a triplet and a 332 subdivision of the beat!

Easy to feel, hard to write as a MIDI part on a piano roll.

 

[Seamus OReally]

I never quantized anything. If I had a musical superpower, it was my sense of time, and I had a superstitious belief that it all “felt” better that way. Maybe it did, maybe I just thought it did, human perception being unreliable as it is.

 

[El Gobernador]

I never quantized anything.

Me neither.

 

[davidKOS]

I never quantized anything.

Me neither.

Nor I.

I have "fixed" a couple tiny errors at times with editing, though.

 

[CigBurn]

I like it when things are a hair off.. Not constantly, but enough to make it feel real rather than programmed.

 

[davidKOS]

I like it when things are a hair off.. Not constantly, but enough to make it feel real rather than programmed.

Ah, there's the real issue!

 

[Seamus OReally]

But isn’t “programmed” music “real?”

 

[davidKOS]

But isn’t “programmed” music “real?”

Well, yes...but I've recorded pieces of music that were not on a click track, no MIDI nor piano roll.

I've also recorded pieces that used a composed MIDI "template", had the piano roll, etc.,

I suppose both methods produce "real" music. I think the idea is that lots of rock music was recorded without a click track and was thus "more real".

 

[CigBurn]

I think the subtle variations that happen while playing to a beat, give the part a certain human-ness. The same part programmed for timing accuracy can sometimes feel/sound sterile to me. imho anyway.

Though I'm not averse to editing if needed to clean up timing. Guess it depends on the part.

Both are real music of course. My use of the word 'real' was meant to describe a part as played by a musician at the time of the recording, with its natural human variations . Probably not explaining myself very well.

 

[Dadocaster]

There are some types of music that benefit from a mechanical feel and I sometimes would like to quantize to make things more perfect. But.....both boyo and I have some junky fun stuff we do even in simple stuff that resists quantizing. So, since it rarely works for me, I mostly stopped trying.

I do like having drummer play to a click though, if they will. That degree of tightness I really like. Kind of self correcting groove.

(I am dying to record with the new band but trying to get up to speed to play out is taking all our time and energy..}

 

[El Gobernador]

I play in front of in back of the beat a lot. Like Francis Albert.

 

[StratUp]

I like it when things are a hair off.. Not constantly, but enough to make it feel real rather than programmed.

That's Rock-n-Roll, baby!

 

[simoncroft]

I have quantised a lot in the past, when someone asked me to write their arrangements in a 1980s pop style. It just gave it that very clinical, precise sound. Funnily enough, a band that personified the sound I'm talking about was New Musik, and they never used a sequencer for anything. Having worked on about 20 reels of old tapes from their keyboard player, I can tell you, the only time the tempo drifts is when the tape's stretched!

While it's not what you want for many styles of music, it does make replacing damaged sections with a similar section from elsewhere in the song very easy, because you're always working in whole beats and bars.

 

[simoncroft]

Well, yes...but I've recorded pieces of music that were not on a click track, no MIDI nor piano roll.

I've also recorded pieces that used a composed MIDI "template", had the piano roll, etc.,

I suppose both methods produce "real" music. I think the idea is that lots of rock music was recorded without a click track and was thus "more real".

To me, the whole point of DAWs having multiple ways of going about creating music is that the 'best' way depends on whose using it, and what they are trying to achieve. For instance, if your in score editor and you want a note to extend into the next bar, it's usually a lot quicker to go into piano roll and drag the end of the note across the bar line, rather that stay in the score and insert a tie.

Similarly, due to the limitations of my piano keyboard, the more complex the part is, the more approximate my timing tends to get. It's not that I can't hear it; the problem is in the execution. I have no compunction about using quantisation to get it close to what I wanted, then manually tweak it to what I actually want to hear. The way I look at it, when you write dots on a stave in a DAW, you are essentially producing quantised music. Unless you are prepared to get into Zappa-esque sequences of tuplets, you're probably going to end up using one or both of the above techniques, at least sometimes.

Having spent a lot of years in magazine production, where time was always of the essence, I'm constantly striving for more efficient ways to produce music within the DAW environment.

 

[davidKOS]

Unless you are prepared to get into Zappa-esque sequences of tuplets, you're probably going to end up using one or both of the above techniques, at least sometimes.

Indeed, all of the above.

BTW, I enjoy "Zappa-esque sequences of tuplets"...but I'm not typical.

 

[CigBurn]

I agree with all that Simon. Especially if I am working with keys. Timing and velocity control are my two most glaring weaknesses, and I'm glad I can pop into the editor to make corrections easily.

 

[Dadocaster]

If drums are pretty tight but not perfect, I have had some luck quantizing just the kick and leaving everything else alone.