"The Grid" didn't kill music
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- Опубликовано: 9 окт 2024
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You may have heard about quantizing and how it's terrible. As with most things, it has its place. Today we'll talk about how to create expressiveness without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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Add a comment isn't working today. Maybe you got tired of my rambling?
A point not raised in the video is the increasing use of "randomisation" to add interest to a sequence, for which, to me at least, a big sign is needed "Less is more" I am sure that some listeners will find amazing personal inspiration in the more extreme use of these programmable variations, I just find that I have limitations in that regard.
I learned recorder as a child but the dots defeated me and my teacher caught me out by putting music in front of me that I didn't know but I could memorise tunes and expression in any music and I was quick to distinguish one interpretation from another or no interpretation whatever. However, I couldn't tell what Mr. Mozart actually wrote down.
Lastly, my point about artificial performance variation, as represented by drum machines and sequencers that offer "swing". I don't know how these algorithms are calculated and to be honest I don't care. To my ear they are an abomination and to those people who use them, I say, good luck! If swing were a thing then Buddy Rich, Bird Parker, Michael Brecker and Dave Gilmour to name but a tiny few, would all swing in a similar way. Everyone has a personal way with a melodic or rhythmic line. It's a basic human right. When we make music together, we adapt our personal take to concur or conflict with others which can be one of the greatest joys known to our species.
P.S. Loved the jamming on a sequence. The breathing in the solo line is worth every moment of study and a testament to your inner neanderthal. Thank you.
This is so important! Also, your music examples are incredible. thx for another banger video!
I didn't use quantize for a while. Then I found the button.
I also do not believe playing on grid kills music. Know who convinced me? ZZ Top. When interviewed in the 80s, one of the players (Gibbons?) noted how much better the band's sense of timing got after recording an album with a drum machine. Questlove changed his drumming style to be more like a drum machine to fit better in the genre he was pursuing. The grid isn't the problem. It's players not learning to play to the grid that is.
To be fair, Questlove also moved away from drumming like a drum machine basically the moment he learned about Dilla. Not the best example there, even though your point is a good one
ZZ Top got progressive worse musically, and ended up with cliche 80s production, so not the best example
I don't think Billy`s rhythm and solo parts were quantized ;)
Damn! I remember thinking how stiff and lifeless ZZ Top sounded compared to similar artists in that genre. I could never get into that band and couldn’t quite figure out why, it just clicked!
@@MH-rt9ts "clicked". I see what you did there. With the click track.
Great message. Good insight differentiating expressive flexibility versus simply chaotic avoidance of the grid.
One of the things I picked up in my classical education for cello is to try to have a clear sense of pulse in the biggest musical unit you can (of course with subdivisions being important as well!) - so if your piece is a fast 4, and you practiced it regularly with quarter notes being the metrenome, can you start feeling its pulse in 1/2 notes, or even whole notes, where quarter notes start being a subdivision within this pulse.
This, for me, has made a natural breath more, well, natural, but has actually made it easier to ultimately feel rhythm more naturally. If I think the pulse too quickly, I end up overloading my simple brain with playing, being in tune, the right dynamic expression and a constant 1234 1234 1234!!! demanding the most of my limited attention.
I think it also really helps tie longer lines into elements that are more rhythmically rigid, or glued to the grid - which as this video points out can be quite musically moving.
Ultimately, this has helped me keep a healthy sense on the rubber band, or rubato as classical peoples know it as.
Edit: forgot to say great video and thank you as always!
Great points, Brice
i do what i want
The Rubber Band analogy is good. In HS my theory teacher/band leader used 'sentences' as an analogous device - When you're reading something aloud, sentences have a defined start and end - you can alter how you get from A to B, but you need to do so in a way which makes sense for the context.
I always enjoy your stuff...thanks!
"stepping on legos..." hahaha!! analogy duly noted. great vid. very helpful insights here. thangs much, nathan.
Thanks you for your help, and reminders✨
Two thoughts on this video - one, really good advice about playing expressively, and two, I miss my Rhodes.
Always enjoy your videos as someone raised on classical music (horn player).
I almost never quantize when I'm recording melodies, metronome on, but having a bit of rubato. Hold a note a bit long, then catch up. I'll record it multiple times till I get just the right feel and maybe adjust a few notes that were unintentionally off where I want them, but I find it makes melodies feel more emotionally satisfying. Another place I find adjusting things to be not too rigid is drum parts. Pushing a few notes slightly off the grid can make a positive effect on the groove and sound more real.
One place I used this was this image I had in my head -- a little man with a hat strutting around a Little Prince type (tiny) planet.Very pleased with himself. Exaggerated perspective, his arms bouncing to the beat, but swinging in half time. Kinda herky-jerky. So the drum beat had this exaggerated double hit to make the last beat on the half at the end of the groove pushed closer to the downbeat. Just enough you hear it and it gave that herky-jerky feel to the last beat of groove. Everything else was on the grid, but taking inspiration from that drum groove. A slight filter sweep on 8th note triplets, melody lines for a flute-like synth patch weaving in and out with another higher pitched synth and a repeated refrain that changed the triplets to short phrases that ended with a accentuate downbeat -- what I imagined was him triumphantly punching the air. The off the grid drum hit accentuated his arrogance because he thinks he's just so great. It's slightly sloppy feeling, which is the point.
Good content brother thank you
Thanks👍
LOVE the popup of mr beato, Bravo! so funny...I've tried shifting things slightly to humanize, but it often feels "off" on a subconscious level. This is fantastic, thank you!
9:56 Hypnotic. I could watch and listen for a while.
Thanks Jay!
Sorry off topic but I didn't know there was a full keyboard poly evolver,m wow that thing must be cool
Interesting to have a perspective of a classical trained pianist. I think to lock certain notes to the grit is important and that doesn't kill the music. Playing all over the place is a real killer. But what is most important is velocity and note length, which should have variety. That's where a big part of a non static feel comes from.
I've invested in an 88-key controller and am slowly learning to play in motifs. I'm concerned about becoming overly pianistic though. I have this idea that many of the voice leading rules, particularly regarding leaps, originate more from the limitations of acoustic instruments than from some inherant sense of musicality.
With synths and DAWs, we don't have these limits. In the back of my mind I sometimes wonder how to make musical sense out of large leaps.
I love the grid!
I don’t think most people who say “QuaNtIzInG kIllED mUsIc” even really understand what they are hearing or what the grid even does.
As Dilla demonstrated, being on or off the grid isn’t the thing that matters. It is the relationship between what is played, and what isn’t played, that matters. Sometimes being on the grid is good. Sometimes being on the grid is bad. Sometimes what you need is a swung grid. Other times you need a consistent grid that is just slightly in-front-of/behind the grid used for everything else. Sometimes having a part being entirely free from being on beat is what is needed.
I have lately fallen into a trend of playing everything rubato, attaching each rhytmical element to some inital human pulse, usually a freeform improvisation. If I want to change the timing between two pulses I change the tempo in my daw between these rather than move stuff on the timeline (and when I do this have noticed that I usually change two pulses, lenghtening one, shortening another, the rubber band). This means I usually start out with 100 bpm on my daw but hide the grid and don't use a click. The fluctuating tempo in these projects can best be though of as % of initial tempo rather than bpm. It's a slow process, as for instance it renders copy+pasting impossible, you just have to play stuff again by ear, but I retain the live feeling of the music that I want. Some day I'll probably figure out some more efficent way to do this.
I like the Rhodes! I need one of those rubber bands.
Great video! Did you get rid of your prophet 12 and poly evolver? Also I see the Muse in the background, hope to see a vid on that from you!
Straight music is a groove unto itself. Intention, stability and movement are so important. I do love me a modulated clock though - shame most daws cant generate clocks on a track by track basis.
Love your videos, they go into areas that many other videos about music don’t go into. I’m definitely use this in some of my music.
Also, Idk why or if others had this experience but the first song you played made it hard to hear you. Everything after 0:50 sounded good though.
And this is why AI will never succeed in replacing human input.
“untethered meandering nonsense” is a description I must memorize. This is both what I want to avoid and my most frequent dissatisfaction with amateur electronic music.
Some of my favourite - and earliest favourite - artists made a lot of their music in a very theatrical way, and that always seems to mean very variable time keeping for a dramatic effect that you can’t get otherwise and lots of stretched pauses: Debussy, early Queen, Jeff Buckley, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Enekk, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Björk, Alanis Morisette, Rage Against the Machine, Portishead, Radiohead, some other head… that’s what I would listen to in my 90’s childhood, and that kind of dramatic aesthetic seems to be intrinsic to what I want out of the music I make. Yet here I am trying to create something I love on a fucking computer…
…anyone wanna start a band?
Just my opinion I am wasting time if I don't play to a click or quantizing notes on the way in.
Choose your resolution and go
I really like that some drum machines (MPC) are intentionally off grid. I watched the video about comparing new Rolands (MC-s & TR-s) and MPC. While the Rolands are analytically precise, the MPC is kind of randomized (even if the 100% quantization is turned on). I personally can´t hear it, but I like it more than the rolands. The drummers are detecting it more effectively. Simply - Wabi Sabi 🙂 - the art of imperfection. But as the japanese ZEN masters say - to master the imperfection, you have to first understand the perfection and this is something what every young player hates 🙂
The problem with randomly changing the tempo is that's not how humans play music. DrumGizmo was, and still is, the only plugin which allows you to emulate that way of playing music. And it's incredibly effective. It will often start drifting out of time, then "notice" and overshoot slightly trying to catch up, then speedup and do the same. It doesn't do everything a human does when it comes to tempo, but it's the closest. Even those multi hundred dollar plugins with tens of GB of content don't do that. The way I do it is only one track is quantized to the grid, and sometimes not the percussion. Then that track is used as a metronome to other tracks. That often works better because you're not doing the "expressiveness tax" game, which is about as worse as the other "alternatives."
A naive question: What are all these equipments around you? It would be a good idea for a video that you explain their usage and why you have them.
Bang a stick for 5 minutes them sync your DAW to it.
There's a difference between playing to a beat, and being gated by a beat. One is clockwork, and the other isn't. There is a huge difference for me between listening to a piece that has been played by a person, and one which has purely mechanical timing. Does snapping to a grid kill the music? Does a sequencer kill the experience? Depends on the listener. For sequenced music, my mind starts focusing on the timing instead of the music, as if a jackhammer was operating. It's a completely different experience than when someone has played to a metronome.
Consider James Brown "Make it Funky." It keeps a tight rhythm, and it isn't clockwork. Would you still consider it a funk groove if the performance was subsequently snapped to a grid? Would the performance be improved? I think that is Beato's point, that snapping a performance to a grid, instead of improving the band's timing, is what "kills" music.
Music evolves inside humans it ebbs and flows within and around us, we are part of it. The grid is an aspect, or a product of the music, like the marks of a river on sand. The grid is just the sand or maybe a rock in the river.
Lol is that an Iridium 👀
Do not quantize anything! That's an order.
That grid is frustrating.
what’s the name for the outro soundtrack?
It has a name, but hasn't been released yet :) coming soon
Hey, I like making untethered nonsense! :) Not always, though
What's the track at 9:54?
I saw Untethered Meandering Nonsense open for Overwrought Linear Minutia at the Hollywood Bowl in '78. 🔥
"Save the moments when you want expressiveness for an impactful moment" Expresiveness shouldn't be confined to some peak point of the track.The whole track should be expressive. A band playing shouldn't keep rigit time (unlesss the genre calls for metronomic rigitity like techno), and in the past bands playing live and in the studio didn't keep rigit time... When it comes to classical musuc, conductors aren't metronomes either. Rather the opposite. You're more making a virtue out of necessity (people having to lock to some DAW's grid)
Anyone else like to just let this guy talk in the background and leave the room?
Its crazy how many people don't even try to play a real instrument or learn any theory and really enjoy clicking notes into the grid. The grid serves it's purpose, but how boring and lifeless.
Yeah, people have fun in different ways than we do. what a shame.
I mean, yes, but also open your mind a bit.
I've seen people make the most beautiful music that way becuase that IS their instrument, or they have a disability and it's the only way they can physically make music.
Sticking to the grid is a choice, and if you know your instrument and how to play it because you've prqacticed it and understand it, you can choose to either stick to it or go outside it as a creative choice.
Learning to make music that way is just another accessible route for people.
And please don't take this the wrong way, it's not meant as an insult to your personally, but by saying what you are you're writing off entire genres of music that are just as valid and exciting to some people as performance based music is, it feels a bit elitest. Everyone has their own preferecnes, and that's fine, but your music is no more or less valid than someone elses.
I agree learning to play a traditional instrument is a good thing but it absolutely sholdn't be a requirement.
I feel like a good example of someone learning to click notes in the grid as their instrument is nick mira
The guy just ears stuff or whistles stuff and translates it to the grid at lightning speed because he's at a point where duplicating/editing/removing/repitching must be second nature to him
Kinda like how people who write staff proficiently can write music without hearing it, but with the modern speed of copy paste lol
Joker 2 looks awful
please don’t