“When you learn music, you’re trained to think [in terms of a] “right way” and a “wrong way.” - Jacob Collier, from TFA
Only if you have a lousy teacher. The best teachers are, in a sense, history professors. Their job is to show you how to imitate the masters. In that sense, Collier might be right, given one can objectively measure whether you're close to, or far from, emulating a given artist. But imitation is only a means to an end. You learn to imitate the masters so that you can stand on their shoulders and invent something new. I suspect that's what J Dilla was up to.
"Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate" - Clark Terry, paraphrased.
Related: Jojo Mayer's "The distance between 0 and 1" TED Talk [0]
Being a prospect of a drummer for more than 20 years (and still without an own drum set...) I've struggled with timing in general. The fluctuations on tempo, playing precise (in like don't playing flams unintentionally when playing two notes at unison with different limbs) and subdivisions.
And as said in this thing, mainstream music nowadays uses all sorts of things to "perfect" things - most notably autotune and the "quantized" rythm thing. Their effects are subtle but I am almost sure even the most untrained ear can feel modern music records just sound different than at least a couple of decades ago.
All in all it made me realize that while mastering time keeping is the main task of a drummer, another is the ability to play loose (I recall one video from the 'youtuber' "the 80/20 drummer" about that) and all that's between those two ways to play time.
People can hear it and that's expected and intentional. To a large extent the to-the-cent precise vocal pitch and quantized beat is the "sound" of modern popular music. There are a huge number of tiny decisions that affect the final "feel" or sound of a recording and there have been since the beginning of recorded music. Each era/genre combo in that matrix has a different set of norms and expectations around those decisions.
The median technical skill and musicianship of most mainstream musicians now is just unreal compared to any point in the past that I know of. Applying those tools in that way is not technically necessary and is essentially part of their artistic statement: "I am part of this moment, I am influential within it." Musicians, even popular ones, still do release recordings with a different feel, but that is making another sort of statement.
I'm also not the biggest fan of this sound, I like a fair bit of sloppiness in my music. But it's a mistake to consider this either a necessary or accidental tradeoff with these tools. It's intentional, even if it may be one of those things that most producers wish they could just not do.
Another factor, minor in general but relevant to the current thread. The more you freak your relationship to the pulse the more you need to be precise elsewhere to keep the feeling of mastery over your instrument & performance. Being late can be in a groove, being flat can be really feeling it, being both registers as sloppy etc.
In the style influenced by Dilla, the beats don't land where you "expect" them to, and for that to feel intentional they need to be quantized precisely so they're off by consistent amounts. There's flexibility here for sure and good live percussionists can push both very far. But in a recording, there's already other pressure to nail everything to the grid so why not play it safe.
"Just fix it in protools" is a common phrase uttered by too many musicians to count in the pages of TapeOp as well as their podcasts, to a degree that would seem to argue against your points raised here. There may be many artists that are technically proficient and still employ these techniques as an element of their aesthetic, but there are far more who acknowledge using it as a crutch.
Agreed, I don’t think most current-day musicians are amazing or even technically proficient at what they do. Hell, most people can’t even name a non-vocalist instrumentalist who recently appeared on a record they enjoyed.
Not that that’s some kind of mark of shame on anyone, styles and tastes differ. But I know that personally in my own musicianship (semi-pro/bedroom artist) I’m absolutely nowhere near the level of some of my idols, who themselves aren’t as much once-in-a-generation virtuosos as they are masters of feel, production, and atmosphere.
I’m still listening to that TEDX talk - but I can’t help thinking in a few places it’d be great to sample his voice and use it on a very drum heavy dance track. E.g. when he says “there was once a drumbeat that acted as a signal to a whole generation of kids to go wiiild and rebel against their parents” - various other phrases too - could sound great in isolation on a track.
Hey Junglist45689 old buddy -- in that TedX talk at 5mins JoJo plays the legendary intro to Sing Sing Sing, and then he plays another intro to a song that "25 years later another acted as a signal to make the next generation go wild and rebel against their parents" -- what is the second song?
Software can quantize with a margin of error to imitate humans. And you can configure the “swing” effect. In the end it sounds just as human would. With perfect quantization it definitely sounds dry and a tell tale sign of a noob beat maker :)
This is brilliant - the idea and the execution. Love it.
I encountered a slight bug. When I first scrolled through it, the 'outside the club background ambience' sound never stopped and I found it quite distracting, especially when listening to the examples.
After I had scrolled up to the beginning and then down again it stopped - so I assume first time was a glitch. If you encounter it too, I suppose it is not intentional.
I had a similar experience with the club beat playing which confused me with the later examples. After seeing your post, I revisited the page and it worked fine that time.
Really cool page. I'm not musical at all but find the theory very interesting and this breaks it down in a very accessible way. I have to say I struggled to follow some of the later examples in my head, as it was difficult for me to tell the component pieces apart while also following the timing, but if I tried hard I could pick it up.
Kind of a different topic, but this reminded me of when I first read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It really opened my eyes to how literature (and art in general) didn't need to follow a set formula or be tied to any structure or reality to be enjoyable. It helped me appreciate other surrealist and magic realist art which I enjoy for, seemingly, a lot of the same reasons as people enjoy J Dilla's work.
Very interesting but swing is so difficult to hear in real tracks. Also I noted that in the "swing" example, if I enable swing on bass and hi-hats then kick and snare (which are supposed to be straight) start to sound slightly off beat.
Only if you have a lousy teacher. The best teachers are, in a sense, history professors. Their job is to show you how to imitate the masters. In that sense, Collier might be right, given one can objectively measure whether you're close to, or far from, emulating a given artist. But imitation is only a means to an end. You learn to imitate the masters so that you can stand on their shoulders and invent something new. I suspect that's what J Dilla was up to.
"Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate" - Clark Terry, paraphrased.