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Gridding is a choice and when producer/engineers work with good musicians they can choose not to grid the fuck out of everything.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
Same with gridding- everything in the 00's was totally gridded but we are starting to see records that preserve the timing of the players.
I haven't looked but I'd be surprised if any Clutch records were gridded- Jean-Paul Gaster is such a monster drummer that it is just unnecessary and counter-productive.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
Yes, there was a pressure to use Beat Detective and autotune, but that's mainly because there was a pressure from the record companies at the time to produce ever more releases with as little money as possible. As he showed in that video, these tools save masses of time. Not only from the perspective of tracking, but also when you want to make wholesale changes to the music itself. That actually gave the labels more control over the end product - they could literally change drum beats and song structures to make them more radio-friendly after the fact with almost trivial effort (and they'd be paying one person to do it instead of paying the whole band plus engineers to re-record it).
Sure, blaming the existence of the tools is quick, easy route to success (and it always gets a ton of YouTube views), but that's as much of a fallacy as the over-use of the very thing they're complaining about. The real cause, for me, was actually the initial conditions which made the use of these plugins a necessity; top-down pressure from the business side of the music industry. The labels simply wanted to chuck as much cheaply-produced music at the wall to see what stuck. That cheapness then became the benchmark for all subsequent releases...and boom! Sanitised rock music everywhere.
The hilarious part is that he's trying to address rock music here, where there's another place it's even worse - the Nashville country factory.
The issue isn't the existence and/or use of the tech on a conceptual level, it's the reliance on it to "make product" quickly and cheaply, to the detriment of the ultimate quality of the music.
As for Nashville country, there is a growing movement away from the awful sugar-coated generic pop nonsense, but it'll be a long time before that stuff has gone away.
Tools aren’t inherently evil, and usage of them isn’t necessarily equally skilled either.
Thus 95% of the music released was nothing to do with rock (and its associated genres) - and the marketing was easier too, because it focused on an individual.
This is precisely the point where music became a commodity, leading to the situation today where there's a glut of music around, worth almost nothing, treated by most young folk as something to have on in the background while other things are happening as opposed to something to focus on and enjoy in itself.
I use Easy Drummer 2 for my meagre recordings and it has a humanise feature to avoid hard gridding. Makes the beats sound so much more natural.
That said, there's a time and place for being absolutely bang on - Megadeth did it deliberately on the Countdown to Extinction album and the whole album sounds like a relentless marching army of metal.
This is where it's at for me.
Editing gives you the choice to present your music as you intend. And I maintain that a lot of people can't tell unless the editing is bad, the performance was so bad that the editing can't feasibly sound good (so the raw probably didn't either), or it's deliberately trying to sound 'edited'.
I like the presentation of his videos and knowledge that he has but I think rock music isn't in the mainstream anymore because it's mostly homogeneous and everyone sounds the same. I think rock music today, is more about the experience of hearing it live and the energy of that than it is listening to it on Spotify.
The example he used of Halestorm is a great example in my eyes, I bet if you went to their show it'd probably be a blast but would I listen to an entire album of their stuff? No thanks. I think rock music producers, bands etc. should look at how they can sound more distinctive rather than blame beat detective for the reason they're not making platinum records anymore.
Actually I think it's more than just the music, I agree with Finn McKenty on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCHj2GHEhOo
But that actually isn't what humans do when they're playing music.
Source: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/PT.3.1650
An LRC is a long-range correlation. It's basically a description of how a drummer adjusts their synchronisation with the rest of the music over time. This affects the perceived humanity of the performance.