Re: [Fwd: Re: Can I have your feedback?]

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

On 6/8/12 4:16 AM, Rainer Straschill wrote:
> If done by an accomplished musician, I find the combination of the
> machine-like (because it's a machine) and accurate human inaccurate
> groove really interesting.

I do, too, Rainer.    I remember the first time I ever saw Ultravox play 
in the 70's.
They had a drummer with a kick, snare, hi hat and ride cymbal (unheard 
of minimalism in the
world of 70's excess) and he was playing with a Roland CR-78 analogue 
drum machine.

You could feel his 'humaneness' (re: imperfection) as it related to the 
perfectly quantized
drum machine (there were only perfectly quantized drum machines in those 
days.......changeable
quantization wouldn't occur, technologically until the 80's).

I was stunned and have been a fan of drum machines ever since, to this day.

And there is an interesting thing about the interaction of *perfect* 
timing and *human timing*
in human pattern recognition.

In literature or film they talk about the "reasonable suspension of 
disbelief"..........you
either buy the premise of a Science Fiction movie or you don't.   It 
isn't real of course, but
if you can suspend the concept that it's not real, then the experience 
can seem very real.

This can happen in drum programming as well.
Early on, when the first digitally sampled drum machines came out (the 
Linn Drum, the EMU Drumulator and others)
Record producers learned that if you played perfectly quantized drum 
samples in a groove that it felt 'stiff'.
But they quickly learned that they programmed all of the kick, snare and 
tom parts to be perfectly quantized and then
had a studio drummer come in and play hi hats and cymbals over the top 
of this,  the listener would
*buy* the results and be fooled into thinking that the entire track was 
real.

I've found that one can use as little as 10% to 30% non quantized tracks 
on top of rigidly quantized tracks
and the net result is that the tracks will sound *human*.

Another thing I've discovered is that the faster the BPM of a track and 
the more complex the track is syncopatively,
(as in Kay'lon's first example track) the more effective it is to use 
rigid quantization.

You are already asking the brain a lot to *hear* a very syncopated beat 
(that one is a much longer discussion and is
the basis of the Rhythm Intensive course that I teach to melodic 
musicians) so if you throw in relative rhythmic inaccuracy
to the mix,  it just makes the whole thing more problematic.

Also, in Kay'lon's particular case,   to quantize those drum beats at 
the onset of the piece can then enable him
to play with non quantized/human feel on top of the tracks with his 
initial organ rhythm parts.

To me, it is fascinating that we can convince the brain, unconsciously 
to have the 'reasonable suspension of disbelief'
through how we loop and how we program.

Rick