Man vs Machine

[SomeoneYouKnew]

And finally...without a doubt, playing to drum machines has improved my timing. However, "improved" timing to me also means the ability to play a little ahead or a little behind with accuracy , not just being metronomic.

This is the art of nuance. Employing the right amount of metric aberration, in the right places.

[Anderton]

This is the art of nuance. Employing the right amount of metric aberration, in the right places.

 

"Metric Aberration" - great term. Would love to see it as a menu item someday on a DAW

[Lee Flier]

A lot of people overlook that some tools that let you snap things to a grid also let you snap the grid to you. This is a variation on the "tap a beat map" thing that was introduced in the early days of MIDI. This was incredibly valuable to me when adding percussion to an acoustic guitar track played without a click. I generated a click that followed the guitar, and played percussion to the click.

 

YES... I bring this up a lot, because lots of people presume they "have to" play to a click in order to make editing and timed effects work. Nowadays, you don't - as you say, there are various ways to make the tempo map follow you. THAT, far as I'm concerned, is making technology serve us instead of the other way.

 

One thing that really irks me about "flat-lined" tempo curves is there's absolutely no reason for them, even if the band played to a click originally. With time-stretching and other techniques, you can go in after the fact and add some life to a track if the band didn't do so in the first place.

 

Yes, you can, but IMO it's no substitute for letting the music breathe at the source (and I realize you're going in after the fact and trying to breathe life into something that was cut to a click, but just saying). You can create a tempo map ahead of time that has pre-programmed tempo changes at certain points, too, but to me this type of thing is an expressive element that most of the time is better off when it happens spontaneously. Trying to map out all of it ahead of time is a little like you're about to have sex and you have an hour long discussion beforehand about when you're going to speed up or slow down - although you might have a general idea, you really don't know for sure till it happens. And thinking about it ahead of time, in itself, can defeat the purpose. A good deal of musical expressiveness, the stuff that makes music magic, happens on a subconscious level - if you let it.

[Lee Flier]

 

I reckon ALL musicians, not only drummers have a better sense of time since the introduction of the drum machine. The audience also have been affected.

 

 

On one hand you could call it a "better" sense of time... on another hand you could call it intolerance for any sort of deviation from "perfect" time, which IMO is not a good thing for music at all.

[Lukenskywalker]

 

I dunno...the OP made sense to me. Reminds me of an acoustic drummer I heard doing drum 'n' bass stuff, which I always thought was the province of machines. But he was really good. And then I realized that Mitch Mitchell kind of did drum 'n' bass...

 

 

and Jimi was getting extremely exasperated by Noel Redding's bass playing at this juncture, often times replaying the bass line after everyone went 'home' from the studio.

[philbo]

 

The best drummer is the one who doesn't automatically play everything 15-25bpm faster at the gig !!

 

 

AND 15 to 25 dB louder...

 

The best drummers I've worked with were able to play the same stuff as well quietly as loudly. It's pretty rare to find one... And even more rare to find one who uses dynamics as an expressive tool.