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.

Check this one out: https://soundcloud.com/cassalpopolo/centaurs-in-the-jungle

Ha, excellent. So someone did it in 2019. Was it you?

Yep :)

Live-coded version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XM2Fn2IWRM

I love that ted talk, and I'm planning a revised version of this track for my next album - that track from 2019 is quite demo-quality

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?

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.

(Professional recording engineer here)

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.

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 :)