Quantizing becasue it fits the arrangement/song....?

its tricky, but I think 99% don’t understand. I’ll try to explain.

Musicians who have bad cue mix’s or aren’t developed all the way often will be a little sloppy in the time domain, so when you slide them to grid they sound tighter, cleaner, better etc. Most of the sloppiness is probably cue mixes IME.

Musicians who ARE developed AND have good cue mixes.. can push and pull within the tempo to create emotional impact. They can do this over the course of a few measures even with a click, decelerating and accelerating similar to heart rate.. nobody’s heart and mind is a robot, so that motion is a high level artistic choice. Think classical. It’s also difficult to pull off, and if failed won’t sound right, so it’s not always great. Many engineers simply always choose quantizing, eliminating that in the process while also leveling the field so the bad musicians and great ones all sound the same.

Lastly, production choices: quantized music is tight, boxy, packaged sounding. I call it mall music, because it’s awesome music to go shopping to. So if your target market is people who love to shop, with lots of credit cards... just not a care in the world.. quantized is the way to go.

If you are an angry or moody rock band and all your fans are depressed and poor, quantized is a DUMB thing to do.. (not always.. but usually IMO)

Modern music is almost always damn near perfect with regards to timing and pitch. I like that sound, so I have no issue time aligning and tuning as necessary.

There's usually a sweet spot between too loose/natural and too robotic/overdone. That's what I aim for.

YMMV.

There's no right or wrong....but depends on the music.

Personally, I think you can certainly ruin a vibe with quantization.

If you are doing overdubs to a track that was done with perfect MIDI or perfect samples, you really have no choice. But if you make an effort to capture good parts along the way and don't quantize, its amazing how much you can get away with, and how much it effects the feel of a song.

Sometimes the drummer needs to push the band or lag behind in the pocket. Quantizing this ruins the feel. In many bands, the drummer is the primary songwriter and band leader. Why not let him push forward or hold and constantly pull his band mates back together verse by verse if it’s his band and everyone knows it?

In metal, often there’s one guitarist who writes everything whom the less technically adept drummer ends up playing to for most of the song. Why change that if it works and that’s how they play it?

Why make the recording of the band the platonic ideal of the written material as it would appear on a page rather than a captured as well as possible passionate performance of the band? Most of these artist can’t even read music. With overdubs, this has always been somewhat possible but records like The Stooges’ Fun House have always been realer than real performances that work better than 80s drum machine music’s abstracted visions of what everyone knows is an impossible reality. It’s like practical effects aging better than cgi. Don’t be Spinoza.

60s and 70s have the best sounding drums and drum performances. Even classical music now is often a race to the bottom of who can play the most robotically. Major and well-distributed labels pretty much only release new music that might as well have been written by robots too.

Whatever works!
I'll often have quantized drums and leave everything else a little loose indie rock stuff.

Some styles like punk rock sound weird to me when guitars and bass aren't pushing a bit...


Modern metal is basically electronic music now, quantized midi drums, quantized guitars.

It really depends on the genre and I've often destroyed the vibe of a song over quantizing...

Here's a tip that might help....

When you're analyzing the rhythmic aspect of a song, THAT;s when you need to be careful, cause it's easy to keep pushing deeper and deeper into the correction thing.  So be careful, when you're in that zone.

But....

When you're just casually listening or mixing or doing other production things, if there's something that KEEPS pulling you out of the zone of getting into the song - THOSE - are the things that you should fix.  Anything that consistently pulls me out of listening gets fixed.

Yeah definitely. And I feel it's a bit of a vicious circle, people started to over produce things and now  the ear of the general public is tuned to everything sounding perfect. I had a younger musician that I produced who at first thought the Who recordings sounded small and badly played when I introduced him to it, now he's really come around on it but it took time.

I think another problem is, most bands now record in small studios and record everything separately, and a lot of them don't play that well so gridding is kind of a necessity and sometimes one of the reasons some bands don't evolve.

I've had it happen a couple of times, I get a band in, they can't play for shit, I end up spending most of the session just editing. 
They end up being happy about the product, though I warn them that what they're hearing isn't real, it's not what they really sound like but that it gives them a base to go out find gigs, and also hear how it's supposed to sound, and that if they work on their instruments, and everybody is disciplined with tempo work at home, they'll end up sounding a lot better than the gridded version.

But unfortunately a lot of the time, they come back a year later and nothing's changed and I actually wonder sometimes if I'm doing them a disservice because I remember my first recordings as a teen were on the tail end of the tape era, no editing and we sucked and our first recording was humiliating and a wake up call. I didn't record for almost 2-3 years after that but when I did I was ready.
It's a fine line, because I know that had I not edited, some of these bands would've been really unhappy with my work and I would've been unhappy too because my recordings would come out sloppy compared to the guy next door who quantizes everything...

I don't work with those kind of clients anymore as most of my work is my own music production and the few bands I do work, I record all the basics live and I'm much happier with the results.

True anecdotal story that applies here I think.

So...I had to do an arrangement / takedown / production of a Sinatra song for a Sinatra impersonator.  I did the song, and orchestrated it exactly like the recording.  But the impersonator kept telling me it was wrong.  I went over and over it with a fine tooth comb and it was perfect.  And I do mean perfect.  Tempo changes, voicing, everything.  Well...except one tiiiiny thing.  (Keep in mind, this dude was beyond insanely fanatical.  He'd literally sung over this song thousands of times.  He had every inflection, etc. down perfect.).

Finally after going back and forth with him, I got the guy in to the studio, imported the Sinatra song into the session to put it up against the programmed band / orchestra - and low and behold, there was a section in the song where Hal Blaine (RIP Hal, miss seeing you around) had a little bobble on one fill in the song.  (I know, heresy, right??  haha). But I had programmed it in and auto corrected the fill to be "right" - cause it was a mistake in a live vocal / orchestra / band take that got overlooked cause the rest of the take was.....well....legendary.  Well, this dude didn't want right, he wanted it with the warts.  So I f'd it up exactly like Hal did, and he was happy.  (It wasn't a huge deal, just a little timing bauble that most would never notice.)

Sometimes, we get used to the inconsistencies in older songs that we know, and we grow to love them.  In new stuff we're producing, the danger is to sanitize and iron out all inconsistencies until all humanity is gone.  That can be a crime, and coming back years later can be quite a disappointment after you have some perspective.


But yeah.....for the other 95%....