It’s not just pitch correction: with modern music-making software, it’s as easy to snap analog recordings of instruments to a time signature as it is to program EDM. When everything is quantized, says Rick Beato, it loses its humanity—and becomes boring.
People actually do this. This is why everything sounds like it’s on a computer now. Because it is. … A live drummer turned into a drum machine
Beato’s a master of the software and he shows you how to do it, so his critique is technically instructive instead of just a YouTube rant about something he doesn’t like. The tracks he uses really do sound uncannily “off” after being quantized. But I can’t help but point out that now I want to get Beat Detective.
A good terrible project would be to quantize hits by The Beatles and other artists where isolated tracks are readily available, then reupload them to YouTube without disclosing what’s been done, and watching as the quantized versions displace the originals in online media embeds, and TV and radio play, because so many people just get everything from YouTube.
For years I subtly photoshopped famous photos and paintings, posted them at inflated dimensions to fool Google Images into thinking they were the highest-quality versions, and waited for them to turn up elsewhere. I’ve spotted “my” versions in news stories, TV segments, even a handful of books and magazines. I have no plans to disclose them, but if you ever see, say, Henry Kissinger with mouths for eyes in a school textbook, you know who to blame.
Don’t worry, though: an AI-driven renaissance in truth is coming, scouring everything we’ve ever made to find and expose differences and correspondences in the details, every trivial act of plagiarism and derivation, every well-hidden sampled fragment in hit songs, every complex pattern of footstep-hiding in academia, every swiped comic book panel, every “stolen” Twitter joke whose furious “creator” actually got it from an out-of-print Bob Hope joke book. We’re gonna hate it!