What Is Gridifcation

When we finished we got to go watch the sound guys at work. They meticulously gridified and autotuned every note. After it was all over I got the cd, I listened to my favorite tracks that I got to spend the semester playing with my friends, and it had no resemblance to what I knew our group to be. I think I threw the album away.

In one (which I can't find) he mentions a Japanese musician coming to LA to record with the top LA studio guys. It is very common to play to a click track, and one song just wasn't gelling. The studio guys said, "Let's try it one time without the click track." The Japanese musician said, "We're allowed to do that?" Anyway, they went ahead and the song came to life. The musician literally cried after because it felt so good to not be focused on tracking the click instead of being in the moment making music with a bunch of other humans.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@lelandsklar6363/videos

In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.

If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).

So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.

In contrast, when I check out older music from less successful musicians, it's often very imperfect; both in that it's boring, but in that there's little talent there.

Or, to translate: Gridification is modern style that doesn't make up for lack of talent; and ironically masks the talent that used to be there.

Related: I suggest checking out some of the newer Lemon Twigs albums. They're decent songwriters and excellent musicians. They went 100% analog on their most recent album, which I initially thought was a gimmick, until I read this article.

I would argue that there's probably a lot more nuance here when you look at how economics of music have changed in the last 50 years - it's now so much cheaper and easier to produce and listen to music. There are millions of bedroom producers experimenting with production techniques, and the market for music is completely saturated with more good music than anyone could possible listen to. Record labels just can't compete when it comes to making interesting, creative music, however they can still win at marketing. I think the modern charts now are less determined by what resonated well with audiences, but rather what has been calculated to be the most 'marketable' kind of music, and I suppose a metronomic tempo is an easier sell in this regard.

Also worth noting: a perfect tempo makes a song a lot easier to remix, which can often gain the song a lot more exposure than the original edit.

Remember, machines don’t kill music, people do—and quantization is one of the main weapons. ... Quantizing everything is the quickest way to suck the life out of a piece of music.

https://docs.native-instruments.com/pdf-guides/Battery_3_Man...

Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up? This is the most forced claudism I've seen in a long time.

I was thinking about this the other day as I was playing guitar adding slight pauses and swings to what I was playing. The imperfection makes things so much more interesting and fun imo.

It’s been interesting to notice that Suno-generated tracks have all kinds of subtle tempo drift, and the tempo maps look very similar to the irregularities shown in the article, at least from a numerical perspective. I have actually spent a lot of time quantizing AI-generated tracks to the grid (to aid chopping/editing), even creating automations that do it for me now when I ingest Suno tracks into Ableton for follow-up production work.

Unknown to me whether this is A) an emergent “imperfection” fundamental to the model and its training dataset, or B) something Suno intentionally injects to “humanize” their output, but knowing that low-effort Suno-generated tracks are currently flooding music distributors, I think it’s ironic that the same factor the author describes as exemplifying the very humanity of recorded music may also be one of the biggest tells that a song was AI-generated, for music being released today.

The point I am trying to make is that the processes that used to take a maniacal amount of time, resources and attention to detail can now be done quickly and automatically. Does Steely Dan's Aja sound better or worse than a modern album produced using modern techniques?

This comes down to taste and who am I to determine what someone else finds appealing in their music? Producers have been "producing" songs and moving them from their originally recorded state into something entirely different for decades.

I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music. But, would Trevor Horn have pulled some of the singers he produced back into tune before pressing the vinyl? Someone should ask him. I am inclined to say yes.

It was around the same time there was a backlash against the (rather egregious) use of Photoshop in advertising. But for better or worse, in both cases, the use of these and similar tools have become ubiquitous, just in a way that's more subtle.

Nowadays, hearing a band that isn't pitch corrected and quantized to all hell is refreshing, similar to seeing an actor with imperfect teeth. It feels like, for probably a whole host of reasons, almost every art form has been trending toward removing all the imperfections that make human art feel "human" and interesting. I don't expect this will get better now that we have AI.

Support your local bands!

It makes things much more challenging to sync up! You can't just speed up the slower song (or vice versa), because even if the averages match, it will still be all over the place from bar to bar. I now have much better workflows to deal with this, but for that first one, I spent a looong time manually adjusting things to get them to fit.

Working with tracks that were recorded to a click (or digitally gridified, as per the article), are much easier to work with. Match the tempos and everything automatically works. Definitely helps creating my mashups...

But I do agree with the post, in that it loses some indescribable human aspect. I love the push and pull of musicians trying to follow each other rather than concentrating on the click. Or even just pushing and pulling against oneself with things like rubato in classical music, sometimes accelerating, and sometimes slowing, at times almost to a dead stop, so as to build a sense of antecip.... pation.

[1] Link if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP74tMiXBU8&list=PLsj2XVeWwU...

I've also seen produces complain that the default BPM is 120 so they start there and later realize that it should have been changed. Minor annoyance, but it reveals the importance of defaults.

Griddification is trying to take each note and align it to a grid, the two axes being time and pitch. All notes (spoken or sung or struck) start aligned and are tonally compatible. In that sense it is like the grid you see on a piano roll describing music. Basically a de-jittered midi-style reduction of the actual music being player.

With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.

Does this (2019) article propose the opposite? That hit music usually contains a sort of pleasing surprise, and that over time our hits have to become more and more unpredictable musically?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pop-music-good-br...

That's now I'm reading it. But I'm a music consumer, not a music creator, so I may be missing some nuance or conflating related ideas.

The software had a quantization feature which he showed us how to use but he warned us not to use it on everything, because it makes music sound mechanical and less human. I guess that philosophy did not survive in the music industry.

People have been bitching about this since the player piano. In modern popular music, is it a consequence of electronic dance music? That tends to be tightly synchronized, since it comes from clocked devices.

When I sing and play guitar at the same time (which creates recording challenges with mic bleed and phase cancellation), and especially without a click track, there is an undeniable difference and there is magic in that difference. But the perfectionist in me wants to present a polished recording, so I end up "comping" (recording many times and picking the "best" bits), using a metronome, and a bit of gridifying, although usually just with drums if I played them. I draw the line at vocal tuning, I just can't.

This blog post is nothing new to me, I've had these thoughts a thousand times. But it's a great reminder. Especially in the age of AI. Our imperfection and vulnerability is our gift.

I think the thing that has changed is that the tools to "fix" the bugs are better and more commoditized, so they're used more. And similarly, production costs have gone down as hardware is commoditized, so there's more music to choose from. The last piece is that social media has made it popular to all like the same thing and make dance videos to the same songs, so already perfect little pop pieces climb up faster.

Excellent writing. I know nothing of this space, but this is so engaging.

One observation I have, by the way, on a related note, that I've heard some AI-generated vocals which blew autotuned humans out of the water. Oopsies, eh?

Not saying this as some kind of general "anti-AI" argument or anything. I'm not advocating for the Butlerian Jihad. I find AI a very useful tool, and I used it at work pretty much every day. But for art, which in a sense is a celebration of human creativity, something gets lost if we use AI to generate it, doesn't it?

Auto tune is just a signal that you are a player in the music business the way a distortion pedal used to signal transgressive taste, even though punk was indistinguishable from The Monkees, just performed by hiring cheap drug addicts who couldn’t read contracts.

Do pop musicians have talent, sure, but being a musician and being a recording artist are rarely the same thing.

Electronic music became pop and pop production now uses all the tools of electronic music.

This is why there are no "bands" anymore and everything is coming from solo producers & vocalists.

I literally do not care that someone can "hit high notes" or that "unlike this other artist, my favorite artist can actually sing." I'm listening to music, not grading music class students.

Die with a Smile sounds like the exception but I wouldn't discard the idea that those drums were entirely programmed / painted either. It's not like it's difficult to make a flam in a piano roll.

Why not pick from genres that don't predominantly use drum machines as a better comparison?

What I want to know is what the author thinks of drum machines, with their mechanical perfection. Roland's very first product, the TR-77 drum machine, was released in 1972, in time for his 1975 comparison. They have been popular ever since.

I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.

It’s almost amateurish when reading the music, but when you listen to it, it does have a very distinct feel to it.

Where in the binary between "you're a real musician who uses human feel/timing to create art" OR "you're a hopeless commercial grifter chasing perfection" do I fall?

[1] I hope all musicians feel this way

Nothing new can develop in a sterilized environment. Many discoveries were initially mistakes.

Some artists would gridify recording so people who come to their concerts enjoy their plays with "errors" on purpose.

As humans, we don't want to be seen what we spent our entire life to be considered err'ed. I understand the pitcher perfectness in that regard, though I'd still like unpolished "rock/metal" music.

Now I can only enjoy those raw moments in concerts.

I'm so tired of people reaching for the emotional impact of the word "violence" in contexts that are far removed from its actual meaning -- and this context is about the furthest removed I've seen to date.

> If we cannot hear and feel coordinated human time, we cannot learn the forms of felt life that make mutual recognition possible.

I actually laughed out loud.

Remember folks, "punching in" is Okay. Gridifying is Not Okay. Because ________, obviously.

Are electronica and hip hop worse for this? I suppose that's up for debate - but we now have multiple full generations of music listeners and critics who obviously, passionately love those genres, and they've been growing for decades. This is easy to see not just via charts but online discourse and the zeitgeist.

Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human? This is more subjective, and more debatable, but I would argue that hip hop has redefined what 'groove' can even mean, with its very off-the-grid, loose feel despite the technically very precise machine looping the beats (because producers nudge each beat off the grid, usually in very intentional ways, or play the beat in live then adjust it). And it's hard to argue that electronic dance music in its many forms hasn't made people move and connect with the music's rhythm in powerful ways, despite almost complete quantization in most dimensions.

I think purely looking at tempo stddev and not much else papers over these aspects a little much.

I like that as a family we can enjoy a lot of the same music, but it is notably different from how things went when I was a kid.

It is utterly baffling to me that this is a thing someone felt needed expressing. Surely, intuitively knowing this is part of being human?

How else do we explain the blues, love songs... anything?

Ugh. Ironic that this blog post lambasting the use of machines to achieve inhuman levels of perfection is so clearly ai slop brained. This is far from the only LLM idiom I saw in here.

- https://calibro35rk.bandcamp.com/music

Isn't every song recorded as every word singularly at a certain pitch? And timing done completely in the DAW instead of while recording.

Barely was singing when a friend of mine did ``professional'' recording, and had to know each pitch of a song to perfection, since no overlap was ever sung.