Why don't pop songs have real drums?

In terms of songwriting going 'downhill', I'm not sure if that's the case but if it is there is a plausible explanation.

Record companies have been in trouble for a long time now, trying to make money. As have film studios. If we take the example of a popular film genre and analogise it to music, we can draw a valid comparison.

Superhero movies are big, big business now. Twenty years ago we had a few but they didn't saturate the cinemas in quite the way they do now. Around about ten years ago, Nolan's Batman movies got great press and audience numbers and other studios caught on. Marvel comics and their characters (and yes, I'm aware Batman is DC) started having a few hit films and in the last five years or so, there's barely a quarter goes by that there isn't a large-budget superhero action blockbuster that's new on screen. Some of them are good (Nolan's Batman, Wonderwoman, Avengers), some of them not so good (Batman vs. Superman, Suicide Squad). They pretty much all made good money. People went to see them. The merchandising did well. Films that are not financially successful aren't made into franchises and no sequels are made.

The point is, it became a winning financial formula and is an inherently conservative approach.

Move on to music and exactly the same thing has occurred. A particular pop sensibility has developed and studios - afraid to lose money - have digested the financials, worked out the general characteristics of what sells and what doesn't and rather than spending money on 'experiments' have doubled down on what they know will sell. The result? The music all starts to sound fairly similar. In that milieu there are some great songs, there are some really poor songs.

Aesthetic judgement is, however, completely irrelevant. How much money did it make? The more trouble the industry is in, the more I homogenous I expect the charts to sound.
 
I don't think that's for lack of passion, sincerity, or because the production side is too slick. The songs just aren't there.

Bermuda

But I think an argument could be made that the songs are there, but over use of slick production has squeezed all the "there" out of them to the point we no longer here the "there".

Songs are so overly compressed that they don't breathe, and there are no dynamics, and the songs just become digital noise.

If you put Lady Gaga or Katy Perry in a time machine bak to the late 60's with Phil Spector producing and Hal Blaine on drums with others of the Wrecking Crew surrounding them, I think we might have something. But of course, since we don't have a time machine, we can't prove it.
 
I have no idea how I would react if I went to a concert event that didn’t have a drummer.

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Apparently you would enjoy it if you ingested enough ecstasy. :)

It blew me away the first time I saw (not in person) a DJ playing for a 10,000 plus crowd

I've noticed a bit of a trend for solo guys who went back to using drummers over a machine simply for a stage presence. A keyboard or guitar guy can program the bass, guitars, keys, strings and backing vocals and use a live drummer to have some movement/action going on stage.
 
Apparently you would enjoy it if you ingested enough ecstasy. :)

It blew me away the first time I saw (not in person) a DJ playing for a 10,000 plus crowd

I've noticed a bit of a trend for solo guys who went back to using drummers over a machine simply for a stage presence. A keyboard or guitar guy can program the bass, guitars, keys, strings and backing vocals and use a live drummer to have some movement/action going on stage.

A successful performer told me that back in the 80s he tried to perform live with programmed drums, but without a drummer moving on stage, the performance was just dead. It was just him and a guitar. He eneded up getting a drummer to perform live.

He probably could have just hired dancers though.
 
Are there any pop songs that have reduced "percussion" part? From what I heard they all have increased percussion parts. I would conclude the reason that they don't use real drums, is that minimalist one drummer shows aren't good enough.
 
Are there any pop songs that have reduced "percussion" part? From what I heard they all have increased percussion parts. I would conclude the reason that they don't use real drums, is that minimalist one drummer shows aren't good enough.

Yes, machines don't have human limits, and the inhuman limits (ie. subtleties) - to paraphrase the great Leslie Neilson - don't amount to a hill of beans any more. Part of this comes from the fact that today's society is loud - more people, more machine sounds - Joni Mitchell's acoustic guitar isn't going to cut through the way it once did.

There's been a strong push to "tidy up" rock and pop, to legitimise it with precision. Sloppy hippy dippy playing like the Stones or Hawkwind is passe. So now pop is clean and mean and made by a machine!
 
Yes, machines don't have human limits, and the inhuman limits (ie. subtleties) - to paraphrase the great Leslie Neilson - don't amount to a hill of beans any more. Part of this comes from the fact that today's society is loud - more people, more machine sounds - Joni Mitchell's acoustic guitar isn't going to cut through the way it once did.

There's been a strong push to "tidy up" rock and pop, to legitimise it with precision. Sloppy hippy dippy playing like the Stones or Hawkwind is passe. So now pop is clean and mean and made by a machine!

Funny, this just reminded me that at the turn of the 20th century Tin Pan Alley was called the song factory and it was criticized for creating mass produced sterile music. And that was people like Irving Berlin, Charles K. Harris, Jerome Kern, Harry Von Tilzer, and George Gershwin they were talking about. Granted these writers had a very high level of professionalism which is discernible in their music but when did that become a bad thing? Why is there this feeling that poor musicianship is somehow more authentic or real? I always found it odd that people would credit garage bands with very little musical ability with more musical authenticity than the musicians that spent years of their lives studying and bringing themselves up to a professional level of facility. It shows up in mainstream pop music with the advent of Rock n Roll and reappears with punk rock(musically identical but with distorted guitar and edgier lyrics). Sorry i think i've strayed from the topic a bit but the thread brought all this stuff up in my mind
 
If it results in the exact same performance, then what's the difference?

Let me convey a little story. On one of Al's recent albums, there's a particular original song on which I played the drums live. I have to brag here, I did a particularly excellent job, and there's not a moment where you'd think "that's a live drummer." It was that tight and even and solid, and the song lent itself to that vibe, so it was perfect.

But I still wonder why I spent the time playing it when I could have just programmed it for the exact same result. I don't think I was trying to prove something, but I know I ended up working harder behind the drums than I would have behind the keyboard. Note: I get paid the same either way. :)

Just saying, if the result is the same, then what's the difference?

Bermuda

The difference for me is that we're talking about art, so it's absolutely fair game to care about whether or not it was made by a human or a machine. Whether we can be fooled or not is a different point, I think.

There's more to how we feel about art than the bottom line. I can care about whether a product is hand-made vs. made by a machine, and it's got nothing to do with whether or not I can tell the difference. People are moved by the things other people do. It's about expression and empathy for the human condition. It's about an appreciation for a skill acquired through hard work. Human achievement matters to people. Machines can do almost everything faster and better than us, but we still have spelling bees and people still try to out-run each other on tracks.

I get that from a business perspective, the music sells regardless of how it was made, whether it was performed by man or machine. But I think there's a tendency to view the act of caring about the particulars as some kind of thing everyone just needs to get over. And it feels sometimes like the people who are concerned with such things are just viewed as Luddites who can't adapt to a changing world. And I don't see it that way.
 
It was just him and a guitar. He eneded up getting a drummer to perform live.

I swear I read somewhere that Smashing Pumpkins used to perform with a drum machine before getting Jimmy Chamberlin. I can only imagine the difference they felt.

What I can't imagine is programming a machine in a tedious fashion to recreate Chamberlin's parts. Sounds like a royal headache.
 
But I think an argument could be made that the songs are there, but over use of slick production has squeezed all the "there" out of them to the point we no longer here the "there".

Songs are so overly compressed that they don't breathe, and there are no dynamics, and the songs just become digital noise.

I don't think processing is a detriment to a song's enjoyment, as much as poor production and lack of melody, groove, and hook would be. More than anything, a song has to have a hook. Even today, with product not selling. The song has to stand on its own.

Bermuda
 
The difference for me is that we're talking about art, so it's absolutely fair game to care about whether or not it was made by a human or a machine. Whether we can be fooled or not is a different point, I think.

To be clear, machines don't spontaneously create anything without a person behind it. Drum parts aren't spat out by a computer. They're composed by a person. Ideally IMO, a drummer.

Discounting music because some or all of the sounds were generated by a computer, is very unfair to the composers of that music (has nothing to do with whether you like the music or not, that's another matter.) Even Zappa relied on a Synclavier (or was it a Fairlight?) for his later works. Was he no longer creating music or art because of that?
 
When I create a drum part for my own personal music, I'm typically using a drum machine/program to compose the parts with. Back in the 90's when I was a more serious songwriter, my idea was to just learn enough drums to play on my own music. But now I compose my part on a drum machine or program. Of course, if I did any actual studio work with my songs, I think I would use acoustic drums for the most part, but I'm not against using programmed drum tracks.
 
To be clear, machines don't spontaneously create anything without a person behind it. Drum parts aren't spat out by a computer. They're composed by a person. Ideally IMO, a drummer.

Discounting music because some or all of the sounds were generated by a computer, is very unfair to the composers of that music (has nothing to do with whether you like the music or not, that's another matter.) Even Zappa relied on a Synclavier (or was it a Fairlight?) for his later works. Was he no longer creating music or art because of that?
The fact that the parts are created by a person is important, yes. Although, there are instances now where AI software has "written" pop music. Granted, all of this was enabled by humans who built the software and the machines, but that line between human creativity and machine is being further blurred all the time.

I don't think ANY of the things we're talking about invalidate the art. I'm not discounting any of it. I love plenty of music with programmed parts. I listen to a lot of pop music, rap, techno... everything. I'm not just saying that, you should see my playlists!

I'm just defending the position that it's okay to care about whether a part was programmed or played by a musician. Maybe you don't think that's really being argued here, but in the larger scheme of things, beyond this forum, I feel it often is.
 
To be clear, machines don't spontaneously create anything without a person behind it. Drum parts aren't spat out by a computer. They're composed by a person. Ideally IMO, a drummer.

au contraire mon frère, this music documentary proves otherwise.

https://youtu.be/hyCIpKAIFyo


But seriously, when these first came out years ago, I watched maybe one all the way through. Totally soulless. And it sort of demonstrates why we go to see performances with live human beings. There's nuance. There's soul.

I too don't get the hords of people going to watch someone spin records. There's nothing to watch. I guess the folks are there for the mind numbing thump, thump, thump
 
The fact that the parts are created by a person is important, yes. Although, there are instances now where AI software has "written" pop music.

Is any of that music out there, or just in the experimental phase?

If it's still behind closed doors, then it doesn't count. Yet.
 
Is any of that music out there, or just in the experimental phase?

If it's still behind closed doors, then it doesn't count. Yet.
Good question. And I'm not sure. I need to check into it more.

As an aside, I've always been fascinated by the advances in chess software, which is an interesting prism to view AI advances through. I've played chess since I was a kid and I had a good friend who went into physics and math who shared my love for chess. He and I used to geek out with these computer chess reports where this really dedicated chess master would play hundreds of games between various computers to establish their ratings and relative strength. I can't imagine how many thousands of hours that took, but we ate it up.

Computer chess became a bigger deal when machines started beating the best humans, at which point it hit the public consciousness, because it was portrayed by then as a "battle" between man and machine. But the most interesting time for me was way before that, when there were still philosophical debates about the best way to make a computer that could play chess. I feel like the discussions about software and music are sort of at that early stage now.
 
Originally posted by Macarina
au contraire mon frère, this music documentary proves otherwise.
https://youtu.be/hyCIpKAIFyo

That's an exercise in animation, not music creation. A person created the melody and rhythm, and a person directed the animation.


I too don't get the hords of people going to watch someone spin records. There's nothing to watch. I guess the folks are there for the mind numbing thump, thump, thump

That's basically it, they come to dance. The presence of a person 'spinning records' at a dance is nothing new though, the sock hops of the '50s featured a person with record player and a stack of wax (I wonder if any of the attenders wished there was a live band playing?) and the discotheque was very popular in the '60s.

Bermuda
 
Computer chess became a bigger deal when machines started beating the best humans, at which point it hit the public consciousness, because it was portrayed by then as a "battle" between man and machine.

The thing is, it's always been a person against the computer. There's partial human interaction required. Has anyone made a program where the computer plays chess with itself? Would there be a point?

Granted, it's possible for a computer to generate a (technically) unique melody and rhythm based on certain parameters (such as: here are 500,000 published songs, don't copy any of them!) The results would certainly be novel, but it's not going to stop musicians from creating, and performing music.

My acceptance (and dare I say skill?) at programming hasn't killed my passion for playing acoustic drums.

Bermuda
 
Is it "real" if the music is made by a machine that does not use electricity?

WINTERGATAN is all about music machines. The one linked is a wind-up marble machine.
 
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