Re: Why pitch-corrected vocals sound so mechanical

On 2025-04-11 4:13 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDJF4lR3_eg

Just as pitch-correction alters the pitch of notes to make them "perfect", quantization alters the placement of notes to make them rhythmically "perfect". For instance, if the drummer's high hat hits are a little bit off the beat, quantization can shift them to be exactly on the beat. This too makes the playing sound mechanical. I've heard several musicians bemoan the (over)use of quantization just as "Fil" bemoans the use of pitch-correction in this video.
This video is a brief explanation of quantization without much of the philosophizing about whether it is good or bad. I'm sure there are other videos that examine the issue more thoroughly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LtY2aATl0 [7 minutes]
Note: He makes several uses of the term "DAW" (spelled out as individual letters) without explaining it. DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation, essentially the software you use to do the recording, pitch-correction, quantization etc.
For what it's worth, I've often heard analysts note that bands like The Beatles, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin definitely speed up and slow down perceptably in some of their well-known recordings, even though they had fine drummers. If quantization had existed and been used when those recordings were made, we might well have found those songs somehow less impressive....
This short by Rick Beato gives an example of a quantized Led Zeppelin groove versus the original:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a7dTRgc0Mn4
The short is an excerpt from this longer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT4fFolyZYU [10 minutes]
When Beato says that the original tempo is 170 BPM, he means 170 beats per minute.
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Rhino