Quote:
Originally Posted by karbomusic
...In my humble experience that almost always results in bands that don't sound cohesive, they sound like several musicians playing at once to their own "perfect grid", none of which line up musically...
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Great post all around.
Note that it's not strictly necessary for all the musicians to be playing with the exact same swing, nor that they are all "landing" on exactly the same microsecond (good bass players in particular will often anticipate or delay notes slightly to get a certain swell or emphasis in relation to the drum hits).
What matters is that everyone knows where the beat *IS*. Maybe the guitar player is playing funky up-beat chord stabs, and slightly dragging the beat to increase the sense of syncopated funk-accent. But if she's going to achieve that effectively, she needs to know where the up-beat is. Or maybe she's playing a pounding metal riff that rushes the best slightly to hype up the excitement. She still needs to know what kind of beat she's rushing.
Back in the olden days of the mid-90s, I and my college-rock cohorts used to call this kind of thing "tight", exemplified by jazz-influenced, artistically ambitious punk rock bands from the era such as NoMeansNo. This was in particular contrast to looser, "sloppier" hippie/blues rock.
Not everyone needs to play Nomeansno-style songs with difficult and shifting time signatures, long rests punctuated by sharp accents, and complex polyrythms, but there is a big difference between hearing a record that sounds "tight" and one that sounds sloppy, especially in these post-DAW days where radio records are ruthlessly corrected and tweaked. A real band actually playing the notes they mean to, when they mean to, always sounds better than studio-constructed timing.