How many bytes in a bar?

I am going to be unpopular. My good friend David is not one to be found in a photo. However, I felt that this episode needed to be recorded.

It represents an evening's work creating a backing track for a London based singer. The software used is both extraordinary and disturbing. How it can turn your performance into a detailed score, and reproduce it in seemingly unlimited ways, would have had us, in previous centuries, burnt at the stake for witchcraft, or at least dunked in the village pond.

The latter option is where you feel you should be when you see how inconsistent and inaccurate your playing actually is, when displayed in such electronic detail. You see the chords where the fingers weren't placed together, the extra note, the wrong note, the mis-pedaling. Need I go on?

You can sort it all. You can move it, a note at a time, removing the blemishes, adding the omissions, correcting the chords. But, what you end up with is not music.

Music breathes, varies, changes, is perfect in its imperfections. It doesn't need mistakes, but it must have uncertainty.

So, you may not see David again, but if you're in London, you might hear him coming from a speaker somewhere. But there again, when Julia sings, will anybody notice David?