Sorry groovy, but that’s not really true any more. Pitch and tempo transposition has leaped forward by huge amounts in the last decade. Tempo adjustment can be (within limits) adjusted completely undetectably, not only can pitch for single notes be corrected, but notes WITHIN chords and complex recordings can be corrected and adjusted. And electronic music often has as much that was originally played on a keyboard and then possibly edited and quantified as it has made by inputting with a mouse.

There just aren’t any rules any more. Guitar loops with the wrong chord and wrong tempo for a project can be undetectably changed to fit a new project, tracks laid down by real players can be quantized to rhythmic perfection (or imperfection!), you can input synth parts to a DAW merely by humming them into a mic!

And yes, god’s walk among us, there are players who achieve perfection (or whatever the producer is looking for) in one uncut take. You find a lot of these over on the jazz side, but at the top end, studio musicians can still do great work in one take..!

What HAS changed is the option if a studio god is outside the budget of a small production to, as you say, ‘comp’ together whatever will pass for ‘perfection’ (truth is, there’s no such thing!). And nowadays, yes there’s even the option to slow the DAW down a bit while audio is recorded and then, just like sequencing, speed it back up to nominal. And, in truth, this has been done even on hit records for decades with multitrack tape decks. There’s nothing REALLY new under the sun!

But, to finish, I think you actually missed the point of AJ’s post… the thread is about using chord loopers with an arranger. Modern chord loopers allow you to store and link the loops with Registrations, but most arrangers at this time don’t have the tools to edit the loop as easily as you can a sequence. So his post was about recording the loop by hand at a slower tempo, so the player can take the care to be as precise as possible before it is used at full tempo, because it can’t really be edited afterwards without a ton of bother.