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Detecting Click Tracks
jamie found a blog entry by Paul Lamere, working for audio company Echo Nest, in which he experiments with detecting which songs use a click track. Lamere gives this background: "Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years, rock drumming has changed. Many drummers will now don headphones in the studio (and sometimes even for live performances) and synchronize their playing to an electronic metronome — the click track. ...some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile, that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song." Lamere's experiments can't be called "scientific," but he does manage to tease out some interesting conclusions about songs and artists past and present using Echo Nest's developer API.
Around here... I wonder if they are using a click track?
On a serious note, I do like the warmth of older music, and my listening tastes tend to meander around the times between 5 + 30 years before I was born. (Child of the 80's).
As much as a tech nut I am, I still believe there are certain area's in life where it should be left at the door.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Much music now is explicitly shit, and I'm not even 30.
I think you've just explained why.
Much music has always been explicitly shit, regardless of when it was made. Go back and take a look at the charts for any year you care to name, and probably 95% of the artists will be people you've never heard of...because they were shit, had their fifteen minutes, and are now long-forgotten.
the drummer from linkin park spent 8hrs a day for 3 months practiciing to click track before the recording sessions started...and this was for their 2nd album...not the 1st...
what is making things sound sterile is simply crap pop music that is also waaaaay over produced. not being rhythmically correct.
I also forgot one other reason click tracks are popular in today's live pop and hip-hop concerts. Turns out it screws up the choreography if you have even minor tempo fluctuations. A slight shift in tempo can make already difficult dance moves even more so.
Actually, yes, most musicians need some sort of "click track" if they're playing in any sort of ensemble. It's just that in an orchestra or band setting, they're called conductors. In modern rock/pop bands, they're called drummers.
If you start with the drum track then everybody can play along with that recording and there's no need for any click track to keep everything in synch. It can even be the same individual playing all the instruments...
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
Lots of bands that play poorly live sound great on their CD's, and vice-versa. I'd go as far as to say that *most* of the bands that I've liked listening to live have sounded terrible when laid down, and vice-versa.
It's the musician's dillema. Focus on the tricks that make a recording sound good, or focus on the aspects that make a live performance sound good. They're very different sounds.
Of course, I'd guess that the major impetus for getting a click track to the drummer has not been the relentless march of soulless digitization, but simply ticked off guitarists. Sure, we might call it the natural ebb and flow of music, but on stage it is called the drummer screwing everyone else up.
The ______ Agenda
I guess you missed the article a month ago on Auto-Tune software, or you'd have already had an idea why most music today is bland shit.
That is because the money is not in the music, it is in the music video, accessories, and other bullshit. Just find some beautiful woman to sync to a click track, the alter her voice to actually _sound_good_ and you've got a winner, with no accusations of lip syncing or whatnot.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I am just wondering... What would happen to classcal music if they started to use Auto-tune. the whole point of music and excellence would simply disappear on the first occasion of live performance.
What has already happened in case of "popular music". Decades ago.
Just imagine a opera singer going out of sync with others... but wait... that is what live performance is all about, to make avery performance a bit different but not wrong.
It has been proved that holding an beat perfectly makes a music boring, while artists that have tempo correct on average do sound good.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
From TFA:
Um...really? You can't make a click track gradually change rate over time? Or follow whatever kind of variation you program it to? That's news to me. I thought computers wuz like all smart 'n' stuff.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I think the click track is an abomination, symptomatic of the general micro-managing, nit-picking, perfectionist trend that's been going around in business...
There's your problem. (Emphasis mine.) ;)
It's not "having fun, making music" anymore. It' "cold hard business". When I even hear stuff like "music managers" selecting "target groups" to "monetize" their "product/resource", I'm starting to feel sick. Not that It's not Ok to earn money with your music. But it should not be your dominating factor. By far. Luckily I'm pretty sure, this will not survive P2P file sharing.
it's not about doing it right (the organic flow of an unclicked drum track is "right"), it's about doing it how you're "supposed" to do it.
I know what you wanted to mean, but there is no "right" in arts. If you think the sound that your $5000 synth makes when it crashes on the floor after falling from a high-rise is the perfect sound, then so be it. ;) If you want to have a perfect, maybe even mechanical timing, then that is (well, at least it should be) a artist decision. Where you're definitely right (and what I think you wanted to say), is that it's not an artist decision, but a business one.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Different people hear pitch to different degrees. Some are tone deaf, things can be completely out of tune and they really don't notice, they can't hear it. Others have excellent relative pitch. They can hear if two instruments playing in unison or harmony are in or out of tune to a high degree of accuracy and what the interval is. However they can't tell the tuning of a single pitch on a single instrument played solo. Well there are still others with perfect pitch, that is the ability to tell tuning of a solo sound. You can play a note and they can tell you what note it is, and what the tuning is often to a very high degree of accuracy.
So while the first group would absolutely require the use of a chromatic tuner to be able to be in tune, the second group wouldn't. They could tune their instrument by listening to the band. The third, they wouldn't even need that. They could tune by themselves.
Well, different people can also just "hear" or "feel" tempo. Again some can't hardly at all, others can lock on to an existing tempo, and still others can internalize it to a high degree of accuracy.
Nothing magic about it, different people have different skills. So ya, just because a drummer is on tempo the whole time, doesn't mean they are listening to a metronome. Maybe they simply have a good internal beat.
One thing TFA suggests (and a comment or two here) is that click tracks are necessary to allow digital editing. That's not really the case and isn't the reason people use clicks. You can sync an editor to a live track and in any event, if you need to push or pull an off-timed beat you can just adjust manually or snap to grids with accuracy in the hundredths of a beat in Protools or whatever. And its not drummer tempo consistency. The vast majority of pro drummers are perfectly tight and the human ear enjoys their slight variations in timing (although My Chemical Romance got rid of their first one for it among other things). No, the real reason that clicks are used 9 times out of 10 is where there are sequenced keyboard, bass line or percussion type parts and the click is used to keep the drummer in time with the pre-programmed parts.
Yeah, but "randomizing" is not really "humanizing". A good drummer doesn't vary the tempo randomly, tiny tempo changes would go with what feels right for the song. There are many reasons why a particular section of a song might feel better with a slight tempo change. There may be some randomizing going on as well, but that is certainly not the whole picture, or in my estimation the most important part.
Even if you program in slight tempo changes for different sections of the song (which I've done on occasion) there's still an interplay between the different performers trying to stay in sync that causes slight leads and hesitations between different instrument that add to the depth of the music. If everything is quantized that is lost too, and randomizing doesn't bring it back.
I've recorded with and without click tracks for various reasons, and quantized or not for various reasons. Neither is right or wrong, it just depends on what you're trying to create. But there is a lot of depth that comes out of having people playing live together that is nearly impossible to replicate when the recording is highly controlled.
Cheers.
Yep, I was going to say the same thing, the parent said "In order to do all of this, you have to have all musicians performing to an absolutely constant tempo."
And its not true, all you need is to have all musicians performing to the _same_ tempo
it's the recording engineers who drag notes around to fit against the rigid timeline, or else just cut and paste a good take of one verse and make it into all of the verses... The software they have now is just too powerful and they don't know when not to use a fancy feature like dragging individual notes around to "quantize" them
I've had it done to me... my bass notes were dragged around to make them exactly on the beat... and this sounded horrible... took all the feeling out of it... he might have well just used a disc of sampled bass notes and plonked them onto the track
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
But if you take away the electronic gizmos and rely on musical talent, most of today's bands are out of business. Instead of hiring beautiful people who can kinda/sorta sing and play, the music industry would have to hire talented people, many of whom would be unattractive and therefore less marketable. The alternative to click tracks and Auto-tune is ... well ... plastic surgery.
I played in a band and put out 6 albums. We did exactly what you said instead of using a click track. We isolated all instruments in sound proof chambers and just recorded the drums. The drum tracks became that reference. The advantage of this was that the whole band played the song together and the drum tracks reflected that. Then the other instruments laid their parts over top after the fact. We could do punch ins and make good use of digital editing equipment and software. Worked out rather well in my opinion.
All points of time and space are connected.
Actually, yes, most musicians need some sort of "click track" if they're playing in any sort of ensemble. It's just that in an orchestra or band setting, they're called conductors. In modern rock/pop bands, they're called drummers.
I see your philosophical angle. But what click track does the conductor or drummer use? That's what the article is about: detecting click tracks that the conductor or drummer uses.
So in other words, it's required to cover up a lack of talent on the part of the performers.
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You're offering Linkin Park as a counter example to overproduced crap pop music?
Wow.