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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.
It's required to make use of drum editing and multitrack syncing. If I were to record garage rock album i would throw everyone in the same room and just play the songs. However to leverage much of the flexibility and power of a digital recording you need a click.
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.
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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.
Sometimes there's an obvious speed up or slow down on a song, and in those cases you don't need software to figure out if there's a click track. A quick way to check is to compare the very end of the song and the very beginning. It's similar to acapella singing, sometimes there's a slight change in pitch. If it's not so much that you notice in the middle of the song, then it's not worth worrying about.
There are great albums that used click tracks, and great albums that didn't. Obviously a metronomic sense of tempo is a good asset for a drummer to have, especially if they're looking for session work. But a sense of dynamics and texture is, in my opinion, more important. I'd take an interesting drummer over one that just subdivides everything any day.
Then again, some songs benefit from the drum machine sound. It's all about the vision.
I don't consider a click track on a studio album to be cheating any more than a photographer using a light meter. In a live setting, however, it's a different matter. Not that I've seen anyone actually use a click track live (except for people attempting to sync up with some other prerecorded track and did it out of sheer necessity).
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 do some recording/mixing and have had the privilege of working under a Grammy winning recording engineer (and phenominal musician in his own right).
Great comments here- yes, click-tracks have been around since the 70s (maybe 60s). Tempo throughout a song can change too much without some kind of metronome. It doesn't have to be an actual click track, just something to guide the musician laying down the first tracks. Just because a drummer or other musician listens to a perfect tempo click track doesn't mean the timing will be "sterile". We're still human! However I know some drummers who are scarily close to perfect timing- without metronome.
Most better click track generators have the ability to randomize the timing a few percent (adjustable). One major midi-based recording program that I use (MOTU Digital Performer) calls it "humanize". You can "quantize" a track to get timing, then "humanize" it.
I'm an experienced drummer and I play regularly with, and without, click tracks; I can tell you that the assumption that "feel" or "groove" is only present when a drummer's time varies is not accurate.
... I'm tempted to have a play with it.
There are at least two types of variation that matter in a drummer's performance: the overall sense of time and the moment by moment variations. The ability of a drummer to play a complete number and keep to a set tempo is really important, particularly in this day and age of digital editing. But it is a common feature of "click track performances" for the drummer to sway ahead of and fall behind of the beat (faster and slower). If done correctly this variance in tempo will add significant life to a performance and such a skill takes a lot of practice to perfect.
The subtle qualities of a drummer's performance go far beyond whether or not they stick to a given tempo for the duration of a number; this is just one variable that effects the quality of a performance. Some genres require a rigid sense (metal/electronica) of time whilst others benefit greatly from its absence (fusion/jazz).
Interesting software however
I play keyboards for two different worship bands at my church, and I discovered a pretty amazing trait that our drummer/leader in the morning service has:
He doesn't change tempo unless he wants to.
At all.
To elaborate, as that sounds sketchy unless you know how I learned it:
I'm a pretty rhythmic keyboard player, and one of my favored techniques (especially if I need to fill in empty space from, say, a missing electric guitarist in addition to the other textural stuff I was doing) is to use multi-tap delay and really accurate timing to build rhythms and and evolving chords. It can be a really fun effect.
I don't use it much, though, because even with a tap-tempo delay, which I have in my rig, it's really awkward to stay synced up with the rest of the band. My delay is pretty accurate (built-in effect on the Nord Stage, which is rather high-end. I'm pretty confident it's got sub-millisecond accuracy), and I can stay tight with it, but even decent drummers can have a hard time with that (let's hear it for teachers that make you practice with metronomes, eh?), so I usually have to adjust the tempo a few times throughout a song, and that can make things get ugly fast. A less-than-decent drummer, which is all too common, can't stay consistent enough for me to even try it. Thus, I don't (or didn't, I should say) do this much at all, despite my fondness for it.
But, when I first tried it with Bob (the aforementioned drummer), I was shocked, because it just worked. I tapped in a tempo on his first measure or two, and it stayed tight the whole way through. I really hadn't expected that result - hadn't occurred to me humans could be that accurate.
Naturally, I started trying this in various places where it fit, and so far, I can't remember a single attempt where it didn't stay synced. Granted, I haven't tried it with really dragged out delay times (nothing above about two beats of delay at maybe 100 BPM), but even so...
This is the best of both worlds, because when you need him to be rock-solid, he is, but when the situation calls for it, he can (and does) manipulate tempo intentionally.
I've told him (and others) that playing with him is like having an expressive human metronome, and I mean it. It is amazingly blissful - I can wander out into strange netherworlds of syncopation and/or ethereal tempolessness (yay for pads!) and the foundation never wavers.
I'm sure that at times, he has small amounts of drift, but given that my delay stays tightly synced with him for whole songs at a single tempo, it can't get as large as even a single beat per minute very often.
We haven't tried it yet, but someday I'd like to try him out against some sequenced stuff - I'm pretty sure that if I could handle it (which I don't think I can, yet), he'd be unphased by it, even if it got pretty thick. Live band + sequenced riffs/textures/effects could result in some pretty cool stuff.
So, all that to say:
The guy who wrote TFA is actually just providing a measurement of how consistent the drummers for these bands are. Maybe they used a click track to achieve that consistency, but as a semi-pro living in central PA (not exactly renowned for its music scene), I've found one who doesn't need the click.
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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.
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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.
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
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Multitrack recording is great, but if the guitar player screws up, you play back the rest of the band and have him/her rerecord against the other good tracks. Some have pointed out that with click-tracks, you can take a rif and loop it over the entire song. That's the kind of thing that really sucks. I'm all for multitrack in the studio, but this mechanical click-track music is repulsive. If you can't sing or play an instrument, you shouldn't be making music.
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.
to leverage much of the flexibility and power of a digital recording you need a click
A "click track" is pretty much the same as a metronome. If you need a metronome IMO you're a poor musician indeed.
If the musicians are in different rooms, that is one reason for much of the sterility of today's music. Back in the analog days, they'd use carefully placed sound absorbtion sheets to get the exact sound (drummers were often in a different room, but everyone used headphones).
And as to the "flexibility and power" of digital, I don't see it. Digital has a wider dynamic range than analog, but the increased range is seldom used. It has no noise (another plus for digital), but OTOH analog has no aliasing, and digital aliasing is compounded when you digitally make the tracks louder, and compounded when mixing (rounding errors).
Actually, digital's biggest advantage is that with analog, the more you spend on your equipment, especially input devices for playback, the better the sound (and anyone can hear the difference). With digital there's comparitively not much difference between a cheap setup and an expensive one.
Also, mixing analog and digital gives you the worst of both worlds with the advantages of neither. A Beatles LP will sound much better than a Beatles CD, provided you have a high quality turntable. But a Nirvana CD will sound far better than a Nirvana LP, since their masters were digital.
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It has to do with editing and modern-day DAW track editing. If all you're doing is laying down bass, guitar, drums and vocals in a garage or folk band, then you don't really need a click track. But if you're doing a high amount of production with multi-layered guitar tracks, synth lines, and orchestral mockups (midi), you HAVETO have a click track. Many times, recording a complex rock arrangement isn't that much different from doing a film score, you have to have events coming in and out along a very precise timeframe. You can pre-determine tempo variations, but they MUST be pre-determined.
This strikes me as not so much an arguement about drummer quality or production level, but an arguement about how much rock music should be pre-determined. I know folk and punk rockers will say that it is heretical to have too much determinism in rock music, but there's another side of things. I play in and produce a progressive rock band. I had over 12 years of training in piano and composition before I did 5 years of undergrad work in composition and studio production. For what I do, I want EVERYTHING to be planned out. Usually, the more planning that goes into a tune, the more unique it can be, because everyone knows what their roll is. That's why most folk and punk bands usually sound the same.
Basically, "the click track" is one of a number of tools offered by an institution of music construction that allows for a lot of flexibility and creativity within a certain framework. Click tracks free up producers, composers, and musicians to be able to have a lot more leeway in other areas. It's not a question of "my drummer can play without a click track". The reality is, no matter HOW good a drummer is, if they don't have a click, the music isn't going to line up on the grid in Pro Tools, Digital Performer, or whatever DAW your using. If that doesn't happen, then you've just killed about 50% of the production and creative possibilities you have at your disposal... including orchestra and midi (which is much more prevolent than most would like to admit) additions.
Orchestras have a click-track: it's called a conductor. They spend hours maticulously figuring out exactly how to control the tempo of the orchestra, to the point that when they finally do it live, it's going to be the same each time. When orchestras record for film scores, the conductor wears headphones and conducts to a click-track. Recording an epic-sounding rock track is pretty much the same deal.
Ask any metal or prog band to record without a click track, and they'll probably laugh in your face. Dream Theater (for instance) maps out their entire works out on Digital Performer before they even begin the recording process. Certain types of music just require it, others don't. You want detailed, highly-controlled sound the posibility of adding a lot of post-production stuff later... you HAVE TO use a click track.
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