Didn't they use clicktracks?

Riaan · 2010-04-21T19:46:24+00:00

I've been playing around with some backing tracks that I downloaded recently - it sounds like the original recordings of well known songs, minus the guitar p...

Didn't they use clicktracks?

PeteM

I find that metronomes and click tracks are great for practicing with, but when it comes to the real thing there's nothing like playing with a live drummer who follows the mood of the band. I'm not talking about wild tempo differences - but music should breath and the tempo will fluctuate to allow for the tiny subtleties of rallentandos, ritardandos and accelerandos, which might naturally occur within the body of a piece of music. Musos need these nuances to feed off one another for expression and colourful phrasing, and IMO these will suffer when they are restricted by a perfect mechanical beat.

This is why live music and recordings excite me or when a band does one-take stuff in the studio. Sure, one can still do overdubs on these, but the fundamental 'feel' has already been achieved.

So, to answer your question Riaan - yea, maybe you have real live musos on your backing tracks and they are not midi-generated.

[deleted]

Great response, Pete...

Riaan

Pete yes that does make sense. The muso's on my backing tracks are certainly real, it's not MIDI. Just another illustration of what makes a great band great, the way individuals play like one. I figured the easiest will just be not to use the click track at all, and try and play along. So no copy and paste of good takes, etc.... :-[

What I'm trying my hand at, is recreating the parts of tunes that I can play, with different instruments just to hear what it sounds like. It's also a great way for me to really listen to all the parts, especially keyboards which I don't pay enough attention to most of the times.

Bob-Dubery

PeteM wrote: I find that metronomes and click tracks are great for practicing with, but when it comes to the real thing there's nothing like playing with a live drummer who follows the mood of the band. I'm not talking about wild tempo differences - but music should breath and the tempo will fluctuate to allow for the tiny subtleties of rallentandos, ritardandos and accelerandos, which might naturally occur within the body of a piece of music. Musos need these nuances to feed off one another for expression and colourful phrasing, and IMO these will suffer when they are restricted by a perfect mechanical beat.

Absoloodely. +1 and Karma. Pete has hit the nail on the head and told us about it with great eloquence and clarity.

Bob-Dubery

Riaan wrote: I almost get the impression that some of the great recordings of great bands were not done with click tracks at all. As tight as they sound, when played along with a click track, it would appear that the song's tempo varies somewhat throughout. Not so much as to be noticable, until one tries to sync it with a metronome. Anyone else experienced this?

Many great recordings were indeed made without a click track. The Beatles, The Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Bowie.... many others would all have made recordings with no click track. When Dave Brubeck cut "Take Five" you can bet there were no click tracks involved.

As Pete said. this can provide a more pleasing sound because the musicians can control the dynamics and the music will breathe.

Jack-Flash-Jr

Just had the live drummer discussion with Rene last week... there's the human element that makes the music breathe naturally, Pete nailed it. It's also the primary reason (yes even more so than lack of lyrics/songs/instruments) that I found listening to dance electronica tedious after a while, even in a cool club setting. I want the potential for mistakes to have been there...

MIKA-the-better-one

Some bands do use click others dont. More old school or classic rock not so much.
Minus the Bear, Artic Monkeys DO use click both in studio............ not sure about live
But then Queens of the Stoneage DEFINATLEY DO NOT use click live, but do in studio
Led Zepplin DIDnt ever touch a click........... and it worked for them

I personally love using click in studio........ as it kills any doubt of a song.......... and as a goood local drummer said to me "if you are a good drummer it wont feel like you are playing to click" So waht can be assumed here is drummers should be good enough to play in and around the click to create that space.
Also good drummers should be able to keep things tight witout a click, Sadly not true these days.

andrewjbryson

Riaan wrote:

Also, I noticed that when I do manage to get the first few bars into sync with the metronome, by using Guitar Rig's tap tempo, the song's rate often ends up something peculiar, like 104.5 b.p.m. And a few bars into the song, it's out again and almost ends on an offbeat near the end of the song.

In Cubase I use the Tempo Track tool, where you can specify your tempo for each bar in the form of a graph.
I would imagine Sonar and other DAW's have similar tools.

Example : Bar 1- 8 - 120 Bmp, Bar 9 - 12 - 125.5 Bmp

Many producers have Pitch-shifted the song (to give the vocalist a "even higher than high" vocal take)
If they use cheap tricks like that, I don't see why they won't also change tempo's of entire tracks/ sections (even if they initially
used a click track)

Problem is, the more you stretch/ squash a track , the more the quality of audio degrades.

At the end of the day , no one really needs to "adjust" the tempo of a song.
Rather get the band to re-do it, if they aren't using click tracks.

I don't think Black Sabbath used a click track on their 1st Album. But the timing was near perfect

Bob-Dubery

andrewjbryson wrote:
I don't think Black Sabbath used a click track on their 1st Album. But the timing was near perfect

Why does it have to be perfect?

OK... everybody needs to play "in time" as the human brain and ear perceive that. Get too sloppy, too loose and the listener WILL notice. But tempos can vary a little and things can still be perfectly musical and satisfying and sound very tight.

I think the main reason click tracks are there is to make things easier for engineers. Geoff Emerick tells the tale of the making of "Strawberry Fields Forever". Lennon decided he liked the first half of one take, the second half of another and requested Emerick to splice the two together (we are talking tape here - so a splice was a physical affair involving a razor blade and tape). The problem was that the two takes were at different tempos. And, this being before the days of electronic tuners, the band had tuned slightly differently for the two takes. Emerick - IMO a truly great engineer - made it all work, but no doubt that particular job would have been easier if the band had used electronic tuners and played to a click track.

I'm not sure that I like the modern obsession with absolute perfection. A bass player of my accquaintance tells of being asked to do a session. He went in and laid down his parts. Shortly thereafter the engineer and producer start "tidying" things up, moving every note so that it is absolutely on the beat (as per the click track). He asked if his parts were that bad, they said something like "no, very good, but nobody can play with absolute precision so we just tidy things up a bit". They also moved around vocal parts in the same way. He said that he thought the finished product was, yes, more perfect, but he wasn't sure if it was as musical. He asked for his name to be kept off of the sleeve credits because the parts that made it onto the record were not the parts that he'd actually played.

I also wonder if modern technology might not curb some things that made for arresting music in the past. Like the games that Led Zeppelin play with timing on "Black Dog". Like Keef and Charlie's habit of "turning the beat around" (listen to "Start Me Up"). Like the way that Ritchie Hayward would play slightly behind the beat with Little Feat, and the games that band would play with syncopation.

MIKA-the-better-one

did your friend happen to record at B# studios, as they have a tendancy to take a grea track and screw it up to the point where its unhuman. Drums, bass, guitars all of it just so over done its disgusting

Renesongs

Firstly I am a great believer in working with click tracks. Hell a good click track can serve as accompaniment as in Paul McCartney's song Black Bird. Having said that I have found that very few songs that I have tried to backtrack fit well to a metronome time and when they do you get tempos like 114.318 bpm I think that might be the legacy of older mechanical recording equipment with gears and pinch wheels et all that wear and do not perform with binary quartz clock accuracy.

What I like to do is start getting the basics down with a click track and as the music becomes more developed , fire the Japanese drummer and let some dynamics creep in. I few years ago I was writing a lot of orchestral music for dance and stage. It was all midi but I achieved dynamics by using a metronome map to subtly accelerate or retard the tempo to liven up the music. One piece I wrote was 15minutes long but the producer wanted only 10 minutes. there was nothing that I could cut out because the piece would not build well. I tried upping the tempo but the dancers had got used to the original tempo. Eventually I worked a way of gradually increasing the tempo from the original 110bpm to 140bpm across the entire piece . The result was the same work crammed into 11 minutes which satisfied the producers needs but did not throw the the dancers out. Because it was a Bolero type build the subtly increasing tempo actually enhanced the feel of the piece.

Bob-Dubery

Renesongs wrote: Firstly I am a great believer in working with click tracks. Hell a good click track can serve as accompaniment as in Paul McCartney's song Black Bird.

Famously not a click track but a tapping foot. The track was recorded outdoors in a garden. McCartney told engineer Geoff Emerick that he wanted the track to sound like he was playing in the open. Emerick told him the best way to do that was to play it in the open and record it there. So they ran some leads out of a window into the garden at the back of Abbey Road studios and Paul sat on a stool and laid the track down. Not all of the birdy noises you hear on that song are overdubbed.

Two points
1) For solo guitarists this should be enough. I have seen several players lately who I thought would be doing a whole lot better if they just tapped their toe (or even nodded their head in time). In one case, where I was playing with some other people, I suggested to the offending party that they sit on another stool. That stool was lower, feet reached the ground, toe started tapping, problem solved.

2) To return to the original question, certainly in the 60s they would have been hard pushed to use a click track because of the limited number of tracks on the tape. They'd either have to leave it in the mix when they started bouncing down, or they'd have to reserve a track on a 4 or 8 track machine exclusively for the click track - which with such limited tape real estate they would be loathe to do.

Graeme

Not sure which version of Sonar you have? I have the latest version 8.5 producer edition. It has something called audio snap which (with a bit of tweaking) can extract the tempo of a song and make a tempo map from it. You can then sync Sonar's metronome to the track.

This is great if you've recorded someone without a click, but still want to be able to program midi on top and have the ability to quantize.

Riaan

Not sure which version of Sonar you have? I have the latest version 8.5 producer edition.

Thanks Graeme, I have version 8.5. I didn't know what Adiosnap was and still haven't gotten around to checking it out... :-[ Will try it out this weekend.