JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Bass and Drum Forum Do Click Tracks Stink???

Click tracks are a tool. Use them if and when you need them. I've heard them ruin a track and I've heard them save a track.

If I'm going to use a click, I like to let the drummer hear it, but not the rest of the band. Then we all play to the drummer. That gives us a better "band" feel.

Some folks play well to a click. I'm not too bad at it, it was forced on me in college. Back then we had wind up clicks called "metronomes." On my first recording session as a hired musician, they recorded a metronome and used that "track" for the click...hence, the "click track." We were using four tracks back then. With one for the click, that shows how important the producer thought the click was.

Some folks play well to a drummer. The cymbals, especially the hat, give a "cue" as to when the downbeat will hit. A good drummer may speed up and slow down a little, but it will be gradual, not so abruptly within a measure that it throws the musicians off like a mechanical bull.

But some folks can't play to either a click or a drummer. That's when the recording loses it's groove. When everyone plays to the click, it grooves. When everyone plays to the drummer, it grooves. When everyone plays to their own drummer, it gropes.

The advantage of using time, either in seconds or in measures, as a visual template for a musical wave file, is being able to manipulate the audio or midi. I've had clients who changed their mind as to whether the guitar lead should be in the second or third verse. If we didn't have a click track, the guitar part might not have just "dragged and dropped" from one verse to another. Then the client would have had to pay the guitar player to come back and cut again.


If you have trouble with a click track, double it up. Instead of putting the click on the quarter note, put it on the eighth note. Then it's easier to drop on the beat.

Here's a click trick I used a few years a go. We were recording a female vocalist. The client wanted a real jazzy vocal with very sparse whole note "diamonds" for the piano. The vocalist sounded uninteresting. I had the engineer put a click on that only the vocalist would hear. It was a swing beat. She sang to that and when we played it back without the click, her voice had a "swing" to it. The client loved it.

Clicks are tools. The way we use them can be good or bad.