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

This is all great info.

Yes, the drummer's the "time boss." The cymbals are the clock. Now, in bluegrass, the banjo is the clock, the upright bass is like the kick drum, and the mandolin is like the snare. They all depend on the clock to tell them where to come in. Sometimes when the whole band is listening to a click it just doesn't groove like it should...now, I said sometimes...with a good team it doesn't matter. But it happens often enough that most full band sessions I've played have the click going only to the drummer.

Some years back I was hired to be musical director on an album project...whatever that means, Ha. I guess what it was supposed to mean was that the producers (two producers...hmmmm...all chiefs...maybe they should have had a vice president of guitars) anyway, the producers weren't really musicians, so they needed someone to interpret to the pickers. Of course, they, being from Boston, spent a few days in Nashville finding the musicians. They went out to the bars and collected a band. I, being the bass player as well as the music director ( ) was allowed to pick the drummer. The producers in their wisdom put up a click track for everyone to hear. After a few takes we listened back. The track sucked. The nervous producers started blaming me for choosing such a poor drummer. I told the engineer to solo the drums and bass. It grooved like a steam locomotive. It was obvious to the producers. I tactfully told them that it might have been their musicians who couldn't find a beat if they were making love with Tina Turner. So they let me have my way. I chased the musicians out and the drummer and I cut all the songs, then we brought their guys in and built them onto the tracks. That project got a "number one add" in Cashbox and still, nearly twenty years later, sells for the artist.

But the old clicks had serious limitations. Today's clicks can be programmed to change. High end ones can "morph" and accelerate or decelerate. You can stop the click and bring it back in at a different tempo. We could have used those features years ago, back then we had to use a conductor (which symphony orchestras still use) to be fluid with the tempo. Being fluid with the tempo is something that, like dynamics, is practically gone from popular music. Remember "Those Were the Days?" It broke tempo, accelerated, it was exquisite. You couldn't do that with an old "locked in" click. We ran afoul of that at a session some years back.

We were playing a demo session at the long gone Willow Wind studios. The piano player on the session was the late Larry Knechtel, a lovely guy. Larry won a grammy for playing on "Bridge Over Troubled Waters." He was part of the Wrecking Crew and a member of Bread. Larry could play the piano so good the elephants were ashamed of their poor quality of ivory. Anyway, we had a songwriter who wanted her song to stop at the end, come back in at a different tempo, then speed up for a while, then ritard to a halt and finally finish with a short, quick measure and a sudden stop. The drummer was using a click. The way the studio was set up, we couldn't see the drummer. The producer spent his time on the phone, trying to get more gigs LOL. After about six or seven botched takes, the songwriter started saying she thought we were supposed to be some high class studio pickers, but we could hardly play. I was afraid Larry would throw the acoustic piano at her. I explained to her that she was getting a low budget demo and for what she wanted she would need to have a conductor or be in a studio set up so the drummer, or someone, could conduct. We took a break while she played us that passage on the guitar about a dozen times...each one played differently...and finally went back and felt our way through a take. Now, of course we could have gotten it quickly with a conductor, or today we could have a programmed click to bring us in at tempo.

Mike, you are so right. Session players don't talk about this stuff at all, they just play. A good team can use a click in the mix or just give it to the drummer and it makes no difference. Most drummers here bring their own click to the session and feed the monitor send into a mixer so they can mix their own click as they like. Sometimes a producer will have them send that click to everyone else, that is rare, but when it happens, no one says anything about it. Sometimes a producer doesn't want a click at all (and sometimes when that happens, the drummer doesn't say anything ). We just play, and the drummer is the time boss.