Several times over the years I have come across musicians who have had issues playing to click tracks. It’s definitely not the most natural or easiest thing to do and it can hinder your groove, which is the last thing you want, but timing inaccuracies can really put a listener off. It’s also a lot more common than you imagine. Many big bands you will have heard of, even use a click for timing on stage, but as it’s played through the monitor system you won’t hear it. This enables them to have pre-recorded effects or other instrumental sections come in at the right time without, for example, having to take a whole orchestra on the road or suchlike.
There is a good alternative now though, and that is a guide track.
Playing along to something that’s musical rather than the clinical beeping of a click track is far easier, less off putting and allows you to relax more into the music. It’s also very easy nowadays to knock up a guide track relatively quickly. This is what you start with:
- A stopwatch or timer
- A drum track or loop
- A vocal
- An instrument
Firstly, work out the timing of your piece, either by simply playing along and counting the beats over a 15 second period on your watch, or with the help of a band mate. One of you plays, and one of you counts beats and keeps an eye on the time. Most tunes have the same timing throughout, but if yours has differeing timings on differing sections, simply work it out for each different section. Now the beats per minute, (or BPM as it is often referred to), is simply the number of beats multiplied by 4, (because a minute is 4 x 15 secs). Make a note of it for what we do next.
If you regularly buy computer music magazines, they often come with a disc containing looped beats and samples, and over the years I have collected a few. Failing that, Youtube now has many drummers who offer drum tracks at various different speeds, just type in “drum track ### bpm” replacing ### with the bpm number of your track. If it’s an unlikely number, then round it to the nearest 5, i.e. if your bpm is 123 and not much comes up, pop in 125 instead and you’ll get more options. You can also specify a style, so if you type in funk or metal or rock, you will get something with a different groove. Failing all that, you can make your own. Before now I have recorded a foot stomp and a handclap, looped it over and over for five minutes, and used it very effectively with a folk band.
Now you could leave it there, and it would give great backing to play along to, but sometimes you need things mapping out, and that’s where the next 2 ingredients come in. Vocals usually change throughout a track with one verse being different to another, which is a great help reminding you where abouts in the song you are. With a click track, I’ve seen people concentrating so hard on the click, they forget how many bars they’ve played. Using a guide instrument too, also gives useful information, especially where there are no lyrics, particularly if that instrument is used to play some sort of fill at the end of each phrase to indicate what the song does next. You could also do this verbally on the vocal track e.g. “bridge coming up in 3,2,1…”.
And there you have a guide track. It’s like SatNav for recording, leaving musicians free to feel the groove and play well in the moment – which reminds me: What’s the difference between a vocalist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist…
