Over at the Music Machinery blahg, Paul Lamere explores the use of the click track in music production.
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. This allows for easier digital editing of the recording. Since all of the measures are of equal duration, it is easy to move measures or phrases around without worry that the timing may be off. The click track has a down side - some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile, that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song.
Blah blah blah...being a child of the industrial (music) revolution and one that has never felt the need to practice relentlessly to the strong armed overlord that is the metronome, my own sense of time is, how you say, lacking. Four on the Floor is the only way we do it and then judicious use of the quantize button. Either way, this is rather interesting seeing which artists obviously use clicks, and which don't. Hell, I'd be hard pressed to even say 'played to click, as tools like Mixosaurus/ make it very easy to replace these stick monkeys with something virtual and on time.
Read more at Music Machinery.
