ORIGINAL: bunkaroo ~ Gotcha-sorry if I seemed combative.

Didn't take it that way bunkaroo... you actually got it. We have to compromise between great meter and flexible timing.

Now back to that lame horse...

Spose' you take 4 musicians of equal talent. Drummer, bass, keyboard and guitar.

A click track is percussive. So is a drummer. He's the only one that has to compete with the click.

All other instruments are used to being timed by an external source (usually the drums).

The drummer is used to being the timing source not competing with one.

When it's all said and done. The guitar (and others) are no more in sync with the click track than a good drummer.

But a drummer, off tempo of a click, sticks out like a sore thumb.

Practicing to a click will make you a better musician but taking it too seriously can make you boring and sterile.

IMHO it's best used as a tool... not a member of the band.

capslock - thanks for the information - i have tried to learn to engineer/master from info on the web, but your points about stereofying the vocal effects i will have to learn more about.

its recorded in a bedroom - and the songwriter asked for the guitar solo to be played randomly with feedback on the whammy bar! - thats why its out of tune:) and the intro guitar lead is the songwriter playing - i said to him "you are a good acoustic guitar player but you have never bent notes on an electric before, and your bends are painfull" but he insisted.

and the im guessing the drums are ahead of the beat because after the recording was finished it turned out that SONAR was adding 22ms of uncompensated lateness to the tracks, and it was drums first, everyting else to the drums.

issue fixed now - but i sure aint telling the songwriter!

Let me explain something to you. Drummers have a NATURAL feel for rhythm. When you put a metrodome (I know I spelled that wrong) to us, you throw us off. Simple as that. We have our own feel, within our head. As soon as we start to feel someting outside our own natural rhythm, we get thrown off. Its not a simple 4 count on a hi hat, its in us. If you have a drummer that cant keep time, you dont have a drummer. Simple as that. A true drummer sould be able to do, off beats, funk, fills, etc, with out any help. What throws us off the most (within a band), is a screw up on part of the bass. drums and bass are the backbone of rhythm in a song. Do not, I repeat do not say we have no talent. How about this, try doing paradoodles, whilch is tapping R = right, L = Left.. RLRRLRLL, LRLLRLRR.. And see how fast you can do it to time

I've been playing guitar and keyboards nearly 40 years, and I've always wondered what was in drummer's heads. I guess now I know!

ORIGINAL: mildew

capslock - thanks for the information - i have tried to learn to engineer/master from info on the web, but your points about stereofying the vocal effects i will have to learn more about.

its recorded in a bedroom - and the songwriter asked for the guitar solo to be played randomly with feedback on the whammy bar! - thats why its out of tune:) and the intro guitar lead is the songwriter playing - i said to him "you are a good acoustic guitar player but you have never bent notes on an electric before, and your bends are painfull" but he insisted.

and the im guessing the drums are ahead of the beat because after the recording was finished it turned out that SONAR was adding 22ms of uncompensated lateness to the tracks, and it was drums first, everyting else to the drums.

issue fixed now - but i sure aint telling the songwriter!

Well... you take my harsh treatment of you with grace... perhaps there is a human behind the drummer basher after all.

Thus I apologize for my rude treament and suggest a truce. I will be nice, if you will refrain from insulting my trade. ;)

Deal?

cAPS

Sorry if this has been posted already, but after the first page of silliness I decided to skip to the end.

I've had plenty of experience playing drums to a click track. I always used quarter note clicks and learned that the secret was to NOT HEAR THE CLICK. When you don't hear it you know you're on time. If your timing is so poor that you manage to slip by an entire quarter note, you have other issues. I know that this is simplified but it is not to suggest that it is easy. It takes practice. I understand what some drummers say about the "feel" thing and that mechanical timing is too inhuman, but if you can't play to a click you may just have a problem with time-keeping. It can be an eye opener after you've played for many years and thought you had solid tempo. :)

I'm a guitarist, bassist, and drummer. I can play them all to a click. You either have good time or bad time, period. If you have good time, the click is almost irrelevant -- just signposts passing by while you drive, rather than pylons in the middle of the road that you have to swerve around.

Time and feel are totally different things. But while solid time can have a bad feel, really bad time can never feel good in a pop/rock context.

I always used quarter note clicks and learned that the secret was to NOT HEAR THE CLICK. When you don't hear it you know you're on time. If your timing is so poor that you manage to slip by an entire quarter note, you have other issues. I know that this is simplified but it is not to suggest that it is easy. It takes practice.

aha..exactly - I remind y'all again.. please try the metronome "exercise" .. the post is at the middle of page 4 .. maybe this isn't new for some..give it a try :)

There's a lot of odd stuff being interjected around this thread. Playing in time with something else is a skill like any other, and for a lot of untrained drummers it's a skill they never have to learn because their band follows them. So, you put a click on (or a guitar part, or a sequence of percussion or anything else) and they can't play in time with it - they rush, drag and correct which results in an uneven time feel, or just just drift off entirely. Like any other instrument out there, the majority of drummers suck and haven't done the work. The same is true of guitarists, the same is true of singers.

Nearly any drummer who's even remotely what I'd describe as "good" has put in serious hours with a metronome learning to play in time. That's just part of learning to play, because it's very hard to actually develop any kind of consistent time feel on the drums without an external reference. The drums are a very physical instrument, and there are a lot more things in terms of co-ordination and balance that can affect your timing in a way that you won't experience as a guitarist or keyboard player. If you have to go from a cymbal on your left to a cymbal on your right in a certain amount of time it's a very different movement to moving from the snare to the high tom.

As an analogy, imagine driving to work. It's easy for you to do it in time because you do it every day and you have a clock that keeps you in time while you're doing it. Now imagine having a fixed amount of time to get from any point in your town or city to any other point, not being allowed to arrive early or late and having to pick your speed to make sure you arrive precisely on time. That's what drummers do every time they move around a drum kit, and if they practice that without external reference then they'll probably get it wrong sometimes - usually on fills, or when coming back from a fill to the groove.

The other aspect is that many drummers actually can't play in time with themselves. Drumming typically consists of playing ostinatos somewhere on the kit (usually right hand, for a right handed drummer) and then playing syncopated patterns against those ostinatos (bass drum and snare, in a pop/rock context). If you're not actually able to land your notes in precise unison with the ostinato then you have another problem, because most drummers tend to carry the time in their ostinato, but the rest of the band carry the time from their bass drum / snare pulse. So if a drummer doesn't have very good technique or precise co-ordination then you'll again have trouble landing notes precisely on the click when playing grooves.

It's all actually really quite hard. The physical and co-ordinational bar for playing the drums consistently is much higher than on the guitar or keyboard, while the requirement to play consistently is considerably higher-priority. Does it matter if your guitarist has slightly loose time? Not as much as it matters if your drummer does.

The reality of the matter here is that when guitarists suck it tends to be less obviously their time that is the problem. Crap guitarists play out of key, flub chord changes, have poor tone, get their volume wrong... all manner of stuff. If you find one who doesn't do all of that stuff but who has slightly loose timing you tend to give them a bit of a break. Drummers, on the other hand, have to get it perfect or be named-and-shamed, regardless of what else they do right.

I studied at music school with an engineer who used to run us through a test: He'd give us a click at 120bpm for sixteen bars, let us get comfortable, then drop it out of the cans for four bars. If we came out the end of that still in time with the click he'd bump that up to eight bars. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. The all-time record was held by a Korean guy who managed a massive SIXTY-FOUR bars of staying in perfect time with a click he couldn't hear. That's more than two minutes. I think my record was eight bars... But this stuff is something you can learn if you want to, and if you want to record regularly as a drummer you'd really be advised to put the time in. Go grab Gary Chaffee's book "Time functioning patterns" and George L. Stone's "Stick Control" and practice them front to back with a metronome, at every tempo from 30bpm up to your maximum. That ought to do it.

Man I can't believe we're still talking about this. 5 pages of it....wow!!! Well at least I see a lot of us guys, mainly the ones with formal training, all agree in that drummers (actually all instruments, but in this forum we're talking about drummers) should be able to play to a click. If not, like many have said, specially if you wanna be a studio cat, get on it ASAP.

I would like to add to what some have suggested as far as practicing with a metronome goes. I think, in my experience, that any musician would get more out of a metronome using it while playing songs they're learning or already know. Now don't get me wrong, do practice your fundamentals with it. But if you don't wanna sound too mechanical then also play songs you're learning or already know using a metronome. Another thing that helps tremendously is dividing and sub-dividing the quarter-note beat. Don't just do it with eight-notes and sixteen-notes, but also with eight-note triplets, etc. And if you wanna get out there you can also try doing irregular divisions and sub-divisions of the beat (i.e. dividing the quarter-note using groupings of 5, 7, or even 9 notes). A cool trick I like is the use of Poly-Rhythms which is something Dave Brubeck does sometimes when soloing by superimposing 4/4 over 3/4 (It's bad). Killswitch Engage does this too in the intro of their song "A Bid Farewell" (1st Guitar plays 4/4 while everybody else plays 3/4). You can also do another thing the drummer in Killswitch does. He uses poly-rhythms differently by suggesting different time signatures over one already stablished. For example, in their song "A World Ablaze", the intro starts with three bars of 5/4 and then he changes the beat with three bars of 4/4 and a bar of 3/4 repeating this pattern until the chorus I believe. So you end up with (5+5+5=15 just like 4+4+4+3=15). I know I'm getting into the analytical realm here, but that's how you can come up with new things instead of doing the same thing everybody else does.

If you want to hear a very unique take of what Jose7822 is talking about, using polyrhythms, check out Vinnie Coliauta on Frank Zappa's "Tinseltown Rebellion" album. Vinnie was given complete freedom to play in in alternate time signatures that overlapped with the rest of the band on specific beats, or points.
I've always been intrigued by songs like "Packard Goose" by Zappa, or "Two Hands" by King Crimson, where the vocals and instruments are not in the same time signature, meaning in all probability the vocals were recorded to a click track rather than the actual instrumental tracks. Yet the vocalist had to learn to sing the songs for live performances to the instrumental tracks.
Another odd example of playing to a click (in a way) is Phil Collins and Chester Thompson on tour with Genesis. They obviously spent a LOT of time rehearsing together because they sounded like one mind controlling 2 bodies.
In my final comment, while I stated before that different situations may require different levels of rhythmic accuracy, I do agree that it IS a good thing to learn to play to a click.