The Horror...

[Deleted]

... of click tracks!

I was collaborating over the internet recently with someone who wanted some real fingerstyle acoustic guitar on his tune. The guitar was just one part of a much bigger arrangement. He sent me a MIDI equivelent and noted in passing that my part should be reasonably tight, timing wise. Well, ok, I thought; shouldn't be a big deal - just learn the guitar part from the MIDI, and go record.

Wrong!

This thing was at 90bpm, so I set up a click track in Cubase and proceeded to record the part. I was shocked at how much I kept drifting out of time. I had to take a break because I was just getting all tensed up and frustrated.

After a couple of days, I eventually got something down that I thought was pretty well tight on timing. Any occassional note not exactly on the button, I passed off as inevitable due to it being a human being, not a machine, that was playing.

So I sent the file back to the guy thinking about a job well done and hoping he liked the feel and expressiveness and tone, etc.

Well, he came back and said would I mind redoing a couple of bits coz the timing was just slightly off and wasn't gelling with the 40 piece orchestra that (he tells me) is swooning away in the background.

What did I do? I opened a bottle of wine. Maybe tomorrow I'll give it another go. Or politely suggest to him that he quantize the orchestra. Sheesh.

Fun.

[Gypsy Picker]

I've had alot of trouble recording with click tracks because they're so unnatural and distracting. Plus, the only times I've used a click track it only sounded on the primary beat. Seems that it would have be easier if there were sub-clicks in the time-sig as well. I'm sure it can be done, I just never tried it that way.

[Deleted]

Gypsy,

You can set the Cubase metronome to as many sub-divisions as you want, within reason, but it's all crap. It's a craft and a skill which I'm afraid has passed me by. No session jobs for me.

[Gypsy Picker]

I've not fully embraced home recording as yet, so the only click track experience I have is in the studio. I have no idea how the click track was generated, but it was just that -- one click per beat, and it was an obnoxious sounding click at that.

[loopysanchez]

Dave, I know exactly what you're dealing with. I thought I had really solid rhythm until I started trying to record my OWN songs with a click track in order to do a multitrack recording. This wasn't somebody else's stuff, these were songs I wrote, and had played a thousand times. It was flat-out embarassing how far off the beat I could manage to get in 3 minutes' time. And not on fancy fingerpicking, I'm talking about basic rhythm strumming. I found that if I recorded my drum (machine) parts first, then played along with that, there were a lot more rhythmic markers to help keep me in the pocket. Even then I usually had to splice together 2 or 3 parts to get one solid rhythm guitar track for the songs on my CD.

As for the instrumental solo stuff, fergiddaboutit--There's no way I could play that stuff with constant BPM start to finish unless I spliced it together 2 or 3 bars at a time.