10 December 2009 — Click Tracks
This is the first of a series of posts I'm putting up that relate to the recording process. Since spending a bit of time in the studio recently, I thought I'd deal with a few of the things that happen there. This first piece is about click tracks. It's a little bit long.
Most modern popular music is recorded using digital recording software - generally Protools. Even though many rock albums are, at some point, mixed to the older medium of reel-to-reel tape machine, this is essentially an effect: all the songs are stored as multitrack recordings on computer and later, once the stereo mix is completed, the song is sent out to run through a tape machine to get some of the sound quality associated with using tape, before being fed back into the computer once again to be mastered and made into an album.
The advantages of using digital recording software are many. Unlike old tape systems, there is no limit to the number of tracks you can have in a song. In older analogue systems you would eventually run out of spare tracks, and if you wanted to add any more parts you would have to perform mini mixes, in which you would combine, say, all of the drum tracks into one stereo pair. After this, you would never be able to alter the levels of the drum sounds individually: you would be stuck with that drum mix for good. This sort of restriction was no doubt the catalyst for a lot of creative recording ideas – restrictions are always a great spur for creativity – but the freedom of limitless multi-tracking is largely irresistible to bands unsure about the direction they want their song to take in the initial recording stages.
One of the features of digital recording software is that it becomes incredibly easy for a skilled operator to combine different sound files together seamlessly. This generally means that an artist is able to perform several takes of a song, and then the recording engineer picks the best parts from all of the takes and edits them together into a "perfect" track. Again, this was always possible with analogue equipment, but the ease and versatility of the digital medium means that it's a lot less time consuming – and therefore much less costly – which has made the practices almost mandatory.
Of course, in order to combine tracks together, it helps if they were all recorded at the same speed. While speed alteration is vastly more sophisticated than it used to be (it is now possible to speed up entire pieces of music without changing the pitch, and often without a noticeable reduction in sound quality), it is something most engineers are reluctant to do, particularly for sustained sounds. Of course, singers can keep time to the drums, but, when recording several takes of the rhythm section, what does the drummer keep time to? The click track.
The click track is an incredibly important part of modern pop music, though it goes largely unheralded, due to the fact that it never gets included in the final mix. Simply put, a click track is what it sounds like: a track which consists of a simple metronome (the clicks, which often a cowbell sound, or some other sharp percussive beat) beat set to the desired tempo, and played through the headphones of the musicians recording the initial parts of the song. Assuming the drummer is relatively competent at his or her parts, it only takes a few run-throughs to ensure that the recording engineer will have enough material to assemble a drum part that adheres to the click for the entire song. Having the click also means that other instruments can be recorded at the same time as the drums and also edited, without worry that if, say, the guitar part from take 3 is used over a piano part from take 6, they won't be in tie with each other.
At the same time, digital recording software goes hand-in-hand with electronic music that is generated by hardware synthesisers such as keyboards, software synthesisers often run within the recording software, and sampled sounds that are stored on a hard drive. Most modern synthesisers use a language called MIDI: the much-maligned (but now retro-chic) acronym that simply stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI is not a sound, as many people would believe, but a set of instructions used for triggering sounds created by a variety of sources, like those described above.
Now, when I was describing assembling drum parts to adhere to clicks, a lot of people might frown in disgust, probably for two similar, but separate reasons. The first is that this method would appear to be a very big safety net for drummers who aren't very good. Suddenly, as long as they get something near a good take, and engineer will be able to make a good track from their many attempts. This is true, and it's why sometimes bands that sound great on record aren't so good live. It's quite possible to see live clips of modern bands where they completely ruin the timing of songs, seemingly unable to play in time together. This is a fair point, but it tends to exist mainly as a premise for the second argument: that using a click track kills the "feel" of a song. On his blog, Musical Machinery, Paul Lamere decided to test some songs to see whether or not they were using a click, by using a piece of software to analyse tempo variation – reasoning that songs with little variation were likely recorded to clicks. It's an interesting idea, but you can see where he stands on the issue fairly early on, when he says that "some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile, that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song". Later, when describing Britney Spears' ". . . One More Time", he says that "(i)t seems that most pop music nowadays is overproduced, so my suspicion is that an artist like Britney Spears will record against a click track.". It's pretty clear where his loyalties lie. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I think he's got it wrong though.
The thing is, since the advent of electronic music, listeners have become incredibly familiar with completely even tempos. Sequenced music stays at exactly the same tempo for hours on end unless the programmer makes it change, and we have become adapted to it. Dance music would sound simply wrong if it were played with the sort of tempo changes that were common in earlier rock songs (disregarding more long-term changes, in which a song is sped up at an even rate as it reaches a climax, and other variations like that). And, as the lines between dance music and rock blur, there are many more instances in which the sounds and aesthetics of one genre inform the other. This is particularly evident in modern R&B: electronic samples and synthesisers prevail, and these are all sequenced to a set tempo. Any live band that wishes to sit well with these elements have to play to a click, particularly if they're recording their parts before the electronic instruments are added – a common occurrence.
For Plastic Palace Alice, who just finished recording a new album, the choice was an easy one. While we ended up recording one song without a click, the rest of them simply worked better with one. It wasn't a question of whether or not we wanted the "feel" to be there, it was a matter of what feel we were going for – in our case our songs often have heavy disco influences, where you want that constant tempo that a click track provides.
On the other hand, Potential Falcon didn't record to a click at all. We played until we got a good take, then we overdubbed a lot later. The interesting this is that the Plastic Palace sessions felt more "live" when we were recording them than the Potential Falcon ones. We all played together for each take, and several of the vocals that will make it on to the album were recorded during this tracking process, rather than as later overdubs. Yes, some of the tracks are likely to be fairly heavily edited to fit the "grid", but in our ears it's improving the sound of the songs. Yes, there are certainly situations when music suffers a little because people use a click when they probably shouldn't, but this, like autotune or anything else, is a matter of correct use of tools.