Click Track - Criticisms

Criticisms

Using a click track, does not really allow a natural shifting of tempo, that would be vital for expressive phrasing and instances of fermata, accelerando, ritardando, etc. Quotation:

• "And many recent recordings of pop music demonstrate how music is killed by a metronome for they are as square as a draftsman's T. For the convenience of recording engineers, each player has to record their part on a separate track while listening to a click track — a metronome — and the clicks are then used to synchronize the tracks while the technicians adjust them to their taste and mix them. I know talented young musicians who can't do it; we can understand why. Nothing compares with a recording of a live performance in which the players provide each other with the time-framework. if you want to kill a musical performance, give the player a click track!"

— James Beament; How we hear music: the relationship between music and the hearing mechanism

When there is no need to post-process the music with it properly fitting up to a tempo grid in a DAW, it can be reasoned that there is thus no need to record or perform to a click track, particularly if the band is good at keeping together rhythmically and particularly if they are musicians who are experienced with tempo-alteration and musical phrasing. Although it is possible to create "click maps" (pre-programmed click tracks designed specifically for a song or musical presentation that changes tempo and/or meter throughout), much live music can benefit from natural shifts of pace (tempo) between different sections of a song or piece of music. Genres like jazz are especially said to have this type of character to it. If one listens to some jazz from the 1930s or 1940s, and then imagines those musicians having to record it to an unchanging click, one might be able to see how it could ruin the musicians' "grooves", so to speak. Similarly, if one loads an old jazz recording into a DAW and tries to automatically calculate the average BPM, one may be surprised to see just how much the tempo naturally increases and decreases, depending on the current mood of the piece.