Playing without a click track
Clicks are everywhere now: worship teams, cover bands, school groups. They solve real problems. They also cost real things: in-ear monitors, someone to run the tracks, and a band that plays to a machine instead of to each other. Plenty of great bands have never used one.
If your band plays without a click, by choice or because nobody has in-ears, here is how to stay tight, and the one problem a click used to solve that you still need to handle.
When a click is worth it
- You run backing tracks. Tracks can't follow the band, so the band follows the tracks, and the click is how.
- Recording to a grid. Editing later is much easier.
- A song lives or dies on an exact tempo and the band keeps rushing it.
If none of those are you, the click is optional.
Staying tight without one
- Pick the tempo before the song. A phone metronome in the drummer's hand for the count-in is enough. Most rushing starts in the first bar.
- Count it in with the sticks. Everyone hears the same four.
- The drummer leads, everyone watches. Hi-hat and kick are the click now. Bass locks to the kick.
- Rehearse transitions. Tempo slips happen at the bridge and the last chorus. Practice those spots, not the whole song.
- Record a rehearsal on a phone. Drift you can't feel while playing is obvious on playback.
The problem that's left: delays, arps and tremolo
Humans follow the drummer fine. Gear doesn't. A dotted-eighth delay, a synth arpeggio or a tremolo pedal runs at whatever tempo it was last given. Without a click feeding it MIDI clock, someone taps tempo by hand at the top of each song, and by the second chorus the repeats are fighting the snare.
The fix is to give the gear the drummer's tempo, live. A beat tracker listens to the kit and sends MIDI clock (or a tap on every beat) to the keys rig and pedals, so they follow the drummer the way the band does. That's what DrumClock does: phone by the kit, stick count-off, and the delays and arps follow the drummer all night.
The short version: without a click, the drummer is the click. Make that true for the gear too.
Try it
DrumClock is free to try for 14 days with everything on, on iPhone, iPad and Android. Audio is analysed on the device and never recorded or uploaded.
Setup by rig: sync delays and arps to a live drummer · Sunday Keys tap tempo · MIDI clock from live drums.