The steady downward slope shows shorter beat durations over the course of the song (meaning a faster song). That’s something you just can’t do with a click track. Update – as a number of commenters have pointed out, yes you can do this with a click track.
This kind of undermines what’s getting said doesn’t it
This is really interesting. I wonder if there was a change when artists stopped recording to tape so much, too. I do a lot of recording with an analogue drum machine recorded to 4-track tape, to essentially get as organic an electronic drum beat as possible. Would love to run my tracks through his code to see if it’s closer to human than click.
obviously there’s a reliance on click/tight/perfect everything nowadays which makes everything kinda robotic and shitty and strips all the personality out of some types of music, but that goes for everything innit
I always thought a lot of big rock albums now just sampled the drums and essentially programmed the rhythms as tightly as possible (like a drum machine, ala what MBV did to compensate for Colm knackering his arm). Not necessarily slagging that off as a practice (it definitely has its place), but it seems a bit point-missing to do that with rock bands who are ostensibly probably aspiring towards a more “live” sort of sound
I’m fine with click tracks. If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, getting a decent drum sound is always going to take up most of that. It’s so much more efficient to be able to drop in and out of takes, or just c+p a good bar over a bad one to fix something, rather than re-record the whole thing when the rest of the take was good.
I’d also argue against the idea that it’s less ‘natural’ to use a click. If you’re in a studio doing a drum take it’s (in my experience) pretty stressful and trying to do a whole song flawlessly isn’t going to feel very natural at all. Best to be able to relax with takes knowing that you can fix the odd fluff here and there.
also think with a lot of those big 80s ballads they would re-record the snare by itself or re-amp snares so they could get that big badooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooof sound.