Drummer can not keep a beat..

[ruraldave]

Sooo....We are in the middle of recording (nothing serious just home studio / Demo stuff). Everyone but the drummer (who has just started to record) has recorded their parts to a click track and are dead on the beat. Our drummer cant seem to match the click track. He's usually fast / slow / off beat and it's just not working. We have been playing for 1.5 years or so and in practice of live we can make it work (the rest of us just adjust to match his rhythm) but in a recording situation it's really obvious we need a different drummer. Our bass player referred to an intro he recorded last week as sounding like a shoe in a dryer....

So how have you got rid of members that did not work out? My wife and I have known his Wife for over 12 years and he is friends with our lead guitar player. Worst off he's a nice guy who told us he had been drumming since high school (now mid 40's).

Thoughts????

[Larry Mal]

A lot of drummers can't record to a click track, and that's a reason why studio drummers have the amount of work they do.

Why do you need to record to a click track? I assume you are building the song by recording parts more or less separately?

[saxjag]

Often a percussion track is recorded first, & becomes the rhythmic/structural reference track for the rest of the players as they layer in their parts. This might be something to try in future recording sessions.

As to your current situation: IMHO, a drummer who can't keep the beat is no kind of drummer at all, & has no place in a serious band. You have to ask yourself which is more important, the friendship or the music? (Ideally you could have both -- but if it's either/or, which would you choose?)

If your drummer friend's spotty musicianship causes you to resent him, perhaps parting ways with him as a player will enable you to keep him as a friend. It can work out that way.

Or sometimes it all ends in tears, & you move on. That's OK too. Music is sacred -- why do it badly if you can do it well?

[ruraldave]

A lot of drummers can't record to a click track, and that's a reason why studio drummers have the amount of work they do.

Why do you need to record to a click track? I assume you are building the song by recording parts more or less separately?

In previous bands we recorded drums first (the recording engineer was a drummer with 8 kits in his studio (it was over kill)) but in this instance the drummer never had the time (self employed builder) to get things started so we used the click track so that we could have something by fall to try and get gigs.

[Larry Mal]

Sure, but my point is, can he play in time with the rest of you? Is it just the click track that throws him off, or can he keep time?

If he can't keep time, then there's no hope for the current situation.

If he can keep time when he plays with you, only the click track is throwing him off, then what's the insistence on the click track?

[DECIBILL]

As has already been mentioned, recording the drums first would have been best. Actually, playing with a drummer who can keep time would be best. But you are asking how to make the best of the situation you are in. I'm a drummer/guitar player. I also record and mix my band and others in my home studio. There are a few things I've learned that might help. The first would be to spend some time working on the headphone mix that the drummer is playing to. Try boosting and cutting the other instruments as they are layered on top of the click track. There may be certain cues in one instrument, riff or melody that help him lock in a little better. You may need to jack the whole mix and the click wayyy loud to force hime to pay more attention to it. The other thing is if you are recording digitally, just record a bunch of takes and try to comp something together. Maybe it's the verse from take 2, the chorus of take 6 and the breakdown of take 3. Finally, depending on how you have things mic'd and if you are really desperate, you can convert his playing to midi and nudge things there to match the click. It's a lot of work, but I've done it before and it can save the day if you are willing to invest the time/money.

[ruraldave]

As has already been mentioned, recording the drums first would have been best. Actually, playing with a drummer who can keep time would be best. But you are asking how to make the best of the situation you are in. I'm a drummer/guitar player. I also record and mix my band and others in my home studio. There are a few things I've learned that might help. The first would be to spend some time working on the headphone mix that the drummer is playing to. Try boosting and cutting the other instruments as they are layered on top of the click track. There may be certain cues in one instrument, riff or melody that help him lock in a little better. You may need to jack the whole mix and the click wayyy loud to force hime to pay more attention to it. The other thing is if you are recording digitally, just record a bunch of takes and try to comp something together. Maybe it's the verse from take 2, the chorus of take 6 and the breakdown of take 3. Finally, depending on how you have things mic'd and if you are really desperate, you can convert his playing to midi and nudge things there to match the click. It's a lot of work, but I've done it before and it can save the day if you are willing to invest the time/money.

Thanks for the recording info I'll make sure to share it with the guy doing the recording!

[spacecadet]

Your original question was basically asking how to kick a guy out of the band. The question to ask yourself is what your goal is with this band. Are you planning to be the next U2? If not, then I'd say just live with it and try to figure it out. It's not worth ruining a friendship over a band you're just trying to have fun with. My band when I was younger was in this exact same situation and we kicked our drummer out and I still regret that. At the time it seemed like the only choice we had, and we rationalized it to each other that way, but we were stupid kids who thought we were going to be huge, like every other one of the hundred thousand bands out there. But the drummer we kicked out was my best friend before that, and we didn't speak for about 20 years afterwards. Meanwhile, the band broke up completely about a year later, so the whole thing was pointless. It wasn't close to being worth it.

If this is something you're doing just for fun, then do whatever you have to to keep him in the band. Re-record the whole album live or something; plenty of bands used to record that way.

[saxjag]

Strangely, my experience was the opposite of spacecadet's. Our drummer was a disagreeable jerk with a very limited repertoire of percussion riffs. If he was mad at somebody in the band, he'd jack up the tempo to impossible speed just before they started their solo. It took years for us to work up the gumption to give the bastard the old heave-ho, & he really put us thru the wringer about it, too.

It didn't take us long to find a way better percussionist. Our esprit de corps improved radically. Rehearsals were a pleasure. We became a more cohesive unit in performance & in the studio.

So my view on the matter is this: If a band exists primarily as a justification for buddies to hang out together, then the quality of musicianship doesn't matter so much. However, if a band is aiming toward creative growth & some degree of worldly success, a substandard person or two must occasionally be jettisoned.

In the current case, a cat with three decades of drumming experience plays like a dog instead of a god. Nobody did this to him; he did it to himself.

[spacecadet]

So my view on the matter is this: If a band exists primarily as a justification for buddies to hang out together, then the quality of musicianship doesn't matter so much. However, if a band is aiming toward creative growth & some degree of worldly success, a substandard person or two must occasionally be jettisoned.

I think you're actually saying pretty much the same thing I did, just from the opposite perspective. But let's face it - a band that's in their mid 40's and recording something that's admittedly "nothing serious" is probably not on their way to superstardom, if only they could just figure out their drummer situation. That sounds like a band of buddies to me. They should probably stay that way.

[mothershipzeta]

Hi guys!

As a drummer, I thought I'd share some thoughts:

It is two radically different situations for a drummer, playing with and without a click. As mainly guitarists and bassists, for you guys the general scenario is that someone else gives you the beat, and you have to match his timing. Now for drummers the typical situation is that he/she provides that tempo with all the little fluctuations in timing that he/she feels that fits the music's flow.

Now while recording (with click) the drummer is torn out of his/her godlike place, and is in a very unusual situation: He/she has to adjust to someone (something actually) giving him/her the beat. And that is something which he/she hasn't encountered in his/her whole musical career, but seems only natural for you guys.

From the above comments I gathered that some of you are handling this issue as a very final thing: the drummer either can or can't keep a beat, while in my experience this just isn't so. The solution is very simple: It takes dedicated, hard practice to be able to keep time to a click, but is something which you can learn. I sucked at it very hard for a very long time, and now it just comes naturally.

My 2 cents.

Oh, PS: there are certain musical situations which deifinitely benefit from employing a click, but there are others, when you let the natural tempo fluctuations remain in your song (eg by tracking the structural base of the song playing together as a band, as you have practiced it most, and as you are familiar with it), you may get a very natural sounding track.

[saxjag]

You're right, good drumming isn't always metronomically precise. The two best drummers I've worked with lifted or propelled the band somehow; they not only sounded good themselves, they made everybody else sound good too. I guess that's the definition of a good player on any instrument.

[fuzzking]

Please don't get me wrong, but I think that recording drums after the fact is just a tad nonsensical when the band does not consist of pro players. Suddenly the poor guy has to do the opposite of what he's done since he's been playing with the band. If it was up to me to decide, I'd erase the recordings and record the band live. One drummer I play with often rehearses to a click when on his own, but I don't think he could pull off laying down one decent part when suddenly being asked to accompany the pre-recorded bass and guitar, with probably a totally different rhythmical feel than usual. I see my drummer as the rhythmical foundation, not the escort. And when playing together, there's so many shifts in micro-timing and dynamics happening in an organic way, it couldn't be done to sound natural if we started recording bass and guitar to a click and try to lay down drums later. At least not being the hobbyists that we are. Maybe best to try the traditional recording approach before kicking the guy out.

[mynameisjonas]

Hear hear^

Our drummer re-recorded all the drums to our first album after everything else was pretty much finished, and it was hell for him. It's not something drummers are normally required to do (except studio pros), and definitely not something I would kick a guy out of the band for not being able to do.

As others have said already, keeping a beat and following someone (something) else's beat are two different things, and the latter is something that can be learned with a bit of practice. The ability to play along to a click track is helped a lot by getting the mix levels right, and it also matters a great deal how the click track is set up, with accentuations and such. It may sometimes be easier to play a 4/4 song to a 2/2 click track for instance, and sometimes you play better to a 16/16 track. It all depends on the feel of the song.

[mothershipzeta]

The ability to play along to a click track is helped a lot by getting the mix levels right

Oh, this x10000!

The big breakthrough during learning to play to a click was to forget the headphones, route the click (with accents on 1sts) to a PA, and turn it up pretty high, almost louder than my drums. Then it just somehow came to me. After very little time I could lower the volume a bit, and get used to listening to the click trough headphones, so it won't bleed into the mix when recording.