

Revisiting the click track - recurser
http://musicmachinery.com/2010/02/08/revisiting-the-click-track/

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zefhous
This is really awesome.

One thing that I think could be done better would be to display the BPM
Deviation by percentage instead of a hard tempo.

This is especially important when there is ambiguity over what the tempo
actually is. Is this song 90 BPM or 180? That question is pretty hard for a
computer to tell, and two great musicians might tell you different answers.
It's pretty subjective.

Here's an example of two takes of a slow rubato jazz piece. The computer
analyzes one using a tempo of 169 BPM and the other at 91. It's the same song,
and a very similar tempo. But the one rated faster looks much more erratic
because the deviation isn't displayed as a percentage.

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRFQMHM123E8585C4A&#...](http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRFQMHM123E8585C4A&artist=John+Coltrane&title=06.+Naima)

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRGHGWJ123E858DF63&#...</a>

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illumin8
This is fascinating. Of course most modern music is generated with click
tracks, if for nothing else than it makes it easier to edit in Pro Tools,
since each track will be aligned with a beat grid, and you can literally cut
and paste entire bars of music.

This has more to do with the modern way of generating music - get four or five
takes of the song from each musician, take the best bars and phrases from each
one, and put them all together. Maybe Britney had a great take on the second
take of the chorus, so you just copy/paste that 5 times and now every time the
chorus plays it sounds perfect. Maybe the instrumental solo was perfect the
third time, so let's use that one.

This also makes you have great appreciation for those bands that recorded
music before the advent of modern multi-track recording software, and were
somehow dedicated enough to get that one perfect take where everyone in the
band did great and nobody made a mistake.

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recurser
The guys at echonest seem to slip through the cracks a bit on HN, but they are
doing some amazing stuff. I encourage anyone with an interest in music to
check out the API.

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teeja
Those are some really fascinating results. Although now and then you'll see
machine-like scores when _there's no way_. Most interesting is to look at old-
timers that boozed it up alot... tempos ALL over!

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TREHNVI1254846046C&#...</a>

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adrianwaj
_It looks like Neil Peart uses a click track on Stick it out_

or he could just be rock solid.

I wonder how well Tico Torres and Billy Cobham (great drummers and time-
keepers) backed tracks fare, especially one from the 80's and early 90's when
computer editors were less common.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
There's a link in the article to a webapp that lets you answer these questions
yourself.

A random track by Billy Cobham doesn't look too solid (not that "solid" is
necessarily a good thing):

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRMIPXK123E858CD8C&#...</a><p>A quick
click through also suggests that Bon Jovi tracks are click-tracked.<p>It's
worth bearing in mind that click tracks have been around since the early 20th
century, none of this requires computers, just headphones, though using
computers for editing means you get an extra benefit from click-tracks
(cut'n'paste with consistent beat) which might push more people towards them.

~~~
wgj
You just said a lot of what I was thinking.

Metronomes of course, have been around forever. As early as the 70's a lot of
bands started syncing to an electronic source. Especially the prog bands, with
excellent drummers, who were versatile enough to sync at will to the
arpeggiators on analog synths. And even those arpeggiators often had tempo
drift due to the analog electronics.

I looked in the archive for this article -- an amazing collection of data by
the way -- and found U2 tracks with tempo variations all over the map:

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRKYQTC123E85932E2&#...](http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRKYQTC123E85932E2&artist=U2&title=04+-+Bullet+The+Blue+Sky)

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRZFYJM123E85816BE&#...](http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRZFYJM123E85816BE&artist=U2&title=13.+Pride)

And then others, just a year or two earlier in their career, more
"machine"-like:

[http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRYMXDV123E8593F96&#...</a><p><a
href="http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRJTTTN123E8593796&#38;artist=U2&#38;title=11+Sunday+Bloody+Sunday"
rel="nofollow">http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRJTTTN123E8593796&#...</a><p>This
project has created some amazing data, but I don't agree with all the
conclusions at face value. Some of the stuff that is labeled as too machine-
like, is well within the discipline of a lot of drummers. Meanwhile modern
click tracks can be easily programmed to speed up and slow down throughout a
track. In fact, it's done all the time.<p>EDIT: One other thing, some of the
most interesting intentional tempo variations occur in the cycle of measures,
phrases, and sections. The data presented here, only measured in seconds,
doesn't track that relationship which would be the most musically interesting
thing. It would be a good experiment to listen to some of these tracks with a
prompt following the timeline in real time.

