Music Machinery

let’s hear ringo’s sloppy drumming applied to “hit me baby one more time”!

The linearity of the clicktrack plots is surprising to me. Cakewalk’s products, the audio programs I’m most familiar with, easily allow the producer to change the tempo of the MIDI tracks that would form a basis for click tracks. I’m also aware of the influence that slight tempo changes can have on the emotion conveyed by the music and I’ve always assumed that these features were being used by the ‘pros’. After all, the effect has a name: rubato

I’d love to see more analysis of drummers. The Kashmir graph fits well with what many describe as his signature ‘behind the beat’ style of playing.

Excellent analysis! My one bone to pick:

“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.”

Hmm – well, that would assume that a click track stays at a fixed tempo. While it appears that many of your examples use a steady tempo, a click track can actually be assigned ahead of time to change tempo at various points while the recording is underway. I’ve often played to a click track that varies tempo throughout a song, specifically at verse/chorus transitions. As well, most modern DAWs can apply curved automation to tempo so that speeding up and slowing down seems considerably more natural. Playing with a click track can be used for effect, too. When done well, the result can positively change the attitude of the recording.

Hmm, some followup.

nitpick: Your graph for Nickelback still says Metallica: Enter Sandman at the top of the chart, which is slightly confusing.

More substantial suggestions: It would be interesting to take some of the same artists and compare their work over time. For instance, the Metallica track is an old track, and the Green Day track is very new. Find some of their early, mid and late work and see if it all matches, or if artists appear to be using click tracks more now. Second, pull live tracks from the bands (official and unofficial), it’d be interesting to see if bands use click tracks more or less when they are live.

Is your code something you could share? If so, perhaps there are individuals (such as myself) that be interested in running it to help find trends.

Before people jump over into “See? Who needs click tracks anyway?!?!” territory, I think it worthwhile to consider the Y axis of these plots. Consider Lars Ulrich and Ringo — their variations are around 0.01 second.

They’re keeping DAMN good time when the difference is measured to be around 10 milliseconds.

Super interesting!

As an aside, there is a musical urban legend about a session drummer (Steve Gadd?) who was so rhythmically precise that engineers could disconnect his headphone feed while overdubbing (so he couldn’t hear the tempo of the tracks/clicktrack he was playing along with) and he still kept perfect, solid time.

Another interesting thing to look at might be “Strawberry Fields Forever” which was famously spliced together from two different takes.

e.g. Freedom 90 by George Michael

I can’t imagine click tracks that change tempo would be any harder for a drummer to follow than click tracks that don’t. As you’ve shown they’re already not doing what comes naturally.

Humans are capable of processing such tiny amounts of time, for example the difference between aspirated (p,k,t) and voiced (b,g,d) consonants is a matter of 10s of milliseconds, and humans are able to perceive such differences shortly after birth. Using a click track doesn’t measure reaction time; a good drummer can be expected to keep a pretty consistant beat. The click track prevents her from drifting as the song progresses.

Reaction time is usually measured in response to unexpected stimuli. Keeping a beat is the exact opposite effect. The brain is incredibly good at forming models and synchronizing motor functions to expectations. Think about everything involved in a simple act like walking. It’s no surprise to me at all that even a mediocre drummer can keep a beat to within a few milliseconds for short periods. What seems to challenge most drummers is keeping the tempo during fills, and maintaining the tempo over longer periods. Very few drummers have innately perfect time, but 30-50 milliseconds at 144bpm is about a 32nd note duration, which is enough to sound ‘off’ to the average listener, and is very obvious to experienced listeners.

There’s probably an even more accurate way of detecting click tracks: instead of plotting the beat durations individually (or averaged over short periods), you could use the beat times measured from the start of the song, and compare this to a click track with the same average beat duration. As the song goes along, the click track drummer will stay in sync, even if he’s a really bad drummer, while even the best drummers will slowly diverge as all the small deviations add up.

The bad drummer with the click track may miss individual beats by many milliseconds, but this will always be corrected later on as the click track drags him along. You were already seeing this when you started averaging short durations instead of using individual beats, and the effect will be even more pronounced when you measure from the start.

For the vast majority of pro drummers a click track isn’t really chosen in order to keep a drummer in time – they’d be pretty rubbish if that was required and the human ear as the article suggests quite likes a bit of ebb and flow in tempo. But it isn’t for sound-editing as the article suggests because if you need to nudge a beat that’s a bit off or similar you have very granular resolutions down to 100ths of a beat to which you can ‘snap’ to or indeed you can just do it manually. Playing to a click doesn’t add to that at all.

By far and away the most often seen scenario is that the use of click tracks is dictated by tracks which use sequencers for keyboard parts, bass lines, percussion etc need a drummer to use a click track to stay in time with the pre-programmed parts. And of course it is dance music and Britney Spears type acts that require that… whereas yeah Lars can take a reference tempo at the beginning of a track and then let the music breath as he’s feeling it.

Kudos for doing the hard work to provide hard quantitative data here. All too many musicians start out with an hypothesis, say to themselves, “Boy, that sounds logical,” and then simply accept it without any sort of objective test.

Several points. First, to nail this down you need to do a double-blind test. Get some musicians to lay down tracks both with and without a click track and give you the recordings. After you analyze ’em without knowing which was which, they then reveal which recordings used a click track.

You claim that accelerando or decelerando can’t be done with a click track. Alas, not so. Cakewalk (and many other MIDI sequencing packages) have a tempo change feature. You can step-enter beats and then speed them up or slow them down over the course of a MIDI sequence by any desired percentage. A drummer playing to such a click track would produce an accelerating or decelerating beat.

Lastly, current DAW software like Nuendo and Pro Tools allow audio recordings to be treated like MIDI sequences. I.e., recording drum hits in the audio track can be auto-corrected to within a specified percentage accuracy of the beat. This is particularly easy to do with drum tracks, since the drum strikes are typically percussive timbes with short decay times, so the entire audio event can easily be moved forward or backward in time by DSP software. Are you sure that isn’t what’s happening here?

Music wouldn’t be about reaction time though. A drummer isn’t reacting to a beat, he is predicting it. If he was thinking about it he’d be too slow, as you said.

The White Stripes, she’s pretty renown for her off-beat drums … would be nice to see what it looks like.

Excellent initiative, btw. I wonder how the music industry is going to counter this. Trust me, they will.

Could you also run “Beat It” through your algorithm? There’s a famous story here about how drummer Jeff Porcaro recorded the whole thing without a click track and still made it sound like a drum computer… Thanks!

Try it with something off Metallica’s Black Album — legend has it that Lars’ desire for perfection led to the album’s being delayed. This was the first time I had heard of a “click track” being used, FWIW.

Click tracks become inaudible to the drummer with a comfort level to self adjust the “pulse”. Run the program on material by Dave Weckl and Steve Smith and you’ll find that they are capable to playing to clicks and yet perform subtle adjustments to the notes parking themselves before, on and after the beat or click within a given measure.

As mentioned above more sophisticated recording and performance software prorams can add “swing” and decelleration/accelleration to a rhythm click track.

I couldn’t agree more with you that some music suffers the sterille effect with a locked in drum track; not dance music, but rock does.

I second what Julies Davies said – some of what you’re seeing is likely just sequenced, which would be a step above the click track.

the best drummers – and other musicians – can float round a click track, rythmn loop, any loop, any drum machine… in fact a lot of great music had some time “aid” like the previous and the players brought the performance to life by minutely breathing from centre time to ahead or back of the beat.

this is so irrelevant. sometimes absolutely robotic metronomic time will be what the music needs … other times it will stifle the song/mood/whatever.

it’s just another aid to trying to make good music. just like an amp aids the guitarist by opening up other sonic territory… or a capo helps a guitarist play things across many keys that would be otherwise difficult or impossible….or a synth program that plays a whole complex rhythm on one key. or a sampler turns a vocal into a tripped out hooky soundbite [ Missy Elliots ‘Work it”].

if you didn’t know about it – just get used to it. it doesn’t kill music any more that it guarantees cool music. it just is. the humans using it are responsible, for the better of the music, or not. just as most people just like it, love it or don’t, regardless of whether the bass player had stickers on the frets to remind herself of where to play or not.

How about some old school hip hop from Boogie Down Productions. Part the song called Poisonous Products has the verse “It’s kind off beat… yea I know it.”

You can use my tool ‘JacksonDJ’ to easily find out whether a song has a fixed tempo. Disclaimer: there is currently no support.

Bill Bruford has said that in his Yes days, there was no attention paid at all to steadiness of tempo; it just wasn’t an issue. But of Ringo, Paul McCartney has said that Ringo’s ability to hit and resume a given tempo reliably made it possible for the Beatles to use radical edits without ruining a mix.

While interesting as an exercise, I feel like this process isn’t really useful for evaluating drummers qualitatively unless the drummers are playing by themselves. Personally, I feel like in group playing – which is what these plots are more representative of – the drummer is part of a consensus. I would contend that the drummer does not necessarily have a unique role in that consensus; it’s just that his or her expression of it is more uniformly obvious.

Dave Grohl’s comment on using click tracks (from a 2001 interview):

“We do use click tracks sometimes. I remember the first time someone advised me to use the click track I was absolutely heartbroken. I’m sure any time a producer says, ‘You might want to think about using a click track on that’, your ten or 15 years worth of experience go right out the window and you feel horrible. So we were recording Nevermind, laying down the basic track for ‘Lithium’, and we had maybe gone through three or four takes and Butch Vig brought us in and said to me, ‘You might want to think about using a click track’, and I immediately felt worthless and horrible. But I learned that as long as you can play within the click track you can still achieve a natural feel. I’m convinced and I used to be a purist and think, ‘Jon Bonham never used a click track!’ But I think it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If there’s something that you want to sound completely chaotic and has not only a dynamic but a tempo dynamic that moves up and down – okay. If there’s something that you want to be completely solid – okay. I’m not opposed to trying new things. I’m not into drum loops or drum machines for this band, but I think click tracks can be helpful.”

I have sat in studios and watched engineers spend a lot of time in post production editing drum tracks to get the tempo and feel they want. So I’m not sure you can say this method will always show if the drummer originally played to a click track.

I have worked in a well working studio, and indeed, some click tracks are made to have accelerations and slow downs on good productions to keep “life” in the beats.
I would like to say that also many bands now use drum programs such as BFD or Addictive Drums instead of recording real drums, this is a great gain of time and has much larger mixing possibilities. I am quite sure the drums on that Britney Spears song are not real drums, but simply sequenced samples.
Any ways it’s very interesting to see the variations of those drummers, and Ringo’s precision in his accelerations and slow downs.

Interesting stuff… but one thing I’d like to point out (yes, I am a drummer…) that one thing I believe is much much more important than tempo is the feel or ‘groove’ of a song… some songs just ‘lock in’, and some just don’t, but if it feels good, it’s perfectly OK… one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is other musicians who get so completely anal about tempo, that they forget to just play the music… Click tracks? – producers like them (cheaper and easier edits with digital tools), but most drummers I know don’t like them, since it’s more difficult to play with feeling when most of your concentration is on the click…

Paul, great stuff.

On a historical note, the first click track (actually servo track, but same concept) was recently found in France – it predates Edison’s first sound recording by many years. The Lawrence Livermore guys played it back, here:

http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/

The servo track sat underneath the audio track. There was an image of this on-line, but it seems to have been removed due to a copyright issue.

Very nice! Just a few thoughts:

1) it would be very interesting to see the effects of quantization when plotted – does it take a track with human variance and make it appear to be done to a click track?

2) the opposite is also interesting – many drum programs can now add so-called ‘human feel’ by varying the beat slightly in emulation of humans who keep a ‘mean’ time vs. an ‘absolute’ time through the song.

Of course whenever people see something new they have a hundred experiments for the inventor to run – nice work regardless. Keep up the good work, look forward to more,

– jason

Sure, I’ll probably actually do that. Right now I’m having an issue with the API not working (getting list index out of range on echonest/web/util.py:53), but feel free to mail me outside of the comments (I’m assuming you get to see my email address when you go through the comments?). This is actually a subject I have a lot of interest in (even if it’s just academically; I don’t have any practical use for it). I’ll post some updated code later tonight / tomorrow.

–dho

Actually, I gather there is a fair bit of interest in tempo analysis. NPR interviewed a researcher who found a correlation between popularity of songs with low tempo variation and times of high economic anxiety, and vice versa. I think he did this over the past 50 years, which of course included several decades before drum machines.

How very interesting. I have played in boatload of bands and have also recorded a lot of electronic dance tracks and I have to say that it is really personal preference and also the style of music that would dictate whether you used a click track or not. Electronica thrives on that steady click, but I love the ebb of flow of playing with an expressive drummer. I am sure U2 uses a click and I think Lars should use one. :) I would be interested in seeing Motown drummers analyzed because they always seemed to be steady tempo-wise.

Thanks for doing all that. Food for thought.

Keith Kehrer
Kamakaze Music

tim: that was another echo nest analysis customer, Philip Maymin

You left a few lines of code out of your code listing but I did get it to work. Would you mind posting your gnuplot source? Here’s my “click.py” listing:

——– cut ——-
#!/usr/bin/python

####################################################################
# See:
# https://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click-track/
####################################################################

import echonest.audio as audio

usage = “””
Usage:
python click.py

Example:
python click.py EverythingIsOnTheOne.mp3
“””

def main(inputFile):
audiofile = audio.LocalAudioFile(inputFile)
beats = audiofile.analysis.beats
avgList = []
time = 0;
output = []
sum = 0
for beat in beats:
time += beat.duration
avg = runningAverage(avgList, beat.duration)
sum += avg
output.append((time, avg))
base = sum / len(output)
for d in output:
print d[0], d[1] – base

def runningAverage(list, dur):
max = 16
list.append(dur)
if len(list) > max:
list.pop(0)
return sum(list) / len(list)

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
import sys
try:
inputFilename = sys.argv[-1]
except:
print usage
sys.exit(-1)
main(inputFilename)
——- cut ——–

I’m sure the formatting will get lost so:

http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/files/scripts/click.py.txt

Thanks!

@Brian Utterback Re: are there any drummers that use a click track but use their own judgment and deviate from it?

My brother does studio drum work. He told me of a story where a sound engineer had him re-record a few bars where he fumbled a stick. The engineer didn’t/couldn’t get the drums muted from the playback in the headphones during the retakes and my brother is too humble to say something. It took a ridiculous number of retakes because it’s nearly impossible to tune out something like that. My point is that if a drummer where capable of making such deviations by choice, they are certainly not using a click track. Maybe you could concoct an inconsistent click track, but that is probably going to cause more problems than it solves for similar reasons.

If you were worried about performance, instead of calculating the running average by constantly recalculating the sum of the list with sum(list) you could update the sum by subtracting the popped value and adding the value passed into the function each time.

I coded this up as “Method 2” and got the following results:

(1 million items)
Method 1 time: 1.21409173512
Method 2 time: 0.618820199215

(10 million items)
Method 1 time: 12.1816600993
Method 2 time: 6.23038151497

I actually expected the two functions to have a different big O instead of always running in half the time, but then remembered that the sum() function is being called on a list that isn’t growing in size past 16. Increasing the number of samples in the running average (max) does make method 2 increasingly efficient, but in the real scheme of things, finding running averages for 1 million beats in about a second is probably good enough.

Fun stuff! I’m analyzing a bunch of stuff I recorded, and I’m finding I pretty consistently play ahead of the beat. Thanks for the article!

Doesn’t Pro Tools have some sort of auto correct function for the timing fluctuations?

I would be curious to see some analysis on jazz drummers of the past. some of the big band drummers were famous for being able to keep apparently ‘perfect’ time. Buddy Rich in particular.

btw, check earlier metallica recordings, according to interviews around the time of ‘and justice for all…’ metallica used click tracks a lot as they recorded the guitar first and they had a lot of very specific tempo changes that were programmed in.

As a drummer with more than 30 years of experience, I can see the value of a click & often practice with one in my ear, however, I wouldn’t use one for either recording or playing live. If you’ve got a good enough ear and a good sense of time, you shouldn’t need one. In addition, drumming in a live situation is really partly about keeping time and partly about getting into the “pocket” and really feeling the song. For me, having a click in a live situation or recording session would be too distracting.

Regarding the charting of the songs, it would be interesting to see what some of the great studio drummers have done (i.e. guys like Steve Gadd on “Fifty Ways to leave your lover”).

It would be *really* interesting to see a graph of the first four minutes of so of Dave Brubeck’s 1959 classic “Take Five”. (In fact, it may be that the bass line is more consistent rhythmically than the drum line in that piece…) I think it would look *nearly* like a click track, and these are jazz musicians, so it’s a pretty solid bet to be click-track-free.

I wonder if disturbances can be picked up in African and jazz percussion…

I liked foo’s comment above and your slap-dash approach to the scientific method. It reminds me of some of my favorite episodes of Mythbusters i.e accurate enough to get your result with a million other experiments waiting in the background.

Looking forward to an update or someone else going PhD on this shit.

Whiskeytown

PS. I bet ‘radio lab’ or ‘sound opinions’ would be interested in this.

Suprised about weezer? I don’t really dig the new stuff, but the first two albums and random tracks through out the later career are good and Pat Wilson is a very talented drummer, both stylistically and technically. Sure it’s just rythem back beat a chunk of the time, but that’s what this kind of music calls for. Check the fills in “say it ain’t so”, in the last chorus there is a fill that is almost hidden and yet amazing in it’s instrumentation, location and implementation. Style and technique. Just because you don’t like someone (based on your affection for Breaking Benjamin, i can certainly see why they aren’t your cup of tea) doesn’t mean that they don’t have ability.

I would have figured that spears was drum machines.

Very very interesting. I use all sequenced drums and I haven’t done a lot of tempo variation (other than tempo speed ups) but I am thinking of looking into a bit just to see if I can add a bit of “life” to my tracks.

Where do people get the idea that a steady tempo is a mark of a superior musician? Most pros know that it’s the details of timing which separate the good from the amazing. True for many kinds of music (not Trance!)
On the one hand people are ready to trash drummers who can’t keep a steady beat, on the other they trash drummers who use a click track???
Neil Peart of Rush is a good example of an accurate and soulless drummer.
Clyde Stubblefield (James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”) is crazy inaccurate.
Who gets sampled more?

It’s really a moot point to try and see if someone is using a click track. There is so much post production that goes on after the drums are recorded in modern music that you would have to have the original recording to really see if there was a difference.

You could do a torrent search for ‘stems’ and get some of the original tracks to older songs and the original drum recordings of Led Zeppelin, Queen, Nirvana, etc.

The flat lines your getting on drumming have more to do with Beat Detective and Drumagog.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug03/articles/protoolsnotes.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/articles/drumagogplatinum4.htm

Lars from Metallica has been using a Click track for a very long time. He has said so publicly. Sandman was recorded on a click track.

This is a pretty bunk analysis for a lot of reasons.

wow that one the main reasons i hate todays music. man, zeppelin and the beatles kicks ass….. metalica used to.

Anthony Pittarelli

Firstly, it would help me if the vertical measurement should be BPM. It might make the relative variations clearer to the average musician.

Secondly, I am creating a machine that determines what kind of people need a machine to tell them who uses a machine (other than their instrument which is a machine) to play music (which in itself is also a machine)(as are the people who are playing the music).

Very interesting stuff. I want to take your code out for a spin on some other tracks, but I’m a little concerned by The Echo Nest terms of service:

—8<—8<—8<—8<—8<—8<—8<—
Licensee further grants to The Echo Nest an irrevocable, non-exclusive license to any and all data provided by Licensee to The Echo Nest in connection with Licensee’s use of the APIs, including without limitation, any user data, text relating to Licensee’s music catalog and/or website and any sound recordings, musical compositions or other copyrighted works. Licensee represents and warrants that all such data provided by Licensee to The Echo Nest shall not violate any third party rights.
—8<—8<—8<—8<—8<—8<—8<—

Isn’t that a little, ah, overly broad? *Irrevocable* license? To my Web site contents? To any and all music I submit to the API?

Also, as a scholar, I might be working with music to which I do not own the rights but can still use as pat of “research and study” copyright exceptions. How do you handle that? In fact you yourself obviously do not own the copyright to the works analyzed in this post… Wouldn’t that mean you are violating the terms of service?

Just wondering…

unset key

AC-DC – Highway to Hell, as requested by Todd Totale:

I love the analysis and am somewhat interested in learning Python. Great job! By the way one of the greatest drummers in the world – Aaron Gillespie of UnderOath uses a click track on stage and in recording as well.

I’ve recorded and edited a lot of classical music, and the stuff done by pros is a lot easier to splice together: even if recorded weeks apart in different rooms they can match the tempo and pitch exactly, but amateurs can never match that stuff from minute to minute.

Recently, modern music has started using click tracks so that stuff can always be moved around and edited at whim, and the music tech blog the music machinery wrote an interesting piece where they actually analyzed the variations in tempo throughout the songs complete with charts and graphs. Of course, theoretically, people could have been using metronomes long ago and tight drummers could be keeping very consistent tempos without a click track today (or preprogramming variable click-tracks), so it’s not hard science, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless. I know I’ve heard more than a few tracks where I thought “man that’s tight!” and there was probably no click track involved.

Personally I don’t see anything wrong with using the tempo “click” track, even if the implication is that it’s a crutch. A lot of great music has been made possible that would never have been possible before because of the ability to drag and drop music in a grid. At the same time, I think the if you don’t need it, don’t use it philosophy is probably a good one.

For his next exploration, I hope he looks at tracking the pitch and tempo of a college a-capella group. NIGHT-mare!

Thanks to http://www.extrapepperoni.com for this one.

Here’s a way of speeding up the process by analyzing whole albums at a time; get a BPM counter (I use the free one from MixMeister, at the bottom of this page: http://www.mixmeister.com/download_freestuff.html) and watch the digits, if EVERY song on an album gets to have .00 (or .99/.01 as it has a margin of error of .01) then you can be sure the drum tracks were all laid down by a drum machine. There’s a 1/100 chance that a random track gets the digits .00, there’s a 1/10000 that two tracks in a row get it, there’s a 1/1000000 that three in a row gets it, and so forth up to “astronomical chance” for an entire album. If you don’t believe me compare an early album by The Donnas to their latest, or the #Ace of Spades” Motörhead album to any of their three latest, or if you’re not into that then the new Kelly Clarkson album (although I don’t have her previous stuff).

The reason I discovered this is something completely different, I’m runner who collects good songs with very straight drum tracks for leg coordination purposes, kind of a “click track” for my feet if you like (most running takes place within the 140-180 steps per minute area, although sprintwork can taky you up to 200-210). Check out my 986 songs long list here (below the top 50 list): http://k1chyd.adress.eksjo.com/steps-per-minute.htm

It’s an interesting discussion, about which I’ve still reached no real conclusion!

I’ve been to quite a lot of contemporary ‘classical’ concerts where some kind of click track was used, usually because of the use of prerecorded material, often on a laptop. However this can reflect an influence from dance/laptop electronica but also be married with free improvisation etc.

I would be curious to know how Jaki Liebzeit of Can measures under this system. Although he had a jazz background, in my understanding he intended to get away from that rhythmic freedom and was one of the innovators of what became known as ‘motorik’ rhythm (as was the band as a whole). I don’t think he used any kind of track.

I’d like to see you graph some of the great studio drummers, like Steve Gadd or Benard Purdie on tracks known to be w/o click!