Anticipation. This feeling comes through all walks of life from awaiting the results to an ACT exam that you studied all year for to taking a test where you barely studied the subject matter. While it could go either way, the body reacts differently depending on the result that you are anticipating. It works a little differently when you play drums to a click track. In this scenario, you are anticipating the next beat and making sure that you are playing to the proper tempo, otherwise the song just isn’t going to sound quite right.

Before I get into that, I should cover some brief history. Note: the following information is based off of this author’s sole experience in music and video games, experiences may vary. Now, why did I mention video games? I believe I may have talked about this before in a brief blog mention, but I didn’t start playing drums until I was in college and it wasn’t exactly a drum kit that I began learning on. My drumming career began on a Rock Band kit. Yes, I began drumming by playing, admittedly, way too much Rock Band. The game gave me a bit of a head start when it comes to playing with some sort of click though. While it wasn’t an audible one, a visual click is ideologically the same – a sensory based mechanism to provide a tempo to a musician.

Drummers are typically seen as the tempo keepers for any band; the song starts and continues with the tempo the drummer provides. While I had experience with a visual click, I did not have much when it came to playing with additional music, an audible click or setting my own tempo. Up until Rock Band, the experience I had was in school bands with a conductor setting the tempo. So, for me learning to set tempos was, and still is, something that needed practice. My first experience into this was playing drums at Central Baptist Church with some friends of mine. Learning songs and tempos became a weekly endeavor and greatly contributed to my ability to play without any sort of metronome device to dictate tempo, just me and my playing. It was at Central where I first met Robert and through him began to play with click tracks.

Anticipation

For anyone unfamiliar, Fun DMC plays with a loop track. Any effects and keyboards in our music is prerecorded and played along with by the band members. While totally possible to play with the loops without a click (which I did on some songs when I first began with Fun DMC), it is considerably easier to do when playing along with a click track. The click track is tempo locked with the loop and so that band has a constant, reliable beat to follow during a song. Now how does anticipation add into all of this?

Anticipation is my worst enemy with click tracks. No contest. You hear of hand-eye coordination all the time, yet you rarely hear about ear-hand coordination (is that a thing? quick google search It is. crumbles trademark application). Remember when I said that the idea of an audible click and visual click are the same? Well it turns out when you don’t practice ear-hand coordination, it is most definitely NOT the same. When first playing with click tracks, my brain was not prepared for the experience. Listening to the click leads to anticipating each click as they come, and with no practice it ultimately leads to either rushing (playing faster than the beat) or dragging (playing slower than the beat). At some point in rushing or dragging, you will probably end up completely off from the track and the song is ruined, and at that point I tend to feel like either J. K. Simmons is going to slap the tempo into me or just throw a floor tom at my face (if you haven’t seen Whiplash, I cannot recommend it enough).

Anticipation can be overcome in this situation, as with any obstacle when it comes to learning to play an instrument, all it takes is practice. Training the ear-hand coordination will make playing with a click track second nature. After playing with clicks for years now, I can honestly say there are times playing where I forget that there is a click and start to tune it out. Now, you would think that I would get into trouble with that, but I don’t. It sits there in the back of your head driving you grooves and before you know it, you are on to the next song. Sometimes though it likes to pop back to the front of the mind and make you think “(language redacted), am I off from the click?”

If you have any questions about click tracks, or stage stories you want to share, don’t hesitate to leave us a message on the Facebook or shoot me an e-mail at plustalonholmes@fundmc.net.