Why do professional singers still need a click-track while performing? Doesn’t performing enough times makes you develop rhythm?
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This may not be a complete answer, but it’s partly because it’s so easy to get off tempo, even for the pros. With a song lasting several minutes and nothing to register the tempo, it would be almost impossible to maintain with vocals only. If those vocal tracks are going to lay over other instruments, it won’t work if the vocals are even slightly off. Click-tracks help ensure everyone is following the same tempo.
Shout out to all the drummers who are the metronomes for their bands!
it can be pretty difficult to hear the other musicians you are playing with very well on stage. Also, the speed of sound becomes a concern on larger stages. both of those can be fixed with in ear monitors, but some singers (and other musicians) just prefer to have a click
One of the common reasons is that “comping” is the new standard to music production. Comping basically means most vocal tracks you hear today are not going to be recorded in a single take, or even two, but they take many takes and splice the best parts of each one to get the final track.
So the click track may not even be for the singer necessarily, it could be for the editor who is trying to line the tracks up after the fact.
If a singer can hear the band, and particularly the drummer, then they shouldn’t *need* a click track at all while performing live. I think that a certain level of perfection is expected from the performers in pop music, so the whole band plays to clicks on stage.
I once saw an AMA from a bassist who was in Avril Lavigne’s touring band. He said they played with a click track, and they were not allowed to improvise or alter the songs in any way. So it seems that the goal was to have the live performance sound as much like the studio track as possible.
If you are talking live then its most likely they are running prerecorded tracks and the band needs to stay in time with them. It’s becoming way too common and it’s really killing “live” music.
Ppl tend to rush generally or linger on certain note. Hard to predict the deviance of other members. Would be fine if there’s a conductor, but none in pop music. So click track is great friend.
Sauce. Was Session musician 10 yrs ago
For professional musicians, some are really good at singing, and some are really good at keeping time, but nobody can do both well enough to stay on time with an entire band behind them. By using a click track or conductor, the entire group of musicians can focus on playing or singing to their full potential rather than worry about what everyone else is doing.
Professional musicians do have a very good sense of time, and can keep a beat pretty consistently. They are, however, human, and so they may drift to be a little ahead or a little behind where the “true” beat is, and that drift over the length of a long song can add up to a few seconds of difference.
When you’re performing, if everyone can hear everyone else it doesn’t matter if there are slight fluctuations in tempo because everyone else can adjust to make sure parts line up correctly. In big stage performances, it can be hard to hear other performers well enough to adjust, so they use a click track so that everyone has a consistent external reference and can trust that they’re playing the right thing at the right time.
Click tracks are even more important for studio recordings. Each part is performed and recorded separately, so if everyone is slightly off the true beat, things don’t line up without a lot of audio processing. Having a click track gives everyone a firm reference so that when the parts are layered together they line up well. This saves a lot of time and money in audio engineering.
My sister does a lot of music related stuff, and I was drafted as a last minute fill in for a sick violin in a recording session. Playing to click tracks is a little challenging the first few times you do it, because it highlights how imprecise your internal time is. It’s pretty easy to be off just a hair and have that error cascade. After you do it a couple times, it gets easier, but I still greatly prefer playing with the other performers live.
Another thing not yet mentioned is that with live performances, the speakers tend to be directed outward, directly toward the audience. On-stage, the music might be a lot quieter than you think. Meanwhile, the singer is probably producing quite a high volume of sound directly inside their throat. Between these two things, it may be hard to hear the rest of the band.
I’ve noticed this before doing some karaoke – I was singing, but was loud enough that I couldn’t hear the music, and got off tempo. I wasn’t even particularly loud, but the acoustics were bad and directed away from me.
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