Why do professional singers still need a click-track while performing? Doesn’t performing enough times makes you develop rhythm?
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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.
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