Software reveals drummers who used click tracks

Posted by Rob Beschizza, March 3, 2009 12:23 PM |

Because it's much easier to hack music that has a perfectly even tempo, drummers often use a click track to make life easy for producers and remixers. Coder and music technologist Paul Lamere developed a program that plots the deviations of a drumbeat from its own overall tempo, which tells us who brings a metronome to the studio, and who just lets fly.

I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python library that allows you to analyze and manipulate music). ... I averaged the beat durations over a short window, and the resulting plot was quite good.

That wild blue line is, of course, John Bonham.

In search of the click track [Music Machinery]