Playing live to a click is new to me. I can’t seem to pull off a “behind the beat” feel. You folks with experience, is there any hope? Will I get used to it? Right now it has to be the loudest thing in the mix too.
You need to know your monkey. Drummers are either heavy handed, or heavy footed, figure out what you are. Is your snare always louder than your kick when playing by yourself? Once determined that's what you're going to apply to the click to bring about a 'behind the beat' feel.
Let's say your snare is naturally dominant, what this usually means is you're going to have more control over its facility than your foot, and so it would be laid 'on' the click, or easier to lay on the click, calling that the center of the beat.
Once you get a little comfortable nailing the snare in the center, go into auto mode and shift your consciousness to your foot. Mess around with flaming the bass drum with the snare, make it an obvious/wide flam to start, then narrow it down. Flam behind (the beat) and ahead of the beat (before the snare) to familiarize yourself with the effect.
There's no hard rule on either snare or kick bringing up the rear to create a behind the beat feel, but getting used to one first will make it easier to get the other down, so I suggest starting with your dominant (in this example the snare) first, then work on the kick, it'll come easier. Snare being vs kick behind are diff feels, their subtle and have their place, need to learn one first.
Thanks for the encouragements! It seems in my circles there are a lot of players coming up with bad meter. In talking to them I find out that in their personal practice time they are not using any reference tools for meter. Now in this new situation (live w/click) they seem almost addicted to it. At the mere suggestion of not using one, I get a fearful deer in the headlights look. Back in the day if you didn't have good rhythm, or could not stay on pitch you did not get the gig. All very interesting.
Poor time isn't exclusive to just beginners, some top level iconic pros have an undeveloped, poor sense time. Poor time is just something you're going to have to deal with if you plan on being a musician, you will run into playing with these types of people.