DrumEatDrum
Platinum Member
I agree 100%.
I see thresholds of imperfection and it depends on the qualities of the music. For instance, Keith Moon wasn't precise but he brought so much energy and creativity to the mix it didn't matter. Same with Mitch Mitchell. Some of Ringo's tracks wouldn't pass muster today but there were close enough to work with the music and his drum parts and feel were great. ...
Sort of ironic Keith Moon of all drummers was one of the 1st major drummers to use a click on stage so he could follow the sequencers on "Baba O Reiley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again."
But you also make the point I was attempting to make, in that yeah, in the past drummers didn't need clicks because they had good time, but while they may have had good time, how many would have click perfect time? Not many I'd imagine. If you put a lot of those "good time" drum tracks up on a computer grid, they wouldn't line up perfectly. But back then, no one cared as long as it feels good.
Machine oriented music is so pervasive in our modern society, that people just expect a level of unhuman perfection that wasn't expected in years past. If we took today's expectations and put them into the 60's, I bet many of our non-click having hero's would have been using clicks more often.
There is nothing cheating about clicks like. It's not because drummers today are terrible time keepers compared to drummers 30-40 years ago, but because people expect people to sound more like machines today than they used to. Which we can think is sad and wrong all we want, but it's obviously a part of many bands today.