Anybody play to a click track live?

[ClydeMcAllister]

My band is working on a song that's really quite heavy on the electronics. There are alot of things that are sequenced, and our keyboardist could just as well press a button and it'd all be fine and dandy if we were perfectly on tempo with it. So we've been thinking of playing with a click track for our drummer.

Anyone else play to a click track? Is there any sort of device we could get for our keyboard player to tap the tempo in so we don't have to worry about this?(his keyboard has no such feature, that we know of. Korg TR series.) I'm just worried that our drummer will get a bit ahead of himself, fall off the track and then everything is out of whack.

[OveriseFan]

If your drummer can't play to a click - that's a serious problem.

[ClydeMcAllister]

I'm sure he could play to a click, and we've been practicing that way, I'm just wondering if there was any other way to do it.

[AgainstTheOcean]

I'm sure he could play to a click, and we've been practicing that way, I'm just wondering if there was any other way to do it.

You're asking if there are any alternatives to a work-around. If you don't wanna play to a click, play the actual parts. Shifting tempos for prerecorded things is not gonna be pretty.

[hoorayitsdave]

My band just went through the same thing. Because of the arpeggios on the keyboard there is no way to play along without a click. A perfect computer vs. imperfect musicians means you'll be off a lot. We tried just playing the original parts with no arpeggios, but it sounded like shit compared to the sequencing. We ended up purchasing the Nady series in-ear monitor system for a pretty reasonable price. Now we can play to a click and obviously we sound better live.

[Mynor]

I'm sure you could find something for the part to be in tempo, I know there's guitar pedals that you step on in tempo, and it follows the tempo you stepped at. There's gotta be something for Keyboard.

If not, yeah, just buy an in-ear click. That'll do you fine.

[AgainstTheOcean]

My band just went through the same thing. Because of the arpeggios on the keyboard there is no way to play along without a click. A perfect computer vs. imperfect musicians means you'll be off a lot. We tried just playing the original parts with no arpeggios, but it sounded like shit compared to the sequencing. We ended up purchasing the Nady series in-ear monitor system for a pretty reasonable price. Now we can play to a click and obviously we sound better live.

I've heard terrible things about the sound quality of the nady in-ears. How are they holding up?

[remoteCONTROL]

write down all the bpm's of the songs you're recording and keep them logged on a computer somewhere so you don't have to go back and figure it out later. The way we do sampling live is we get a recording of exactly what we want playing through the mains (electronic drums, ambient noises, etc) and pan them all to the right. Then we have the click (cowbell is our drummers prefrence) and pan it to the left. We load all the songs like this on an iPod. Then we have a stereo splitter (radio shack has em for a dollar or something). The right side goes to the direct input line onstage and the left side goes to the drummer's headphones. I think we have a 16 beat intro with the click everytime so the samples line up. Make sense?

[hoorayitsdave]

Obviously we upgraded the factory headphones. We haven't had long enough with them to give a fair grade yet, however if you read up about the product, there are some pretty cool tricks to improve the sound quality. Of course you get the quality you pay for, and we have no money.

[ClydeMcAllister]

write down all the bpm's of the songs you're recording and keep them logged on a computer somewhere so you don't have to go back and figure it out later. The way we do sampling live is we get a recording of exactly what we want playing through the mains (electronic drums, ambient noises, etc) and pan them all to the right. Then we have the click (cowbell is our drummers prefrence) and pan it to the left. We load all the songs like this on an iPod. Then we have a stereo splitter (radio shack has em for a dollar or something). The right side goes to the direct input line onstage and the left side goes to the drummer's headphones. I think we have a 16 beat intro with the click everytime so the samples line up. Make sense?

Yeah, makes alot of sense. We've just been playing with a MIDI file of the song (from guitar pro) in our drummers headphones and trying to follow him until we could figure out what else to do.

I'm sure you could find something for the part to be in tempo, I know there's guitar pedals that you step on in tempo, and it follows the tempo you stepped at. There's gotta be something for Keyboard.

If not, yeah, just buy an in-ear click. That'll do you fine.

I'm still trying to find something like this for the keyboard. We have a few songs with an arpeggiator in certain spots and it'd nice to have when trying to write something with simmilar parts.