Sunday, January 29, 2012

Organising click track tempos and calculating BPM

[As always, the disclaimer: The techniques described here are merely those employed by four musicians in a band attempting to record their album from within an abandoned garage. We have limited experience, a limited amount of equipment, and a budget of precisely zero - none of which we see as a barrier. Whilst strictly amateur in our approach, however, this is a serious attempt at recording ... ]

One of the earliest considerations was how to best achieve a workable click track for each song that we intended to record, as in the past we'd forgone the nuisance of these entirely in preference for simply laying down the drums as a separate take whose only reference to tempo happened to be what the rest of the band was 'silently' playing into some headphones worn by the drummer. This allowed for a certain charm perhaps, although wasn't particularly satisfying to the ear and didn't leave us with a universal track that utilised further along the recording process as our techniques (hopefully) improved.

So this time around we've decided to try and develop a rather more mathematical approach to things and are currently in the process of organising proper click tracks for each song.

Calculating the right tempo was a relatively straightforward process, although there were a few considerations that needed to be taken into account which didn't initially register as being crucially important until issues announced themselves later on, during the recording of guide vocals for instance.

The main problem was that the tempo needed to be one that was agreeable for each instrument recording to it, as depending on who'd be laying the initial click tracks down there'd likely be differences of opinion with regards various complexities: perhaps the drums would lose certain fills if the track was too fast, maybe the vocalist would struggle for air between certain notes if the spacing was too short, if fingerpicking was present, the natural rhythm of the guitarist's fingers had to be taken into consideration ... all issues which had to be addressed prior to finalising any tempo decisions.

The manner in which we've approached these various discrepancies, and in order to get a decent cross-reference of tempos, was to collect all of the various live garage recordings we'd captured of each track over the past few months, and from amongst these we then collectively selected one that met everybody's needs simultaneously; on some practice nights the takes we'd managed to harvest had been rushed, on others the songs seemed to drag along at a leisurely, sometimes painful pace, and on yet others (thanks to a combination of correct playing speed and the fortunate pressing of the record button) a take that was good on all counts was captured. 

As with most (and hopefully all) live bands, the tempo throughout each of these live takes was naturally pretty fluid as well (ebbing and flowing with the band's temperament etc.), so we then each listened to the track separately (at home) whilst using this webpage to ascertain what BPM settings were involved. Basically, the live track was played in the background whilst the tempo was tapped out onto the keyboard and noted down.


All of the individual sections - intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro etc. - were calculated and from there a concensus upon the correct tempos was reached.

[Note: Some tracks had multiple speeds within them (verses might be 117bpm and choruses might be 122bpm, say) and I'll be writing up how we developed the click tracks for those (using Cool Edit) in a future post.]

The final list, with some tracks still to be finalised, looks like this:


With the tempo for each song now agreed upon, the next post will detail how we went about recording the most basic click track (the example being a song which has just one speed maintained throughout) ...