Just curious(Sorry if this is in the wrong section).It seems like it would be somewhat difficult to do with the way basslines work.
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Do Ska bands use a click track?
- Thread starter HarrisonJ.Gool
- Start date
I've done a few Ska tunes here and there with a click track. Not any harder or easier than any other style, as the parts still have to be in time.
I used to be in a ska band...I must have been doing it wrong since I found absolutely nothing about ska bass lines that made them more difficult to play along with a click than other styles.
This is not a ska-specific issue. Bottom line: Either you can play to a click or you can't, regardless of genre. It's not a skill that a lot of people have. The number of people I've had in my studio that say they can play to a click, and then only seem to manage it for a few measures before pushing or dragging the tempo is shocking. I had one guitar player tell me that my click was slowing down. 
Drummers seem to have the biggest issues with a click.
My fiance was in a band that relied heavily on sequences (no keyboards just a sequencer and a synth head) and they had a hell of a time finding drummers that could hang with the click, which was necessary for obvious reasons.
My fiance was in a band that relied heavily on sequences (no keyboards just a sequencer and a synth head) and they had a hell of a time finding drummers that could hang with the click, which was necessary for obvious reasons.
If there's a sequencer involved it gets really tough. I'm a drummer as well as a bassist, and a small studio owner (well, I was until I started building a new studio and am tied up in permitting... ugh... There's a whole thread on it if you want to read it), and have seen this very situation before. Commonly a drummer will play to the click, and then the band will play to the recorded drums, and only rely on the click for sections where there are no drums to act as a guide. You want the rest of the band to play to the subtle drift that occurs with even the greatest drummers. A sequencer is not a human. It absolutely refuses to be anything but mathematically perfect for a given sequence. If the drums aren't tight enough to the click, the sequence starts sounding off, even though they're not the ones drifting. You could always slice and align the drum parts in post, but that rarely sounds all that great (although it's gotten WAY better in recent years). You could also record the drums on an electronic kit via MIDI and align everything in post. You could do the same with the sequencer and record it via MIDI, play it with a VST in the box, and manually align every note of the performed sequence that's associated with a drum beat that drifted a bit.
Absolutely. There are a lot of hiphop bands I see around the Seattle area that do this with backing tracks AND a live drummer. The ones that can pull it off have the benefit of adding the "impact" of live instrumentation to their set. The ones that can't... Wow... Trainwreck to say the least.
