The organ sounds will also happen if yer setting up fer 24 bit recording and have registered the 16 bit version, and it can happen sometimes even when registering the 24 bit version - the keys might be fore 24 bits but n-Tracks still thinks they are 16 bits. If that’s the case then email Flavio. He’s got some specific instructions to fix that poblem.
Yeah, I could pay for it, that is if I had any money, lol. I have wireless mics, so I’ll just have a long lead in time and get to the drums. After I mixed down the guitar part, I put it into mp3 and onto my mp3 player, so I can play the drums to it and it will keep a steady beat. Is that what you mean by playing to a metronome? Sorry that I don’t really have a clue about any of this.
Search this forum for “click track”.
The first step in any song where you’ll be doing overdubbing (adding tracks, which is what we all do) should be to make a click track, with the grid set up and the click track aligned to the grid. It’s just a simple part with clicks on the beat, and usually a different click for the first beat in the measure so you know where that is. We usually make 'em using a soft-synth and n-Track’s built-in metronome. Then you record the first part while monitoring the click track. After that, you can use the grid to rearrange things and it helps in other ways.
When you’re recording subsequent parts, it’s best to to the previous parts being played in n-Track. Use a long headphone cable. Otherwise you’ll have to align tracks manually. And this is another thing that’s easier to do if you have a “count-in click” – the part of the click track before the playing starts.
OK Jeff, slightly off-topic, but.
How do you learn, or rather teach, a sense of rhythm?
Perhaps for some people it’s instinctive; but I know I wasn’t born with it, (and evidently, neither were my parents), but I did learn it.
So how do you instill it in others? Tell them to practice with a metronome? Whack 'em on the head with a big stick every quarter beat? Or what?
Are there any exercises anyone can recommend; any tips or anything?
(And this is not purely an academic query, I have good reasons for asking it).
I like wacking them with a stick! 
Hey Jeff,
I searched the forum for “Click track” and went through the results, but I didn’t find much of anything. I still don’t really know what a click track is. Using a long headphone cable is kind of out of the question right now because I’d need one about 50 ft long. Lol. And about teaching a sense of rhythm, that’s a difficult question. I guess you could just practice tapping your foot to a song, or better yet, learn to play the drums, or guitar. The strum pattern I use for a lot of songs on my guitar teaches a good rhythm, so that I don’t ever tap my foot when I play it. I don’t know, Jeff probably has a better answer.
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Yeah Syn, that rumour has been circulating for a while now, but we’ve all been much too polite to say anything…
Thank you Crystal. I did try tapping my foot, ( I used one of Syn’s old sticks). The first half hour was fine, but then the bruising started. Mind you, it was still Ok till the flesh started going soggy, then the timing got a wee bitty wobbly. I reckon there was a good 8mS between the “slap” and the “squelch”, and the “splatter” seemed to go on for ever.
But, I’ll persevere.
"Thank you Crystal. I did try tapping my foot, ( I used one of Syn’s old sticks). The first half hour was fine, but then the bruising started."
Hey, just to let you know, I was actually being serious. And I didn’t mean tapping your foot with a stick either. You know how keep a beat with your foot while you play instruments? I’m sure you know what I meant, so I don’t think that reply was necessary.
I didn’t even realize how terrible my timing was until I started multitracking (back in 1977, at age 20). I’d lay down a keyboard or guitar track, and then go to lay a track on the other instrument, and wonder why I couldn’t get my parts to work together! (Well, I didn’t wonder for longer than a minute or two – the answer was pretty obvious.) Since then I’ve worked on it a lot. I was really happy not long ago when I was talking about timing and said to a musician I play with that my timing stinks, he said no, I was about average. Whee! Only took me 27 years!
The best way is to practice with a metronome, IMHO. Lots. For really rhythm-challenged folks (like I used to be), you can start out with a drum track, which is easier to follow and also easier to tell when you goof up and slip a beat one way or the other. But I feel the best practice sound is a good sharp click (with a different click on “1” being a good idea but not necessary if you’re not skipping/slipping beats).
When practicing, if you’re on-beat, you don’t even hear the metronome. When you can hear it, you’re off beat. Strangely, this doesn’t require the metronome to be very quiet to work.
A good way to think when practicing playing with a metronome is not to try to follow it, but rather, play the metronome. Sort of like “Be the ball”. Sounds silly, but I find it really helps and it’s a big mental shift.
Once you’re comfortable playing with a metronome, a very good alternative is to set it at half speed and use the clicks for the backbeat (beats 2 and 4). This is particularly good for popular music, including rock, blues, jazz, country, and folk. Less so for classical music, I suspect. The first time it can be a little tricky to get started, just count 2 and 4 when it clicks and then add 1 and 3 so you’re counting all 4 beats but the clicks only come on 2 and 4 and then start playing. After a little practice it gets very easy. And I find that in most popular music, it’s the backbeat that gives the musicians the most accurate cue where the beat is – not the downbeat as one might expect. The thing is, there’s usually lots going on at 1, but at 2 and 4 you hear that sharp snare hit and there’s no guesswork about where the beat is.
Eagleman, I’ll post again later about click tracks. As a drummer, your meter is probably better than most guitarists anyway, especially if you can play drums along with the guitar part and feel good about it. So go ahead and track away, and later try click tracks. I’ll post something here – I may write up a tip sheet to keep on-line permanently since this comes up a lot.
About that 50’ run, just get yourself some cheap lamp cord in bulk at any hardware store, 1/4" stereo jack and plug (at Radio Shack), and make yourself a cheap extension cable. You won’t regret it. By lamp cord, I mean wire like is used to plug in a typical desk lamp (into the wall AC outlet). 16 guage should be fine for this application. Get plenty extra so you can lay it out comfortably behind you. This is not an audiophile solution, feel free to scrimp. It may not sound perfect but it will work great.
I was only joking crystal, but if my response offended you, then please accept my deepest and most sincere apologies.
Jeff, like you, I had to learn a sense of rhythm. I’m not quite sure how I learned it, but I got there eventually.
But I’m now looking for a quick and easy way of teaching it to someone else.
But, I suspect there is no shortcut, just encourage them to practice and practice with a metronome until the beat stays in their head even as they sleep.
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My first drum teacher did just that. He’d hit me on the arm with a couple of drumsticks when I stopped playing because I made a mistake. The idea was that almost no one would notice a mistake while playing but everyone will notice stopping.
"The idea was that almost no one would notice a mistake while playing but everyone will notice stopping. "
I’m not real sure I agree with that though. If you mess up so bad that you’re hitting the snare half a beat before you’re supposed to, then I think the other musicians would be better off playing if you would just be quiet for a second and get back on beat. But hey, that’s just my opinion.
Hey Jeff, thanks for the idea about the lamp cord, I will definitely do that.
My problem with keeping a beat with a guitar is that I’ll slow down just a tiny bit once and a while, and when I play the next guitar part, I’ll just go ahead and slow down too kind of automatically, so that I don’t even realize that I’ve slowed down until I get to the drum track. My headphones aren’t very loud, so I can just barely hear the music when playing the drums, and often times, I’ll be in a fill and by the time I start playing ride and snare again it’s too late and I’m ahead of the beat. I think this click track thing would be an awesome thing, but until you explain that to me, could I just play the guitar to the metronome through the headphones? Thanks!
OK, apology obviously not accepted.
Ach well, life goes on!
A click track is basically no different from a metronome, except, it can be a wee bitty fancier.
But, if you don’t change BPM or time sig throughout the number, then just record the metronome.
But as Jeff says, use something “sharp”. Sidestick, snare click, claves, or whatever, and accentuate the beats you need.
But use something with a lot of high frequency components, it cuts through much better.
If your headphone volume is too low, then fix that. Run it through an amp or whatever you have to do. If you can’t hear the click track, then you’re screwed.
But eventually you’ll find that the “click” still goes on in your head even when you can’t hear it.
How that happens I don’t know, and that’s what I was hoping someone could tell me so that I could teach it to someone else.
But just a few other wee thoughts about working to a metronome. Some people work better to a visual cue rather than an auditory one. That’s why the old swinging mechanical metronomes were so good. And that’s also why you’ll see the bassist on a really tight band watching the drummer.
So perhaps that’s an area to explore.
Also, don’t be tempted to use speakers instead of headphones. The delay of sound in air is very roughly 1 millisecond per foot, so for your 50 feet we’re talking 50mS!
But I know the problem you’re having. My youngest son is a drummer, and he spent ages learning fancy fills and rolls, but invariably he’d return to the basic beat a wee bitty off.
I tried to tell him to concentrate on the essentials first, get that beat in your head, in your heart, in your soul; but what son ever listens to his dad? 
"OK, apology obviously not accepted."
No offense taken, and appology accepted.
Ok, well I was messing around with the metronome a few minutes ago, and I’m finally STARTING to figure out how it works. I didn’t really have a clue how the BPM relate to how fast the song I was playing went. So I just guessed that since it started out on thirty, that it had something to do with multiples of thirty. So I went 210, which was too slow, then 240, which was too fast. Anywho, although it doesn’t make any sense to me, 225, halfway in between, was right at the beat I was using, so I cut it in half and am using a 112.5 4/4 beat. But the three beats after the accented one sometime seem a tiny bit off, and I don’t think it’s just me. I’ll be keeping a perfect beat with it, and I’ll still land on the accented beat, but the other three seem to change once in a while, could this have something to do with what it’s being outputed to? And how do I make a click track? Record the metronome? Thanks!
"My youngest son is a drummer, and he spent ages learning fancy fills and rolls, but invariably he’d return to the basic beat a wee bitty off."
My problem isn’t really that, my problem is that the guitars are off, so when I keep a good beat on the drums and can’t hear the music, I pass up the music because it slows down sometimes.
Just tap it out crystal!
Unless you’re Dave Brubeck or Johann Strauss, chances are you’re gonna be doing four beats to the bar.
You can tap tempo in n-track, or Cubase, or analogueX, or just use a stopwatch.
If there is a timing issue, it may well be the hardware or software on your computer.
Buy a 3 quid electronic metronome to check. If there’s still an issue, then chances are it’s you.
But if it’s the computer, then there’s a whole area to explore involving mobo, soundcard, n-track settings, etc.
But make sure it’s not you first, ok.
I’m not sure what you mean by tap it out, do you just mean count the BPM by tapping with a stopwatch? And it’s definitely not me. When I go “view” and hit metronome, and click the “test” button, it sounds great, but when I hit the close button and hit the play button, the three “other” beats sometime sound a little squeezed together. Anyway, thanks a lot!
n-Track has a feature that allows you to tap to set the tempo. That’s what he meant by “tap it out”.
The metronome could be lagging occasionally due to stuff going on in your computer. There’s a workaround for this, which is to render it to a wave file. I always do this first thing for any song project. Not only does it remove any doubt about the clicks, it can also serve as a visual guide.
I did a pretty thorough search and didn’t find a good “how to”, at least not this year. Thought we did, but it might have been at audiominds.com (another good place for good recording tips). I’ll write something up and post it in the next week or so. Bug me later if I forget, OK? 
Yes, fix the headphone volume thing somehow. Find an old stereo nobody’s using, or at a yard sale. A real cheap one should do fine as long as it has a headphone jack. Adding that long cord will only make this problem worse.
If you have $80 (plus shipping) to spend, I recommend you get a pair of “Extreme Isolation” headphones by Direct Sound. They’ll really help you hear the monitor when playing drums and (much more importantly) help protect you from ear damage. Drums are very loud, and you don’t want to turn headphones up enough to monitor louder than the drums, at least for very long. You should consider this an $80 investment that will make all sound gear work better for the rest of your life.
If you can’t scratch up the bucks, then at least try to find an old pair of full-enclosure headphones for working with drums, if you don’t already have them.
Hey Jeff,
I took apart an old cd rom drive and removed the stereo jack from it, plus I used the plug from an old pair of walkie talkie headphones, and some good speaker wire my dad had laying around, and I made an extension cord. The volume won’t be a problem now that I can just turn up the speakers, but I don’t have any closed-ear headphones. For the metronome problem I did the same that I talked about earlier and put a cord going from output to input on my sound card. I then opened the metronome and pushed “test” and recorded it to Nero wave editor. Then imported the wave file to N. It just seems kind of weird why the test would play fine, but when recording or playing the metronome for real, it messes it up. Anyway, I fixed the problem, thanks!
Uh, HELP!!! I guess I was wrong about the volume. I just plugged in my new extension cord and tried it out for the first time, and even with everything cranked all the way up, by the time the sounds gets to the headphones, I have almost zero volume left. What do I do?
UPDATE: I fixed the problem. There was some problem with a cord I was using to connect the extension cord to the PC speakers, I removed it and went straight from the speakers to the extension cord and the volume magically came back. Thanks!
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| UPDATE: I fixed the problem. There was some problem with a cord I was using to connect the extension cord to the PC speakers, I removed it and went straight from the speakers to the extension cord and the volume magically came back. Thanks! |
Crystal, there is no magic when it comes to technology.
The magic happens when you write or play your music.
The engineering side of things is mostly down to good soldering technique.