It is true that drum machines are wonderful for home recording. You may be lucky enough to know a drummer with the invention of Stewart Copeland, the power of John Bonham or the explosive force of Keith Moon. Unfortunately,though, if you stick this drummer in your home studio/front room/flat, the neighbours are not going to be very happy.

That said, click tracks and drum machines are two of the worst things ever to happen to popular music. First, drum machines like all machines are expressionless in the true sense. No human being is behind the sound at the moment that sound is made. Of course, the technology is a human artefact, and the programming carries human intention that may contain aesthetic expression. But it is the machine that executes the actual music. The essential
link in the moment of performance between the soul and sound waves is not there. The music is literally “soul-less”. It is a huge irony that “beatboxes” came to dominate a type of music that once termed itself “soul”.

Second, both click tracks and drum machines force an inhuman straitjacket onto music-making. Much of the prejudice against popular music that exists in the field of so-called “serious music” is based on a mixture of ignorance, cultural brainwashing and an inadequate critical vocabulary with which to describe how popular music achieves its greatest effects. But with regard to tempo, for once, the reaction of the classical musician is right on the money. If you suggested to an orchestra that they could improve their performance of a Beethoven symphony or a Rachmaninov piano concerto with a click track, so they would all be perfectly in time, they would fall off their stools laughing. When they recovered, they would insist that your click track idea would, at one digital stroke, remove all the expression from the music. In order for music to “breathe”, performers must be free to pause slightly before a chord or modulation or phrase. Classical scores are full of terms such as accelerando, ritenuto, rallentando,a tempo all of which indicate departures from strict time. In other words, “TPV” is an essential element of music performance. Why should popular music be any different?