Unless you're recording some sort of experimental Brian Eno-esque ambient work, drums are the logical instrument to start with when you’re laying down tracks for a song. This is because having a rhythm and feel to play to makes performing in the studio much easier for other musicians.
The drums are the backbone of almost any song, providing the pulse that every other instrument plays to. You can think of them sort of like the conductor of a symphony. Without their direction, the other instruments may drift out of time with one another, and the music would sound disorganized.
A guitarist may have a really strong natural sense of rhythm, but no matter how hard they try, they’ll never be able to lay down a guitar track with perfect timing throughout. It’s not possible.
Humans just don’t have that good a sense of the passing of time. An interesting way to test this is to count the first 10 seconds along with a stopwatch, then look away from the stopwatch.
Keep counting for a full minute, and as you hit 60 seconds, stop the stopwatch. The chances of you hitting stop directly on or even within a second of a minute are incredibly small.
The truth of the matter is, all musicians are following the drummer’s lead, and to follow something, it has to be in front of you. Have you ever seen a drummer click their sticks together before the band bursts into a song on stage?
Drummers do this for the exact same reason they’re normally tracked first in a studio. It sets the sonic scene of the song, allowing their fellow musicians to start playing in time together.
Drummers don’t only provide this essential pace at the beginning of a song. If there are any breaks in the music, they help the rest of the band kick back into action when the time comes.
Think about Black Dog by Led Zeppelin. The verse guitar riffs and drums are separated by vocal passages followed by brief pauses. When I was learning that song as a teenager, I couldn’t for the life of me start playing on time when the music came back in. I nailed it once every so often, but it was always a fluke.
I was just about to give up when I heard something, a very faint “click” sound a split second before the music burst back into action. This was John Bonham’s way of telling the rest of the band it was time to play.
So, without the drums setting up the context of a song or passage within a song, it can be nigh on impossible to get the timing just right.
Of course, there are no rules set in stone that state you absolutely have to lay down the drums of a track first. A studio engineer may request that the drummer be the first in the booth, but if you want to do it differently, you can.
However, on most occasions, you’ll still need a click track at the very least. A click track is essentially a metronome that will play through your headphones, giving you a bare-bones rhythm to play to. It helps you play your instrument in time, so other musicians can layer their parts on top at a later date.
Even drummers use click tracks when they’re laying down their initial rhythmic framework for the song, but a click track is a very limited rhythmic device. It won’t provide…
- Feeling
- Nuance
- Dynamics
- Shifting Time Signatures
- Rhythmic Pauses
All of these aspects of rhythm are either inherently human or too technical for a click track. You’ll need a drummer to bring their personality and flavor to the equation to infuse a song with all these fundamentals.
Have the drums always been recorded first historically? No, not particularly. Back in the early days when Sinatra was swingin’, almost all studio recordings were performed live, meaning the whole band performed a piece together and were recorded together.
Each instrument may have had its own isolated connection to the recording apparatus, so it could be edited independently in post production, but the performance was like any other. A group simply took their stage show to the studio and laid it all out on tape.
This live recording technique may sound quite drastic, but it’s not without its merits. You probably don’t need to be told that a lot of the original spark of a song or album can be lost in the studio.
It’s part of the reason seeing music being played in person can be so much more enthralling. However, by using this all-at-once recording method, an engineer is able to capture the true essence of the band’s live sound — pretty neat, huh?
It wasn’t until around The Beatles’ era that studio engineers began splitting instruments out into discrete sections for recording. As the drummer set the pace for live performances, naturally, they were called upon first in the studio.
An individualistic recording format may have become the standard, but you’ll still see remnants of the live recording era in modern recording sessions.
For instance, even if it’s been decided that the drums should be the first instrument tracked, it might help the drummer get a feel for the song if the guitarist or bassist plays along with them.
The drums will be recorded separately, with the other musician playing in the drummer’s ear but isolated from the track. Using this method, a drummer can bring much more emotion into their playthrough, combining their bandmate’s energy with their own to make something truly unique.
It’s like two actors feeding off each other in a scene. It will amount to a much more engaging and realistic performance than having the two perform their roles separately and cutting it together at a later date.
Another recording technique that takes inspiration from the early days is to have the band record a rough live demo of a song, then get the drummer to lay down their first track with the demo playing in their ear. In this scenario, technically, drums aren’t the first thing recorded.