How to sing in time

What it sounds like

You start with the track and end somewhere else. The phrasing feels natural while you sing it and rushed or dragged on playback, usually rushing.

What is actually being measured

The variability of the intervals between your own note onsets, compared against the beat grid detected in the backing track. It is the steadiness of your pulse that is being measured, not whether any single entry was early.

Timing drift opens as a problem when the coefficient of variation of your inter-onset intervals exceeds 0.15, and counts as severe at 0.4.

Why it happens

Drift is what happens when a singer follows the melody instead of the pulse. It gets worse in emotionally intense passages, at the ends of phrases where a breath is needed, and anywhere the backing track thins out and stops asserting the beat.

How to fix it

• —Practise with a metronome at half tempo, subdividing. Most drift is invisible at full speed and obvious at half.
• —Clap or count the phrase before singing it. If the clapping drifts, the singing was never the problem.
• —Plan breaths as part of the rhythm rather than as gaps between it.
• —Record against a click and listen back to that take, not to the one with the full arrangement — a busy mix will paper over drift that a click exposes.

The drill

Metronome-locked patterns at slow tempos, lengthening as the streak builds, so that the pulse has to be maintained through more of the phrase before the problem closes.

Common questions