The beat rules
The click track, like a metronome fed in through headphones, is essential for keeping the band in sync with any pre-programmed music. But it’s also very rigid when you are playing a gig or even when developing a song in rehearsal. Roberston says that creating music requires a kind of ‘flow’, but it’s difficult to achieve in rehearsal when the band are so focussed on keeping the tempo set by a click track. ‘A key thing about music is surprise, and that’s the excitement factor, and you can lose that by playing to a rigid thing, like having a silent car alarm in the background.’

Speeds up, slows down
He designed the B-Keeper program in Java and the drummer no longer needs to listen to the click. The software makes as small an adjustment as possible, so when the drummer speeds up slightly, everything is shifted and happens slightly earlier. ‘It’s a dynamic system,’ says Roberston, ‘it’s always correcting and there are “windows” around the beat where B-Keeper expects the beats to be, which can get really narrow if the drumming is really precise, or they can get wider if the drummer is varying.’ Robertson has made the software available for other bands to use and will use the feedback to develop it further.