Mike Mangini comments

Please read this about click tracks to relate my feelings on it to your own opinions and feelings about it. This is a version of Bridges in the Sky of our (Dream Theater) album A Dramatic Turn of Events. It is a live version with the click track that I hear in my ear monitors every night. Using one camera from the front is a sign that there is no editing of any kind. The levels are not edited either. Nothing is.

Not the click track itself, but having the entire show depend on me amplifies the difficulty of playing Dream Theater music and makes it significantly harder to play. It is a pressure that has to be experienced to really “get.” Nothing can go wrong.

That’s different than my using a click for reference, say with the past G3 tours, Annihilator, Dale Bozzio [Missing Persons,] or some songs with Extreme. With DT I did not use a click early on except to reference some beginning tempos. These bands and musicians LOVED the click use. The song samples (like the ones used in 6:00 and many other DT songs,) lined up and feel comfortable. Also, they love it because their instrument delays/effects are in time. But mainly, they really love it because the difficult parts are not too fast; no drummer rushed the tempo.

In the early 1980’s, I measured that the average increase in BPM drummers (including me) made on live albums or shows was about +12 BPM. That’s an insane amount. Musicians with difficult parts can’t stand that. I don’t know a single one that doesn’t get infuriated when they cannot play their parts.

And yes, I would love to play some nights with no production, nothing on my back, and without this pressure. However, the most important thing is the result. No joy compares to hearing a show back that was executed spot-on while knowing that fans got the best out of me and that it looked and sounded as great as we could possibly make it. There is nothing is worse than hearing old shows compromised with brutal speed-ups than were NOT intended. All adrenaline. Fun at the time for a drummer, never fun for the musicians struggling to play, and no fun later for anyone because the results were not intended. The excuse of “feeling” while ruining songs can take a hike according to the composers and players.