Is my drummer rushing the beat?

Three things that get called rushing

• Playing ahead. Every hit is early by about the same amount. The tempo is steady and the drummer sits on top of the beat.
• Speeding up. The tempo itself rises, typically into a chorus or through a fill. The hits drift further ahead of a fixed grid as the take goes on.
• Loose timing. Hits are early and late with no pattern. The average may be zero while the playing still sounds unsteady.

Each has a different remedy, so find out which one it is before editing.

How much matters

As a rough guide, an average of a few milliseconds ahead is not heard as a fault. Around 10 to 20 ms ahead reads as pushing, which suits punk and fast rock and unsettles a ballad. Past about 30 ms the drums sound early against everything else. Spread matters as much as the average: a drummer who is 15 ms ahead on every hit sounds tighter than one who averages zero and scatters by 25 ms.

Check the grid first

If the band did not record to a click, the grid is not what the drummer was playing to, and a measurement against it means little. Set the project tempo from the performance first. And if every track in the session is late by the same amount, that is recording latency, not the player.

What to do about it

A steady lead can be left alone, or the whole part moved later by its average offset. A tempo that climbs is better followed than fought: map the tempo to the take. Loose hits are fixed one at a time, or the take is recorded again.

In Zammoth

The engineer measures rushing and dragging against the grid: the average offset in milliseconds, the scatter around it and the swing. Ask about a track by name:

A clip's timing is corrected with warp markers, which lock a moment in the audio to a position on the grid and stretch the audio between them. See the manual on warping and on what the engineer can measure.