How to make a backing track with the click on the left

The file Click Left plays is one stereo WAV per song: the click on the left channel and the whole mix, summed to mono, on the right. One file, one player, and any device with two outputs can split it. This is how to make one.

In the DAW

Make two buses. Send the click to a bus panned hard left. Send everything else to a bus panned hard right and summed to mono. Most DAWs will not route their built-in metronome to a bus, so put a click sample on its own track and program it by hand. That also lets you drop the click for a free-time intro or a pause, which a metronome cannot do.

Keep effects off the click bus. Reverb and delay smear the transient, and a smeared click is hard to lock to at stage volume. A short, bright sample cuts through a loud room better than a soft beep, and an accent on beat one makes bars easier to count when you are looking at the singer rather than the iPad.

Put a count-in in the file: one or two bars of click before the song starts, loud, with the accent on one. If the band starts before the track, make that count-in unmistakable. Decide what the click does at the end, either stopping on the last hit or running through the ring-out, and leave the ring-out in the file rather than chopping it. Click Left fades the track when you press Stop, but a song that ends on its own should be allowed to.

Export a stereo WAV at 44.1 or 48 kHz, 16 or 24 bit. Leave a little headroom and do not push the mono bus into a limiter for loudness. Click Left measures every track as it comes in and matches the levels across the set, so a quieter, more dynamic export sounds better than a squashed one. MP3 and M4A import fine if that is what you have, but WAV is the format with nothing to go wrong.

Naming the file

03 - Song Title (120bpm) [wait for keys].wav

The number at the front sets the running order when you import a folder. The tempo in round brackets sets the cue light and the tempo on the pad. Anything in square brackets becomes the note on the tape in front of you on stage. A folder called Friday Gig becomes a setlist called Friday Gig, in that order.

Checking it

Import the file. Click Left listens to both channels and works out which side is the click, because a click channel is mostly silence with spikes and a mix is not. If a file came out the other way round, open the song and change its layout. Where the click and the track go on your hardware is one setting for every song, so you never re-route song by song.

Play the preview with the Y-cable in and confirm the click is in your ears only and the mix is on the other side. Then run Soundcheck before the gig, which checks that every file still decodes.

What about a stereo mix?

A two-channel file can carry either a click and a mono mix, or a stereo mix with no click. Click Left plays two-channel files, so it is one or the other. With a Y-cable the mix reaches the desk in mono anyway, and most engineers would rather have a mono track they can place than a stereo pair. If the band needs stereo stems and a click, that is a different rig, and a different app.