Unless your piece is some kind of strange tempo lacking song from a weird genre track it. If the song has a tempo, then click-track that shit. The only reason anyone why anyone ever says that a click track sterilizes or removes the heart of a song is because they are bad players. period. If you swear by never using one ever, you are a bad engineer/player. I'll go one step further and say if you can't write your music down onto sheet music, you have no business claiming to be anything but an amateur. If you can write it down onto real sheet music (not tabs noob) then one of the things you're gonna do is write down a tempo. period. None of the classical masters ever wrote a song without a tempo, neither should an amateur artist. If you want to be good you HAVE TO LEARN TO PLAY TO A CLICK. You don't become an airplane ace shooting down nazi's by ignoring what the aces before you did, every great player has learned to play to a click-track (metronome).
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The only people who hate click-tracks are people who hate being shown they are wrong.