Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
The players, as mentioned by Gordon and Mark, may often start early and this does NOT mean the music is misaligned. In BIAB, the guitar very often strums early in a piece that has syncopation. And of course there is the drum lead-in, if you have it set for that.


Just to be clear myself, I wasn't thinking of things as drastic as a player hitting a chord a beat early, or playing some kind of a lead-in. I wasn't thinking of syncopation. I'm thinking of the kind of "misalignment" that will ALWAYS occur, even when the intent is to play perfectly in time. Sometimes, this will just be "flawed humanity", but often it's part of what I called the envelope of a sound. If you sing "hi, hi, hi, hi" in humanly perfect rhythm, in sync with an electronic metronome, you will still almost certainly find that the "attack" begins a bit before the beat as you begin exhaling and peaks a bit later as the tone takes on full strength. It's more than style, it's the nature of sound.