recording to a loop instead of a click track

In the studio I have quite a few singer/songwriters come in to do projects. Often we will start with them and add the band later so there is the need for a click track. I abandoned the straight click track idea a long time ago and have been using a drum pattern with a kick, snare high hat or some combination of those - maybe a shaker or whatever. Somewhere along the way it occurred to me to add a person-played shaker to humanize it a bit.

The biggest revelation came when a guitar player was having a difficult time with the machine rhythm and we tried the Akai E2 Headrush looper. He played a few bars of the tune and when he had the tempo, he muted the strings and I looped a bar or two with the E2. Just like that we had a very human track to play along with - in fact he was playing along with the most natural rhythm possible - his own. We used the same method for all the tracks and not only did it work well, it was way faster than programming a machine and deciding on a temp etc.