Building Your Band

A better conversation about music, with David Loftis and Peter Bulanow

Peter James | Clashing With Every Single Person

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We’re joined by legendary Hillsong keyboardist and sound designer Peter James. Peter has been playing piano/keys for the last 25+ years, and has been heavily involved with Hillsong Church as a volunteer on the weekends, as well as being employed by Hillsong United and Hillsong International Leadership College as a lecturer for the past 13 years. Additionally, he has played on 40+ Hillsong albums.

In this episode, we get inside Peter James headspace on everything from Sound Design -> Writing Parts -> Arranging -> Synth Bass. We hear how he pushes himself to continually try something new, the relationship of keyboard parts to sounds, a trick for coming up with parts, and how to incorporate synth base into your band. We hear about the influence of Hillsong producer, Joel Houston, and the reference material he pushed out ahead of tracking, such as: M83, Passion Pit, & Radiohead, that influence modern worship music today.

Go to Peter James Productions, check out his stuff at Multitracks (including his sounds for Oceans), don’t miss his Youtube Channel, and follow him on Facebook, and Twitter.

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Grant Norsworthy | Prancing, Stancing, Left And Right Glancing

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A Grammy-nominated, Dove Award-winning musician (formerly with Sonicflood and Paul Colman Trio), Grant Norsworthy is also the founder, owner, content developer and principal instructor for More Than Music Mentor, providing online and on-site training to equip church singers, instrumentalists and technicians for artistic excellence and authentic worship.

In this captivating podcast episode, we talk about why Grant wants to use music to connect with people more than he wants to just play cool music that interests himself. He deconstructs the word “worship” for us, and reminds us of a larger definition for the idea (Romans 12:1-2, James 1:26-27 ). This larger meaning impacts our lives most directly offstage, but also informs our music in very significant ways – how we perform it, voice it, arrange it, and even how we prepare for it.

Grant shares two overarching lessons from his time with Sonicflood:

First, music is more powerful than I ever realized, and more capable than I ever realized, at helping people connect with God…. in a way that has eternal significance.

Secondly, the act of singing songs to God in and of itself is not worship. To call us a worship band singing worship songs is actually to misuse the word worship. “To worship God” is a lot bigger than that.

Also, Grant confirms what I thought was my idea ;-), that the sound engineer is the MOST IMPORTANT member of the band.

Grant’s youtube channel is an incredible resource. For more Grant goodness follow him on Twitter @grantnorsworthy, Facebook /grantnorsworthy, visit MoreThanMusicMentor.com / GrantNorsworthy.com and check out the GrantNorsworthy/Blog.

Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher and support the show by rating us and leaving a comment. Have a question? Leave a comment below or connect directly with us!

Intuitive Keys MainStage Template

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I’m so excited to be releasing my own MainStage Template that I call “Intuitive Keys“.

This template is a product of this blog and podcast after spending an inordinate amount of time considering how much the architecture of a template informs the way sounds are created, and wondering exactly how I would want to inform that process.

First, it’s branded as Intuitive Keys precisely because the beauty of making music is that there is no logic that informs a right or wrong answer. Decisions in music are completely intuitive. So I don’t want the process of playing to be cerebral either. Now I love being cerebral, I’m a spreadsheet guy (shout out to auto filter and pivot tables!) and I love doing my pre-production sound design before I play. But when it comes time to make music, I want to be able to be in the moment. Consequently, I’ve made a lot of decisions ahead of time in this template.

In fact, this template works by making decisions ahead of time. This means it’s not as configurable in real time as templates with multiple faders, but I would argue it’s more playable because every sound is carefully mapped to the mod wheel and aftertouch and it’s ultimately capable of achieving similar (or better) results by moving between different combinations of sounds.

The impetus behind using the mod wheel and after-touch to modulate the sound in real time comes from the firm conviction that only half of the job of playing keyboards is playing notes. The other half is playing your sound, and to that end, the large X-Y pad in the middle of the screen informs you of the range of MIDI value (0-127) that your hardware is transmitting for your mod-wheel in the horizontal (X) direction, and aftertouch in the vertical (Y) direction. Changing these two parameters is how you “play your sound”, and this design actually helps teach synthesis to aspiring modern keyboardists.

Anyone who has been around me knows that arranging is key to how I think about music. So being able to move in and out of the pianos is a critical component of that. The way Intuitive Keys is configured, there is the synthesis engine on top (featuring the large X-Y pad), but then a piano engine on the bottom row that is always available and can layer any of the sounds in the synthesis engine as shown in the menu.

Finally, I’m going to admit that not only do I have no interest in recreating the album, I think it’s counterproductive to what you should be doing in your community. In any community, out of country or local, our job is to contextualize the message. You may think you don’t do that, but I assure you that the way your church worships would be inconceivably shocking to Jesus’ disciples. We all do that. So to do that at the micro-level helps validate that message all the more. Getting off my theological soapbox and returning to music, the current trend is for albums to use many tracks and use bright sounds. An excellent engineer can craft out space for the vocals to fit with bright sounds, but this puts an extraordinary and I would argue, unnecessary, burden on a live sound engineer, regardless of their level. Consequently, I have created very warm sounds largely inspired by analog synthesis. This isn’t to say that there are no high-frequency components, but where there are (particularly in the digital and some of the analog sounds with the mod-wheel cranked) those high frequencies are tempered to facilitate vocals riding on top. This should make mixing your keyboard parts in easier, and may even get you turned up in the mix, whereas a brighter sound reminiscent of the album’s sounds, may get you quickly turned down.

Using this template (with 50 patches and 50 combinations), encourages you to:

  1. Use a different patch/combination for every song, maybe more than one!
  2. Modulate that patch/combination with the mod wheel and aftertouch in real time to help tell the story of the song.
  3. Move in and out of using the acoustic piano to change up the tonality of the keyboards and keep the piano sounding fresh.
  4. Use warm sounds in order to facilitate a great mix suitable for vocals to sit on top.

I really hope you get a chance to check it out and use it. To find out more visit intuitivekeys.com and join the Intuitive Keys Facebook group.

 

Christian Nuckels | Open Up Your Hands

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Christian Nuckels joins us to talk about his unlikely journey into ministry and songwriting, the process of songwriting, how production is part of that (but can also get in the way), and how collaboration can mature a song and invest others in it. Christian show us a more generous way of creating- a way that is very much informed by the Gospel of loving God and loving others.

We also discuss his first SKA band, Six Foot Midget, his follow-on acoustic project, and his latest band, Grace Rising, and The Sozo Sessions – EP.

Shout out to: Ben Mellot of Nothing But Noise studio

Influences Christian mentioned include: Cake, Dave Matthews Band, Radiohead The Bends (High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees) and OK Computer, as well as Dashboard Confesionnals – Chris Corrabba.

A song is not birthed fully until it is birthed in the hearts of the congregation. Jennie Lee Riddle

Don’t miss Christian’s Drummer’s episode with Brew.

To find out more, visit Grace Rising Band and Sozo Children. If you’re interested in collaborating with Christian Nuckels on songwriting, you may contact him at iamnuckels at me dot com.

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Dan Cuomo | Something’s Wrong With That Click Track

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Dan Cuomo joins the show to share his thoughts, wisdom and experience playing rock drums, getting signed to a major label (40 Records) and touring Europe, and then deciding what’s next. Today you will find Dan playing modern worship drums in churches all over the DC/MD/VA area.

I hold Dan up as an example of exactly the kind of drummer you should see in your local church. By Dan’s own admission, he isn’t a technical drummer – which is precisely the point: you don’t need a technically trained jazz fusion drummer with intricate grooves and insane chops to sound great. Rarely do I see a situation where I think a musician needs more skills / more chops for the band or song to sound better. Rather, I often think a musician needs to better understand the essentials of what needs to be played, and needs to understand their role with respect to keeping time and creating space. Dan is your encouragement that you don’t need better players, you just need to find folks willing to play less and listen more in order to serve the song.

He must become greater; I must become less. John 3:30

For more of Dan Cuomo, find him on Facebook & Twitter, and pick up Steph Cuomo’s latest project on iTunes.

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 + Creatives

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If you’re a creative, you probably have an eye for Apple’s design and you understand computing at the intersection of technology and the humanities. The last few years, we’ve seen quite a few signs that Apple is focusing heavily on consumers (not necessarily a bad thing) and missing signs that they’re focusing on professionals (could be problematic). While it might make good economic sense to focus on consumers, this strategy is worrisome from an overall creative-ecosystem perspective. After all, if Apple doesn’t provide professional grade hardware and software for creative professionals, where will those media products come from? At Apple’s 2017 WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference), we were given our first tangible proof that Apple has not lost their way, wants to support creative professionals, and wants to do so in a big way. But before we get to that, let’s first briefly review the dark ages we’ve been living in for the past few years.

First, let’s look at their professional software. Way back in 2002, Apple acquired Logic from Emagic. Although Apple didn’t quite turn it into garage band (very consumer-ey software), Logic has clearly lost stock from its position as the preeminent audio-sequencer. Similarly, Apple acquired Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, and in 2011 transformed into something a lot more like iMovie with their Final Cut Pro X release, which lost many pro features in place of a slicker interface and has been slow to recover them. Finally, Apple created Aperture for doing professional post production on RAW images, similar to Adobe’s Lightroom; however, support for Aperture halted altogether. MainStage remains a gift to keyboardists (particularly given Apple’s acquisition and inclusion of Alchemy soft synth in MainStage) as well as to guitarists, although this one application has been looking like an outlier in Apple’s professional portfolio.

Their hardware has been telling a similar story of support for consumers with few real pro-level capabilities. The MacBook Pro I’m typing on, a Mid 2015 top of the line model purchased at the start of 2017, has the most RAM available at just 16 GB. The reasons for this seem to point back to a lack of low-power RAM support at larger capacities. High-power RAM could be used, but that would impact heat dissipation and ultimately,”thin-ness,” by making the machine thicker.  Which is exactly the point: many pros would gladly trade 32 GB or 64 GB of RAM for a hit to battery life and thinness, but that’s not how Apple rolls. Apple’s latest innovation – the Macbook Pro – featuring a touch bar in place of the function keys, adds $800 to the bottom line, but doesn’t offer a faster machine or more RAM. So what we have are machines not getting speed or capacity bumps, but rather a very cool and tone-deaf touch bar in its place. Worse still, their halo machine, the Mac Pro, has not been updated for over 1000 days but is still for sale at the same price. Here is a really good summary of the state of Apple in 2016.

In April 2017, Apple called in five journalists for a face-to-face meeting. When Apple calls you, you come. It’s a fascinating story, and John Gruber called it that this meeting must be about the Mac Pro. I.e. either Apple was going to discontinue it, or they were going to support it, but not have anything ready to show in the near future e.g. the 2017 WWDC.

So the short of the story is that Apple had painted themselves into a thermal corner with their innovative “garbage can” design of the Mac Pro. Apple had banked on two smaller size GPUs plus one CPU, while the industry went with one larger size GPU plus one CPU. With that mistake acknowledged, we now know we have Mac Pros coming – not in 2017- but they’re coming.

That’s all we had to work with until the 2017 WWDC on June 5th. Tim Cook said this was going to be the best WWDC ever, and now that it’s all over, it’s hard to call him a liar.

The bottom line is that we creatives are now in great shape. The iPad Pros are looking more and more focused on doing real professional / productive work with iOS 11. More importantly, the Macbook Pros and iMacs look fantastic. Both now have the option for 32 or 64 GB of RAM, meaning either machine is dialed in for the kind of work we do. Given that Mac Pros are coming, it looks like we will have a fantastic roundup of machines to serve our creative needs.

But wait, there’s more! We also have an iMac Pro coming in December, featuring 8, 10 or 18 core Xeon processors and up to 128 GB of RAM with improved 5K displays and the ability to drive additional monitors. These machines are incredible, and it’s exciting that Apple is aware that creatives have been falling in love with their iMac’s due to its integrated design and significant capabilities. My dream machine might be a bottom of the line iMac Pro (partially because they will come in space gray), and I wonder if even that would be overkill. I’d probably have to invest in several thousand dollars in instruments and effects and need to score a feature length movie to tax that machine (which I’m quite pleased to do with proper funding… anyone?). These are the kinds of machines that developers, pro video folks, and physicists need. That these machines exist, and that Mac Pros are still coming, is proof that we have so much more excellence to look forward to.

This interview hosted by John Gruber with beloved Apple Execs Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi AKA Hair-Force One, offers a very insightful review of the “State of Apple” and support for pro creatives. I highly recommend it.

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2017 from John Gruber on Vimeo.

The Best Keyboard

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Music pastors and aspiring keyboardists occasionally ask my take on the best keyboard for modern worship music, and while I’m happy to discuss differing synthesis techniques, interface philosophies, and personalities of manufacturers, my take is unequivocal: the best keyboard, is the keyboard you own.

Why is that? Well, if you don’t have your own keyboard, you’re not going to be familiar with its sounds or how to navigate on it, so you’re only going to use a handful of patches for any particular set. You’re also not going to be familiar with how those sounds respond to note velocity, let alone aftertouch or the mod wheel, nor are you going to have a good sense of how they sound solo’d or work in a mix. Consequently, you are going to play tentatively because you’re not going to have confidence in your sounds, or how they respond, and when the sound does something unexpected you’ll get spooked by it and back down. Additionally, the house sound engineer may just mute you if something loud sticks out and start messing up their mix.

You need your own keyboard, so that you can become intimately familiar with its sounds, and so you have a variety of your favorite patches, well organized in the user section, at your fingertips. You need to become intimately familiar with how those patches respond to note velocity, aftertouch, and the mod wheel so that you can create something dynamic that evolves, as our incredibly-made ears identify static sounds with ease. Furthermore you need to have a good sense of how your patches sound both solo’d and in a mix (try playing along with MP3’s at home).

The bottom line is, the only keyboard you will be able to play confidently, is the one that you know inside and out. You will only know how to voice your chords to be both present and in their proper space if you’re intimately familiar with how those sounds respond.

Personally, it doesn’t matter who set up a keyboard or how awesome that keyboard is, if I wasn’t intimately familiar with that particular machine, I would never use it during a gig because all I would be doing is inviting trouble. I have turned down using all kind of fantastic gear, to include the Nords, rather than get bogged down in a new interface, get lost in a menu, and be unsure how a sound will respond (am I even in the right octave?). The exception to this is, I may use one sound from a keyboard that I don’t own, if it were something important that added quality and depth to my sound. The best example of this is I typically use the house piano wherever I go, and add my rig to it. This works because I am already very familiar with how a piano responds, the house sound engineer already knows how that piano responds, including how to mic it if it’s a real/acoustic instrument, and I’m spending zero time fussing with it trying to navigate a new interface.

So, yes, absolutely, if you have a Mac do get MainStage, and if you can afford a Nord Stage go for it, and I haven’t seen anyone using a Behringer DeepMind yet so I’d love to see that, and if you like the sound of something different than what everyone else is playing, even better to bring something new to the table! But you need your own keyboard. You probably need a stage instrument (meant for live music and with a simpler interface) more than you need a workstation (with a deeper interface and squencing capabilities). But in the end, it’s not about the gear. In the end it’s about how the gear is used, and how you hear it.

If you’re a wanna-be keyboardist, you need to understand that much of the contribution you make, just like a guitarist, is via the tone and timbres you bring. And it is imperative that you take ownership of that, because you are going to hear sound slightly differently than everyone else. Buying a keyboard, getting to know that keyboard, selecting your favorite set of patches, tweaking (lightly editing) those patches so they are “yours”, and then understanding how those sounds work in a song are all part of the craft of being a modern keyboardist. And have no doubt, this is craftsmanship.

If you don’t have a budget, just start hitting craigslist up, then audition the keyboards for sale there on youtube before you bother to meet up. If you have any kind of a budget, hit the biggest music store in your city, in the morning and on a weekday so the store is empty, and bring your own set of headphones to audition every keyboard they have until you start to hear the differences and start to have an opinion. Then buy your first piece of gear (from that store!! You want them to continue to be in business, right?). Over the next few years your tastes may change, or you’ll figure out what your machine does or doesn’t do well enough to consider a new piece of gear. Then don’t get rid of that one! Instead, add the new ‘board to your sound so you don’t lose anything that you have, and you can slowly get your head around the new interface and contributions of the new machine, incorporate the capability of your second keyboard into your live playing. Congratulations on starting down your path of becoming a modern keyboardist with your unique voice!

Does your experience back this up? Do you see things differently or have other advice? Leave your questions or comments in the notes below or contact me directly!

Nikki Lerner | You All Know The Words

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With Nikki Lerner as our guest, we immediately get to the heart of doing multicultural worship. Nikki helps us explore our motivations, ask better questions, and avoid common pitfalls. She gives us a way to think about multicultural worship that has nothing to do with meeting quotas. Instead, she asks us to be deliberate and base our actions in relationship and questioning. By framing the conversation as “third culture“, she challenges all churches to find their unique voice instead of copying something that has already been done.

Her most recent studio project puts these ideas into practice, as do the live adaptations of the studio versions, as Nikki takes us behind the scenes on the her latest project “The Things We Never Say“.

Nikki Lerner – Can We Start Over (Lyric Video)

Nikki Lerner – Can We Start Over (Brooklyn Sessions)

Nikki Lerner – Tell Me (Lyric Video)

Nikki Lerner – Tell Me (Live – Living Room Sessions)

Culture Coaches: Find one. Be one.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Sting – All This Time

And the Snarky Puppy tune featured in this episode:

Nikki’s studio projects produced by Kevin “131” Gutierrez (Raven, Deceased, While Heaven Wept, Believer) at Assembly Line Studios. Featured tune from Walpyrgus.

For more Nikki goodness, follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, listen to her music on Soundcloud, Spotify, iTunes, Youtube, and buy her book on Amazon.

Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher and support the show by rating us and leaving a comment. Have a question? Leave a comment below!

Jon Waller | Destroyed an Entire Genre

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Jon joins the show discussing a range of genres based around Jazz to include Gospel and Neo Soul. Along the way, he shares samples from some projects he has done. We wrap up with his thoughts on the kinds of music that belongs in church, the role the church plays in moving music forward, as well as his thoughts on playing outside of the church. Find Jon on Facebook.

Let each one according to the gift that he has received, administer it unto the others, as a good steward of the diverse graces of God. I Peter 4:10

A few recent products from Jon on video:

This episode is sponsored by Johnny Flash Productions, a creative agency based in the Washington D.C. area that was founded 16 years ago by John Falke. I can’t speak highly enough about the quality of his service. If you have the need, I think you’d really enjoy working with him and be pleased with the results.

Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher and support the show by rating us five stars and leaving a comment. We love your questions and comments!

If you like this episode, you may also like “Dave Tauler – Not Enough Bassoon Gigs“, “Justin Pinkney, ‘Translating CCM’”, and “William Brew IV | The Way It Is“.