Building Your Band

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

Serving the song as a… [timekeeper]

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I love a great drummer. I love watching them paint with their sticks. I marvel at their limb-independence. I love the textures they produce. I love the spontaneity and the inspiration they bring, and how they can lean forward or back against the beat and even stretch time. A great drummer can defy the laws of physics.

But let’s start at the beginning. If there was a survey of advice for young drummers, the unanimous consensus would be: stop playing fills and keep steady time.

The classic rookie mistake of a drummer is to think that busy is better, to think that riffs/fills are important to their role, and then to sacrifice time keeping for flash. We’ve all done it, or something similar to it. But when a drummer shifts time around (plays a flashy fill and then rushes a little), the consequences are far graver. Instead of thinking about where the sound is going, the band is now trying to figure out where the downbeat is! Everyone gets hesitant and preoccupied, and that shows.

Consider this – instead of filling up space with a fill, have you ever noticed how producers in electronica build tension going into a new section? They usually pull sounds out. They pull out the kick, or pull out the snare, or pull everything! One of the few examples I can find of this in a worship song is David Crowder Band’s “Our Love is Loud”, although Crowder is admittedly fairly electronica-oriented in its production. (Can anyone think of any other?)

Serving the song as a… [guitarist]

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Much of the music we listen to today is defined by the guitar. There is so much you can do right, and so much space to explore. I’m going to assume you know not to use a blues tone on a song that isn’t Gospel. But other than that, I’m not going to get into the technicalities of the kinds of pickups you should use, or if Line 6 pedals are the way to go or not, I’ll let you guys debate the relative merits of the various ways you color your sound.

The main thing I want to say is that communication with the keyboardist is good because you two are taking up most of the same space as the vocalists. Communication before rehearsal is nice, during rehearsal is really nice, and eye contact during the gig can do so much to disambiguate who is doing what, when. Since so many songs are the guitarists, when there is a piano song or keyboard section, let them do their thing. And if there are two guitar parts, you don’t need to cover them both (even though I’m sure you can). Feel free to pawn off the least interesting guitar parts to your keyboardist – they will love you for it!

Except for special arrangements, make sounds that are guitar sounds so everyone can tell what is going on. There is nothing more confusing for a keyboard player (or congregation, if they are paying attention) than to hear synth sounds not coming from the keys!

Serving the song as a… [keyboardist]

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I like to have little 3-octave keyboards on top of a grand piano, and then a 4-octave USB controller to the right of the piano routed to virtual instruments in a mac book pro. While my first love is the piano, my real secret of making the piano sound good is having plenty of other sounds within easy reach… and uh, NOT playing the piano all the time.

So what I’m trying to do is to keep the piano sound fresh by varying what I am doing on it. Sometimes that means sitting out a section, and sometimes that means I switch to a pad for the verses and the bridge. Sometimes I play one hand on a pad and one hand on the piano for some sections. I like the smaller keyboards, because then I can have more of them closer to me, and since I’m trying to be sure to make room for the base, the smaller boards are perfect. If I do need to do an epic pad when it’s all me, I can always use two different boards at once and the two different sounds will sound even more amazing.

The other thing I love doing is running arpeggiators. But that’s one of those things you can do only if the drummer is playing to a click track, so the tempo is tight and doesn’t drift. You know that cool, muted, 8th note rhythmic device the guitarist is doing? It isn’t good form to try to layer that with an arpeggiator. No stealing riffs! When guitarists do get that mountaintop solo, there are two things we can do: hold down the song and create some space! Two hands down low playing whole notes will define the chord and the downbeat and add meat, freeing up the guitarist to do their thang in the space above.

Serving the song as a… [_________]

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When we’re just starting out, we learn to play solo, by ourselves. When we start to transition to playing with a band, we have to learn new things about playing our instrument. We have to learn how our instrument interacts with the other instruments, and the role each of the other instruments that are present.

So while serving the song happens certainly at the producer level, that must be supported at our individual instrument level. In the following posts, I want to focus on what that can look like for each instrument.

I’d love to hear additional thoughts from specialists on each of these!

A critique

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If someone were to critique this sight and what I am doing hear, I think they would probably say that all these articles on the production of music is really missing the heart of worship. That most of this doesn’t matter. And I would understand there point. The intent of doing music on a Sunday mourning (or Saturday night for that matter) is to honor God, to worship Jesus, to invite the Spirit in, and to experience God. It’s really not about the best arrangement, or the best mix, or any of that.

The simple fact is that some people get distracted by the simplest errors of spelling and grammar, which ends up drawing focus away from the message*. I’m not one of those people. I’m gifted with horrible spelling and grammar. But I have seen that deter people often enough from the content of what I’m trying to share (particularly in professional environments) that I understand its importance.

I remember a church with a hired worship leader who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tune his guitar. That’s a guy that needed to go back home. Everything I am talking about here is just as basic, just as fundamental. We really need to get the basics right before we are freed up to be guided by the Spirit.

While music production is not the ends, it is a means. And a means that, if done well, will become effortless and invisible, like the air we breathe.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

 

p.s. In this case: site, hear, is, there, and mourning, should have been sight, here, are, their, and morning.

 

The most important musician

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Who do you think is the most important musician?

This is not a question I have heard posed a lot, but I am very confident about how I would answer this question, and it may not be who you have in mind.

  • It’s not the drummer, although this person is critical for keeping steady time.
  • It’s not the bassist, although this person is critical for how chords move in the song.
  • It’s not the guitarist, although this person is often the most notable in a band.
  • It’s not the keyboardist, although this person can add so much color and depth to the sound.
  • It’s not the lead vocalist, although the front man can make or break how a band connects with the audience.

The most important musician, if you ask me, is the sound engineer.

The sound engineer is a musician. Their instrument is the mixing board, and they need to be able to play that thing like a Stradivarius. They need to love, and I mean really love, music. If they don’t love music, that will become very apparent in the mix. It will sound clinical and boring. I call this the NPR mix.

Onyx 1640i by Pete Bulanow

Onyx 1640i by Pete Bulanow

Their role as gatekeeper is clear: Everything goes through the sound engineer. What is muted or un-muted is totally in their hands, and a band is helpless against a sound engineer who isn’t paying attention.  The sound engineer controls the stage volume, and what the band hears is largely in the hands of that person. The band has very little control over the house mix, and while a sound engineer can’t “polish a turd” as the saying goes (even if they can mute a pitchy vocalist), they very much can make or break how a band comes across in the house, which translates to how the audience responds, which translates to how the band plays. This person couldn’t be more critical.

The rookie mistake I hear (see) engineers make is when they “mix with their eyes”. What I mean is if they set levels the same (to include gain) e.g. for all the backing vocalists, the sound comes out at the same volume. True, each channel could be producing the same amount of gain, but vocalists sing at really different volumes. You have no choice but to mix with your ears.

Or you think because you push a channel up a little louder that it got a little louder. But if you didn’t hear it get louder, it doesn’t matter if you pushed the fader up. Perhaps you pushed the wrong fader up!

You can actually walk by a mixing board and see an engineer who mixes with their eyes vice their ears.

And yet, when everything is going great, the sound tech goes largely unnoticed. The only time the engineer gets any attention is if there is feedback. It’s a thankless job to all but those who know the real deal, to those who really hear a mix.

So musicians, thank your engineer for a great mix!!!!

Keeping the main thing the main thing

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A few years back, before the era of DAWs, I was living not far from Nashville and took the opportunity to mix a MIDI project (that I had developed all on a Korg M1) at a “real Nashville studio”. It was one of the smaller recording studios, but still had records from Amy Grant, MWS, Larnelle Harris, and the Imperials up on the wall (that had, at least in part, been recorded there). It was a great and increasingly rare experience to have had, particularly in today’s age of home studios.

Back to my story…the engineer spent a fair amount of time mixing an instrumental track, and it was sounding great, ready for a lead vocal to go over the top of it. One problem though – there never was going to be a lead vocal. The song certainly had a melody line, often played by a solo instrument, but the engineer had apparently gone into auto-pilot and mixed the music as he normally does as a sound track with space for a lead vocal.

Once I figured out what was going on, I had to step up and discuss this with him. He cautioned me that perhaps I had “demo lust” (that affliction whereby you are asking for a professional mix, but really just want it to sound like the demo), but I assured him it wasn’t that, it was just that the melody wasn’t speaking. Several hundred dollars later, we had a great mix I could live with.

Making sure the melody speaks (is louder) is one of those things that gets drilled into you with piano lessons. When you get to a certain level, you even get to the point where you’re expected to voice the melody within a hand i.e. while playing other notes, even if other notes are above the melody. I can’t say I was ever highly successful at this, but I am at least aware of it (thanks, Alfreda Winninger!)

The lesson to learn is an important one, and one we have yet to learn well. As obvious as it may seem, as cliched as the title to this piece is, we have to be deliberate when we introduce harmonies, and ensure those harmonies never obscure the melody.

There are a number of practical steps we can take to ensure the melody speaks. Perhaps don’t use harmony vocals on the first verse at all so that everyone can learn the song (even the visitors!). If we need backing vocals on the chorus, sing them in unison with the melody the first time. Only after the melody is well established, should we introduce harmonies, and then, never let the harmonies be voiced louder than the melody (sound engineer – I’m looking your direction)!

Piano songs and guitar songs

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In most worship songs, it is pretty obvious when the song is a “piano song” or a “guitar song.” When a song is a piano song, it may have more chord changes (think hymns), and the groove generally derives from the chord structure. Conversely, when a song is a guitar song it may have less chord changes, and the groove derives from the rhythm of the instrument or some lick or hook. This is something you are probably intuitively aware of and consider when arranging the song, but let’s focus on it directly for a moment and consider some implications.

A few years back (maybe before the internet even!) I remember reading a huge interview in Keyboard magazine with Michael Tilson Thomas* in which he talked about composition separate from that of any given instrument. In other words, he didn’t want the physicality of writing at the piano to suggest certain things in the composition. Rather, he wanted to compose independent of any instrument and then later on figure out how to voice it.

Being aware of this dynamic, there is one obvious idea and one less obvious idea we can learn:

The obvious idea is a neat arranging trick. If you have a piano song and you want a fresh arrangement, you can really change it up by arranging it around the guitar. Conversely, if you have a guitar song and you want a fresh arrangement, you can really change it up by arranging it around the piano. This is most famously done by taking hymns generally written at the piano, and making guitar arrangements. An example in the other direction – I was asked to arrange a piano version of one of Chris Joyner’s tunes for a song he wrote on the guitar called “I Believe“.

A less obvious idea is that there is a very real sense that the physicality of our instrument dictates a lot of how we play it. So while we should to play to our instrument’s strengths, we should avoid being limited by that (due to lack of technical skills), or held in a box by that (due to a lack of imagination).

So the former is probably easy enough to understand; we should try to minimize limitations by our technical skills. But the latter is a blind spot. For example, how often do we play monophonic (let alone with just one hand) on the piano? If a simple melody or counter-melody best serves the song, we should play just that (rather than chords) as suggested by our many fingers and all those keys.

Instruments are means to an end. The end is the song. How best can we voice the song?

*famed conductor of San Francisco Orchestra and notable re-interpreter of classic American composers such as Aaron Copland.

Where are you going?

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Not all those who wander are lost ~ J.R.R. Tolkein

… except when you’re playing. Whether you’re playing or singing, you need to do so with an intentionally. And you get that intentionality when you know both where you are and where you are going.

We’re talking here about the emotional content of a song. You may be in a verse, or a chorus, or a bridge – you need to know what you trying to do or to say, and know what is happening next. Are you trying to build things up? Is the bottom going to drop out in the next section?

Typically, the verse will build tension, and the chorus release it. The bridge might take a turn and do a reset and start to build tension again in a different way before dropping back into the chorus and looping it on the way out into an anthemic finish.

This emotional aspect needs to be considered by the band and the worship leader when building the song’s road map. And of course it can be improvised. But it needs to be intentional.

There are lots of ways to build, but the secret to a crescendo, the secret to building a song up, is starting quietly. If you start with everything in, you can’t turn up the volume any more.

And if as a band you realize that everyone is in, and has been in, and nothing is changing (you’ve gained as much altitude as you can), YOU need to be the one to drop out and create some movement.

Ideally a producer will talk his band through the road map so that things don’t have to get into such a tight space. There are so many options, so many ways to break a song down and build it back up. Some of my favorite ways to break things down are to:

  • Drop to acoustic piano
  • Drop to acoustic guitar
  • Go a capella with kick on 2 & 4
  • Go to bass and full drum kit (rhythm section) and full vocals
  • Drop to a big lush keyboard pad and listen to the congregation sing
  • Looping a bridge that builds
  • Combinations of these

There are so many possibilities.

The main thing is to be aware of where you are, and where you want things to go. Don’t get lost!

Sounding like a garage band using garage band

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Among the dire warnings in the world of music was the prediction that software like Apple’s Garage Band would allow anyone, even untrained musicians, to make music. This is because Garage Band allows anyone to drag in musical loops of sound, and transmogrify them into the key and tempo of the song*. People seriously thought this was the end of music as we know it [citation needed].

Turns out that’s not the way it works. Computers are like a bicycle for the mind. They don’t think for us, they allow us to think more efficiently. So what Garage Band really does, in essence, is to lower the threshold for music creation. What was missed by its detractors is that it doesn’t change the threshold for what good music is.

The part they got right is that Garage Band can allow untrained musicians to make music. Which technically means that you can be a musician without having technical training, or knowing how to play an instrument. But if you’re not a musician, if you don’t have “it”, you’re not going to make good music. You’re going to simply create a wall of sound, because in Garage Band, it’s easy to paint a track full of a certain loop. Turns out that “Garage Band” was aptly named.

The secret to making music, then, becomes knowing what to cut.

Suddenly, Michelangelo’s apocryphal story that to create David he simply “carved away everything that wasn’t the sculpture” shines in a new light.

I was reminded of this recently when my 4 year old daughter got a new Toca Boca app for the iPad called “Toca Band”. It’s basically Garage Band for kids, except it only has four bars of music that loop with no tempo or key change options, and then has about three variants of each loop, plus an opportunity to perform a solo instrument. It was easy for her to fill up all the slots with instruments, but I started pulling things out, showing her that it sounds better when you only have a few things going.

The trick to revealing the song, is knowing what isn’t in the song.

 

* Technically “Acid” by Sonic Foundry, did loops first