Building Your Band

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

“Is there, like, a specific place I’m supposed to be looking?”

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Grand Piano (Pete Bulanow)

Grand Pianos are heavy (Pete Bulanow)

New Zealander Lorde recently made history by being the first female and first solo artist to win the best rock video award at the VMAs. In her short time on stage, somewhat bewildered by it all, she asked the question: “Is there, like, a specific place I’m supposed to be looking?”

This is a telling question. If we don’t want people to be bewildered on Sunday morning, we need to have an answer to this question. The visual “melody” of the song if you will, must be clear. Lights can help create this focal point, but at a minimum, the worship leader must be visible. More than once, I’ve seen a worship leader sitting at a piano on the ground level with an unidentified voice coming from the sound system. If that worship leader needs to play a grand, get that piano on stage, or get them playing a big sample-playback keyboard on the stage. We have to get this right.

Let’s talk about sound for a moment.

Reality is generally coherent. For example when a twig snaps in the forest behind you, that means something is behind you. With artificial environments, sight and sound can be decoupled (become incoherent), to the detriment of the experience and the bewilderment of the observer.

Certainly, at a bare minimum, have your speakers up front where things are happening. Similarly, more than once I’ve actually seen speakers in the middle or even back of the church. The point is not just to make sound louder, it’s to make it all make sense. Disembodied voices are disorienting.

Now if you have a nice stereo setup, it makes sense to align the audio with your visuals. If backing vocals are slightly to the left, it may improve coherence to mix them that way. But if your drum kit is off to one side, I would still recommend panning it to the center of your mix (same with the bass), or if panning something off to one side means you will hear a different mix depending on where you sit in the house, then keep everything centered.

The goal is to make it easy for people to understand what is going on and minimize the artificiality of technology.

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)!