A better conversation about music, with David Loftis and Peter Bulanow
Dan Rebeiz by Pete Bulanow
Guitarist* Dan Rebeiz talks to us about unifying the emotional content of the music we create in this sweeping interview.
Contact Dan @ Daniel Jack Productions or Facebook or The Excentrics
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*Music, Lyrics, Instruments, Vocals, Programming, by DJR. Mixed and Mastered by Micah Wilshire.
Links:
Sarah McLachlan‘s Music
It Might Get Loud, with Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White
Michael Thomas
Cellist Michael Thomas talks about the minimum technical skill required to play in a worship band, tells us the secret for how to get the best out of strings, and gives us the inside scoop on employing cello with a rock band.
“You can become a musician that sounds good in half the time that it take to become a technical musician”. ~MT
email: CelloMT at Gmail or Facebook
Chris Joyner – The Great Room (Amazon | iTunes)
Tobias John Thomas was born 11/7/14 at 12:14am, 7 lbs 6oz 21in.
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Here are my production notes for translating Chris Tomlin’s (Amazon | iTunes) Love Ran Red to a live Band.
How to get this right: let it be relaxed, sweeping, even cinematic.
How to get this wrong: overplay it.
How to get this right: preproduction, keep it tight.
How to get this wrong: fail to give it enough rehearsal time and it’ll fall apart.
How to get this right: keep it relaxed, create some space.
How to get this wrong: rush the kick.
How to get this right: be passionate.
How to get this wrong: let it drag.
How to get this right: preproduction!
How to get this wrong: expect a live version to come together quickly.
How to get this right: tight transitions.
How to get this wrong: telegraph your transitions (with fills) or not choking your cymbals.
How to get this right: 16th note hi-hats keeps the momentum.
How to get this wrong: That’d be pretty hard.
How to get this right: Bring in your youth and kids choir to yell out the bridge!
How to get this wrong: Fail to drive the song with all those 16th note hi-hats, or hold back even a little.
How to get this right: Get everyone snapping on two and four before you start the song.
How to get this wrong: If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong. It’s a celebration. It’s about community. It’s about relationships: vertical and horizontal.
How to get this right: Preproduction!
How to get this wrong: not play to a click track.
How to get this right: Have a gorgeous well-mic’d, well-tuned, grand piano.
How to get this wrong: Rush it.
How to get this right: Book The Edge (U2) to play guitars and sing that thematic part for you.
How to get this wrong: Let it get too big / full / muddy / wall of sound (looking your way, keys).
How to get this right: Rehearse.
How to get this wrong: Think this song will magically come together.
I really love that they are offering these. It shows the songwriting can stand up to reinterpretation.
How to get this right: preproduction.
How to get this wrong: fail to integrate live sounds well with the programmed sounds.
How to get this right: show restraint, be tasteful.
How to get this wrong: overplay.
How to get this right: restraint.
How to get this wrong: let it get too big.
Do you hear things differently? Anything I missed? Leave a comment below!
Sarah talks about her origins playing and singing in Venezuela, to leading a band at an intentional multicultural church in Harrisburg, PA. She’s one of the few worship leaders I know who stepped out from behind the comfort of an instrument to lead worship with just a mic in order to more closely connect with her audience.
Sarah on Facebook | Harrisburg Brethren in Christ Church
Post we discussed regarding having/being a focal point: “Is there, like, a specific place I’m supposed to be looking?”
Zion Acoustic Sessions: Amazon | iTunes
Evan Craft & Carley Redpath – “Océanos”: Amazon | iTunes
While we’re here – the making of Oceans
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p.s. If you’re listening to this from South America, and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact me!
Kishore Carey
Worship Leader and instrumentalist Kishore Carey talks about building a band in a church plant, his approach to producing, his advice to new band members “Listen more than you play”, and his ultimate goal of “Honest Worship”.
Twitter: Chasing Agnus, Already Immortal
Facebook: Chasing Agnus, Kishore Carey
Websites: Chasing Agnus, CrossPointe Church
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Lyrics vs. Music post
Tom Jackson on Stage Presence
Planning Center Online was also mentioned but is not yet a sponsor of the show.
by Pete Bulanow
This story begins with the one thousandth time I’m playing “This is the air we breathe” and a simple question that actors ask all the time: what is my motivation? The point being, a good actor (and by that I mean not Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise – as much as I enjoy their movies) can deliver the same set of words a thousand different ways with a thousand different nuances. What should inform those decisions? Luck? Or outside direction?
Musicians can do the same thing with a song. There is so much nuance in music, that if all we have is a chart, precisely what we want a song to “say” is still totally up in the air. That meaning, that motivation, can be filled in by the musician and sheer luck, or can be informed by something more deliberate.
All the inspiration I ever needed was a phone call from a producer. Cole Porter (1891 – 1964)
If we already decided we don’t want “throw away songs“, someone should be able to fill in those blanks and precisely describe why I’m doing this song and how it fits into the metanarrative of the service. That person is the producer (informed by the service planning process).
This past Sunday, my community did a “Hungry Service”. We were all asked to come to church hungry, having fasted for some indeterminate amount of time, even if it was just breakfast. (The beauty of this kind of thing is that we’re asking people to invest themselves in the service before they even arrive.)
Let me tell you, when you do “We are Hungry” or Crowder’s “Hungry”, when you really are actually hungry, you understand precisely why you are doing the song and it takes on a significant meaning. The longing becomes much more than theoretical and the metaphors are much more concrete.
Do you have any examples of where you didn’t know why you were doing a song, or even had conflicting ideas about it, or success stories?
By now you’ve probably seen this version of Oceans getting bounced around the internets. I hope the people in that video have kept their heads held up high and aren’t shying away from playing, because that would be a real shame.
However, this scene is one that is repeated all over the nation, Sunday after Sunday. Musicians are getting up there and doing the best they can, what they think is the right thing, but there is no one stepping back to look at the big picture and make decisions. There is no one producing.
Just a couple weeks ago, I visited a church that had a couple play and sing during the sharing of the Lord’s Supper. The husband and wife duo brought in their own equipment – electric guitar, mics, ‘verb, mixing board – all great equipment, and they sub-mixed themselves down into the house system. What happened next may be accounted for by the fact that they didn’t have a monitor, so they were only hearing themselves being bounced back from the mains. Two things were apparent: there was way too much ‘verb on everything, and they were desperately pitchy. Much like these guys, the good folks involved are clearly good enough and gifted enough to be playing and leading church. But without someone who can diagnose what is going wrong and offer a suggestion, this kind of thing is going to continue Sunday after Sunday.
Here is a pretty fantastic drum tutorial for playing Oceans:
And let’s be honest – the guy on top wasn’t that far off was he? Ok, he got a little carried away with the triplet 16th note tom fils, but that’s kinda what the song does – come in like gangbusters. The drummer read at least a portion of the intent right. So what went wrong?
Let’s start with the electronic drums that are doing nobody any favors. It is really hard to control dynamics on those things. The whole point of those, by the way, is they aren’t supposed to be too loud. Where exactly was that most important musician, the sound tech who was mixing this? And yes, the drummer was rushing, so that didn’t help, but these are all things that can be dialed down.
Personally I’d be happy to walk into this situation and work with these guys. At least they showed up and were willing to bring it!
Technology has had a huge impact on music. It’s made us play steadier (I would argue even when not playing to a click). It’s allowed us to use samples. It’s let us loop in real time. It’s let us use loops, or play sync’d to other tracks. It’s let us auto-tune in real time. And it’s allowed us to program sequences that were otherwise unplayable. All of this has changed our ear – the way we hear music.
One group (Dawn of MIDI) has responded to this by playing acoustic music live that otherwise would seem like it was programmed. They do this by playing crazy meters, time-with-in-a-time where different people play different meters at the same time and it somehow works, that you wouldn’t think people could play. And they do this by playing intricate and repetitive patterns that, ok is indeed minimalist like Steve Reich, but is normally the domain of machines. Humans are unpredictable and random, machines are anything but.
Technology can inform our music. Integrating cultural influences such as these allows us to speak into that culture, they give us that platform for doing so. But practically how could that translate?
In a live situation, most typically this can mean integrating programmed loops or tracks. In a studio situation this can be a lot more intricate, and can mean being aware of technology and what is happening.
On this day (Sep 11th), I could not recommend a more poignant video than “All This Time” by Sting (Netflix). The DVD was meant to chronicle a small invite-only concert at his home in Tuscany, with a dress rehearsal Sep 10th and the main show Sep 11th. In the video, you see real-time reactions to the events as they unfolded, and the decision to go ahead with the show later that night, albeit leaving the setlist open. (Wikipedia)
Leading up to the production of the show, you see the rehearsal space and you get incredible comments from the musicians involved. Sting is the consummate band leader and loves to give his people a chance to shine – there is so much we can learn from him in this regard. But if you recall my post on my ideal band size of 6 or 7, Sting’s band is sixteen, with multiple keyboards, multiple percussionists, brass, strings – it’s insane.
Which leads us to some of my favorite quotes:
He’s got two percussionists, he’s got Jason playing the acoustic piano, Kipper playing the keyboards, and Jeff playing the organ, electric bass and acoustic bass, and guitar. He has all these elements going on at the same time, and it’s working, and it’s very soft, it’s very sensitive. And that was probably the most surprising thing, because on some nights my band is way louder than this and there’s only four guys, and it made me think, hmmm, maybe I better rethink some things when I go home. ~ Christian McBride
and
Songs have to be simple. They can have a subtext that you can find, but you shouldn’t be singing about an issue. You shouldn’t be saying, down with this or down with that, that’s just journalism. Art is something else, something veiled. And I often feel like songwriting is something like putting yourself into a state of receptivity, or to be more cosmic about it, a state of grace where the song can reveal itself to you. And I think you’re lucky if you can be in a beautiful place, because nature is full of stories, full of images. Powerful, healing images. ~ Sting
Ultimately, one of the greatest gifts of this project is the new rendition of the song “Fragile,” developed just days before the concert. Absolutely breath-taking, and hauntingly prescient:
If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the color of the evening sun
Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stayPerhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime’s argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we areOn and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are
How fragile we are how fragile we are
Up until now, we’ve stuck with the integers of counting. Sure, we’ve counted in 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7… but those are just whole numbers. What about the stuff that goes on between those counts?
Music is divided up either by 2’s or by 3’s, stated as “duples” or “triplets” respectively.
So if we were to count 1 – 2 – 3 – 4, we can count between the numbers using “and” like this – 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &. If the numbers were quarter (1/4) notes before, by adding the ands we can count eighth (1/8) notes. And we can subdivide further to sixteenth (1/16) notes by adding something between the “ands”. We count this as 1-e-&-a-2-e-&-a-3-e-&-a-4-e-&-a.
Triplets subdivide the 1-2-3-4 into a “triplet 8th note” by counting 1-&-a-2-&-a-3-&-a-4-&-a.
Laid out graphically this looks like:
All of this follows logically.
Where it gets interesting is with an eighth note swing feel. Technically it’s still a duple, and this is how you would count it, but if you swing the count, it can begin to take on the feel of a triplet.
This is where you get into the “groove”, the space between the notes. Defining how much swing, or how things feel – the human element rarely follows a perfect duple.
The “groove” is one of those things you pretty much need to stick with for an entire song, and everyone needs to agree on – because if you look at the jumble of the grid below, you can see a pretty bad train wreck if you tried to mix the triplet or swing feel with the straight duple feel. The same things happens if you mix other grooves.
One groove per song keeps everything locked into place and feeling tight.