Building Your Band

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

Odd Time Signatures

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Once you get past the basic 4/4 and 6/8 time signatures, everything that happens next gets esoteric pretty quickly. But learning how to count and play in these odd time signatures will make working in the previous time signatures seem trivial. And it will prepare you for the occasional change-up in the basic time signatures. Here are some tunes you can practice counting with:
Dave Brubeck, Take 5 – 5/4 Radiohead, 15 step – 5/4 Seven Days, Sting – 5/4 Brought to my Senses, Sting – 7/4 (after the a tempo) Dreaming in Metaphors, Seal – 7/4 Pat Metheny, The First Circle, 11/4
The above songs were selected because they keep the meter consistent for the entire song. Whereas there are a lot more songs with change-ups that alter the time signature (or meter) throughout the song. I want to talk about one of those with a (now) simple change-up in an otherwise straight forward song. My whole reason for doing this blog post is, selfishly, because I really like the 5/8 bar in the otherwise 6/8 song halfway through the chorus of Famous One! I’ve played with more bands than not that skip that little detail, and it’s because getting the feel of that measure is pretty hard without having the shorthand of knowing how to count. Also, the band really needs to nail the 5/8 feel in the first measure break (right when they sing “Aaaalll the Earth”), so that the 6/8 measure in the break can reset everyone to find the entrance of the second half of the chorus. Bands that get sloppy, that can’t nail that down, end up transmitting a hesitancy to the congregation. At that point the producer is right to kill the 5/8 measure and play it all in 6/8. But with it in there, man it adds that extra little freshness and urgency. To me, it just elevates that song to one of my all-time favorites.
Here are some other songs with meter changes:
Creation Sings by Keith Getty – Verses in 5/4, Choruses in 3/4 Little Town by Amy Grant – Mostly 4/4, with some 2/4, 3/4 and 5/4 bars
Can anyone suggest any other favorites in odd or changing meters?  

Producer’s Course

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We had enough musicians to split the students into four bands. We noticed that bands didn’t (formally) have a producer. I think there is room for a producer’s course. A producer’s course would look like an advanced musician’s course except that it would not be focused on any particular instrument. Rather, it would look at some of the instruments and be directed toward arranging those instruments into something that serves the song. These producers would then be assigned, one (or two) per band to help the bands deal with various issues, such as:
  • Choosing a groove / keeping steady time
  • Deciding when instruments come in / out
  • Voicing the instruments to make space for each other and vocals
  • Arranging vocals (melody first)
  • Playing to musicians’ strengths
  • Deciding on the intent of the song
Class would:
  • Begin with discussions on favorite arrangements, detailing what is going on
  • Move on to discussing how we would do things differently
  • Discuss practically how to help produce our individual bands
I would appreciate any thoughts or feedback on this class!

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.  

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

How to sound like a garage band (the classic blunder!)

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You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”. But only slightly less well-known is this: “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha…”

– Vizzini, the Princess Bride

Back before Apple’s software co-opted the term, a Garage Band was a group of kids who decided to start a band, and the only place they could go to rehearse was someone’s garage. The acoustics of the space didn’t help – everything was echo-ey, and hearing yourself was difficult. Since this was everyone’s first time in a band, typically everyone would play all the time at full volume trying to show their friends how awesome they sounded, creating a veritable wall of sound devoid of any real dynamics. Of course we would never do that in church. 😉 Yet there seems to be a negative pressure sucking people into doing precisely this. If they are on stage, they feel like they should be doing something, specifically making sound. Very few people feel comfortable not playing during a tune. There may even be a sense for a paid musician that they are getting paid by the note, so the flowerier they play, or the more notes they can fit in, the better. But what if it became your job not to play? Part of the job of the producer is to push back on the natural disorganization (decrease the entropy) that is naturally occurring. One way I’ve pushed back on this, is to make it each musician’s job to not play one section of each song. That could be the second verse, the bridge, the chorus after the bridge, the first verse – something! When this happens, dynamics begin to emerge. People begin to think about how the way in which they are playing (or not playing) really serves the song instead of what serves their rock star image. This is the perspective of the producer. Of course, as the producer you are free to dictate, “Hey guitar, why don’t you drop out the second verse and let it be a piano thing with bass and drums, and then come back in on the chorus?” Not only will this provide a wonderful relief to the naturally occurring wall of sound, the guitar will sound a-w-e-s-o-m-e when it comes back in. This “subtracting not adding” is an idea that reoccurs in music time and again. We see it with the sound engineer applying parametric EQ, “cut, don’t boost”. We see it in the idea of a crescendo, as the secret to a crescendo really is to start quietly. The longer I live the more I’ve come to trust that less really is more.  

Flesh and bones

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What on earth am I talking about here? This is how I think about the roles of the various instruments. The rhythm section, consisting of bass and drums is the skeleton, the bones, and everything else is the flesh that hangs off the skeleton. So the real “song” is defined by the rhythm section. A vocal track should have no problem existing inside this space thus creating “the song”. And indeed it is all empty space in there. The other instruments – the acoustic guitar, electric guitar, keyboard, organ, solo and orchestral instruments, backing vocals and choir – all are the flesh and muscle and organs (hah) that exists inside the skeleton, and must not conflict with the lead vocal or each other! This paradigm, these new wine skins, must inform how everyone thinks about the song to include how it is played and how it is mixed. The mix must begin with the kick, snare, hat, etc. and then go to the bass, and then the other instruments. They can be sub-mixed in groups (the rhythm section in Group 1-2, the instruments in Group 3-4), so that the vocals speak, but the only thing that can conflict with the vocals are the instruments, not the rhythm section.

New wine in old wineskins

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If your church has been around for a while, it undoubtedly started out with a pianist and/or an organist. That person was the center of the music. I remember recognizing this quite dramatically when I was 12 years old, the first time the pastor’s wife in my little church of 100 was sick and couldn’t play piano. I was asked to step up and was stunned to notice that I had more power than the choir director. This despite the fact that I had been in orchestras and I knew how to follow a conductor, it turned out the conductor was following me! This paradigm becomes so ingrained that even when band instruments are added – acoustic guitar, electric guitar, keyboard, bass, drums – the piano remains the central point of the music and the mix and directs how everything happens. You can tell this is the case not only when the piano plays the introduction and then the band comes in with the congregation, but also when the piano player is mentioned in the bulletin, to the exclusion of every other musician! I’m sure this scenario isn’t the one Jesus had in mind when he said this, but I think this is one of those cases where putting new wine into old wineskins isn’t going to work out so well. How this shift happens isn’t easy, it’s a discontinuity no doubt, but we need new wineskins in order for the group to move forward, and everyone needs to be aware of it. The long and terrible reign of the piano player as dictator for life must come to an end 😉 ha!

A bigger band means playing less

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If you took piano lessons, you learned that the piano is the whole orchestra. Your teacher made you play legato until it was sweet as strings. You hammered counterpoints out as bright as trumpets. You laid down the bass while adding percussive elements as well. You may have even learned how to voice individual instruments within a hand, so that the melody would sing out above the accompaniment. So what happens when you start playing with other instruments? Hopefully you are adjusting your groove. Hopefully you’re not playing the same way you did before. Because if you are, there isn’t any room left! You are the whole orchestra when playing solo, however, when playing with a bassist, you really shouldn’t double his parts. He is going to be a lot better at laying down that low end and voicing it with respect to what you are playing than you will ever be. And that bassist is going to be able to groove against what you are playing in time, creating a more compelling momentum. When playing with an acoustic guitarist, you really shouldn’t be doubling the rhythm. You’re never going to get a feel as good as he will get, partially because you don’t really have upstrokes/downstrokes the way he has strumming. Likewise, when playing with a string section, or playing with a percussion section, or playing with a guitar, or playing with a choir… each new element that is introduced means you need to play less – or it just becomes a big mess. Not doing this is how you get the “Wall of Sound” that is the bane of every sound tech’s existence. “You must unlearn what you have learned.”