In my previous article, Of Teleprompters and Song Lyrics, I began to discuss how technology assists singers and bands. For some people this is an uncomfortable topic on par with describing how sausage is made. It is hard to accept the fact that professionals use these assists on songs that move us deeply. All we experience is the beauty of the performance. It feels good. It feels natural. It draws us closer to God. In that moment we have an encounter. We don’t hear what the performers hear or see what they see. The fact that there are things going on behind the scenes should not detract from that enjoyment for the listener and should make the performers better. Technological assistance helps to bring it all together.
Imagine a Fourth of July fireworks show that is coordinated with the songs on the radio and rockets bursting at just the right moment. It is a glorious sight to behold but it is all carefully coordinated in order to produce the final experience that we see. Concerts are done the same way and churches have picked up on this approach in recent years. Over the next few articles I will unpack some of the advantages that technical assistance brings to both amateur and professional groups.
From Hymnals to TVs
I was born into the Presbyterian church in 1962. Since then the Sundays that I have missed church are few. I have lived through the Evolution of Church Worship Music and it has been a bumpy ride at times. Churches sang from hymnals for decades (we had three in our church) but hymnals could not keep up with the production of new music and the desire of people to play and sing new music. We went from having hymnals with all the necessary sheet music in front of us to having handouts or overhead projections of lyrics. Projection systems and big screen TVs have now become common. Chord charts are common while sheet music is not so common. The presentation of the music and lyrics have gotten simpler but not much else has.
Central Issue
Today’s worship music is a subset of rock music. It depends, primarily, on a consistent drummer. Below we are going to walk through the use of a metronome or click track in different implementations. A simple metronome has limited use but may be sufficient in some situations. The click track contains a metronome click but can also be more elaborate. It becomes central to doing complex productions.
Tempo Tech
Times have changed and are continuing to change. Just recently I spoke with a young twenty-something-year-old drummer and asked him how he felt about using a click track during live performances. He said, “Oh, absolutely! The guitars can kind of get you going and you can get too fast.” Drummers are human and prone to the same pitfalls as anyone else. Performing can be an adrenaline rush. When it is then it is easy to get off tempo without realizing it. Having a metronome or click track reminds you of where you are supposed to be. It reigns in the exuberance. The drummer sets the pace and if he is off the whole band is off.
Most songs for modern worship are recorded with click tracks – even the ones recorded live. Young musicians are being raised using the click track in performance. For those under the age of 30 I would say it is very common. The rest of us have to be sent to re-education camp to get on board.
Personal Skills
Introducing a metronome or click track to a band that has never used one is by far the most difficult undertaking of new technology. Vocalists and musicians alike will rebel or be uneasy about the change. Some feel that is is constraining in some way. Others don’t like the fact that it reveals that they were not as “on time” as they thought they were. Singers will suddenly learn that they were jumping ahead, falling behind, cutting syllables short, wrongly anticipating a count over a break, and so forth. For non-professional bands, recognizing these flaws is crucial to improving personal skills and group performance. It helps train people to pay attention to the beat in ways that they won’t likely do on their own.
Save Time, Reduce Tension
The metronome or click track saves time and trouble at group practice because it is always right and everybody knows it. I have been at many practices where we played a song and someone said, “that was too fast” or “that was too slow”. Without a metronome going there was no way to know the truth. We then had to stop and review what we just did by listening to the original recording, or checking ourselves with a metronome on an instrument or a phone and then perhaps rehearse the song again at the proper tempo. With the metronome or click track all of that is in the past. Practice moves along more quickly and consistently with fewer tensions.
Different Options
Some bands only have the drummer hear the metronome and then follow him. This is particularly a good approach if you only have floor monitors. The drummer can set up an inexpensive personal system, program it and move on. If your band is already disciplined enough to follow a drummer then you may not need to do more. But often bands have members who aren’t as good as they think they are at following the drummer. Also, some songs begin with only a pad sound or instruments other than the drums. Other songs have rather quirky drum rhythms in places which are harder to follow. For those songs it is nice to have a straightforward click to follow. It eliminates another tension for the rest of the band. Other bands will use the metronome to start the song but discontinue it once the song is underway. If you have a disciplined drummer then you can get away with this as well. Both of these methods are “minimalist” approaches. At a minimum, band members should be required to rehearse with a metronome in order to build their skills and reveal their flaws. However this is impossible to enforce. Worship leader, Paul Baloche, has a series of videos on YouTube describing how his worship team functions at practice and performance. They all practice with a metronome and if they use an “In-Ear Monitor” system (IEM) then they use the metronome or click track in performance.
The metronome is a good tool but the most common thing being used today is the click track. The click track is the metronome squared and then multiplied times 100. The power that a click track has is potentially unlimited when it is combined with MIDI and the proper software. The click track is used is throughout the song and in conjunction with other features – including one to which I have never heard an objection – vocal guidance. Even reluctant band members who don’t like the metronome click do appreciate the cues and reminders found in vocal guidance. This is a huge improvement over the metronome for keeping the band together and focused.
Vocal Guidance
Since lyrics are displayed on screens in small portions it is easy for a performer to lose track of where he is in the song. Most click tracks have a pre-recorded voice to say “Verse 1” or “Chorus” or “Bridge” or “Instrumental” or “acapella” or offer other bits of information. They can even be used to count through difficult parts of the song such as instrumental breaks. A singer could hear a countdown like “4-3-2-1” coming out of an instrumental in order to ensure that everyone is together. Transitions from verses to choruses and such are the most difficult portions of the song in my experience. I spend time carefully noting how many of these transitions go because I have learned from experience that it is necessary. But my notes are not displayed on the stage monitor for the singers. Only the musicians have them on their tablets. This makes the vocal cues even more important for the singers.
Instead of the recorded voice, larger churches and professional groups may have a live Music Director who is speaking throughout the performance. “Okay, guys, we’re about to get started. The lights are down. Now begin a riff in G while Phil welcomes the crowd.” “Let’s hear the drums in 3, 2, 1. Lights are coming up with verse one.” The Music Director serves the same purpose as the director of a newscast. You never see him but he is keeping things together. However, he is still prone to a momentary lapse in concentration that the recorded voice is not so some implementations use both the recorded elements and the live Music Director. In my setup at church I have the ability to talk to the band through a talkback mic at my keyboard. It is a very helpful tool and I can serve the role of a Music Director to some extent or offer other unforeseen comments or reminders. Since I both play and sing the biggest difficulty is being able to speak during a song without losing my place or my coordination. Recently we added a new rookie singer and she loved the click track with the vocal guidance. That was her favorite practice tool. But when we have a live drummer we only begin songs with the metronome click and then it goes away. There is no vocal guidance other than what I might say. So I identify the spots that she has difficulty with and talk her through it. Often this is a simple countdown coming out of an instrumental break. So even, with my limited ability to speak while I also play and sing it is a very valuable tool and I highly recommend a talkback mic setup for the band leader or a trusted assistant.
Having these kinds of assists can be very important for a group. Many churches have two different groups of performers or performers that work on a rotation basis or work across both groups. If the group is cobbled together in such a way then the vocal guidance helps keep it together even if its personnel have not practiced together much. This also allows the groups to combine into one larger group and still perform well together.
Another advantage of the click track system is that it permits a group to do a larger number of songs than they might otherwise be able to do and even add songs more quickly than in the past. With the skeletal structure of the click track in place, then band members need only to know their parts and hit them on the cue. The amount of time working together in practice is dramatically less than would be required otherwise. Everyone is working with the same tempo every time they practice whether alone at home or at group practice. It provides consistency and builds confidence in the performers because they know what is coming up next and don’t have to rely on memory, chord charts, or sheet music for everything. This is extremely helpful for a non-professional band that wants to have a tight, professional appearance.
There are other reasons that a band might benefit from the click track system. Imagine a popular worship team with an eight-minute song going to perform at a TV station where they are only allotted five minutes. The click track and vocal guide can be tailored to that production down to the second. Also, larger churches on TV or radio have to be done within certain time constraints. Worship leaders and preachers alike tailor their portions to fit within those time constraints. There are large monitors counting down the time until they must be finished. If your band does more than one service it is still necessary to be out by a certain time and this system helps assure that things are wrapped up on time. Churches with multiple campuses have to do this every week because at a set time they flip the switch and the preacher comes on the big screen. But there is even more.
Backing Tracks
In supporting the use of a click track, my young drummer friend mentioned the use of backing tracks. Most people do not realize how prominent backing tracks are in today’s worship music. These are for sale or rent online by the original artists and cover artists. You can usually buy or rent every instrument track and backing vocal track there is for popular music. The only thing you can’t buy is the lead vocal track. Amateur worship teams often supplement the things they don’t have by buying or renting some tracks. A band without a keyboardist can get the tracks for the keyboard. Or if your bass player gets sick you can add a bass track. Smaller churches can have that big church sound by supplementing with such tracks. But these are all tied to a click track with vocal guidance so the ability to play along is a necessity.
Once I noticed that a popular Christian artist had a certain number of performers on the stage for the video that was posted on You Tube. I went to my go-to resource for music tracks, Multi-Tracks, and counted the number of instruments used in the recording. It was significantly more than the number of people on stage for the filming of the video. There were not even enough guitar players in the video to match up with what was on the actual recording. This demonstrated a certain level of deception but nothing really hurtful. You have two or three guitarists playing the major guitar parts but the minor parts behind them may be simply a backing track. Do you really need six guitarists on stage?
Backing tracks cut costs even for famous groups. You may not be able to afford an orchestra at every live performance but you could use the backing track. You may not be able to justify the price to fly your conga player around the country just for a small bit in the performance but you can use a backing track. You may take some backup singers with you but you can supplement their sound with the full backup track from the original recording. Get the idea? In the particular video that I watched there were 16 people on stage: 11 of them playing instruments and 5 of them are vocalists. There were 16 instrumental parts (including two complete drum sets on the video). There are 2 acoustic guitar parts and 6 electric guitar parts. There are 4 keyboard parts: piano, organ, probably a synthesizer, and probably pads. There are not enough instrumentalists to cover the necessary instruments and 4 electric guitar parts are played at the same time when there are only 5 guitarists on stage two of which are acoustic players. The music and production have gotten more complex and adding pads or recorded loops to fill out the sound is standard.
But wait! There’s more!
Using the right software, things like lights, fog machines, confetti machines, and pyrotechnics can be tied into the click track system. Some worship leaders coordinate the lights along with the song as would be commonly done in a rock concert. Touring bands do repetitive performances. They incorporate all these types of things with their computer so that each performance is the same. A big show can come from a small computer. Whether that is your style or not, I do highly recommend click tracks for your band.
We have a professional drummer who has played with our worship team for more than a decade. For some of those years we had an alternate drummer who was not nearly as disciplined. His performances were “spongy”: on tempo, then too fast, then back to tempo, then too slow. It made producing those tracks impossible or nearly impossible because as the drum track was adjusted so were the vocal tracks and all the other instruments. It could easily become noticeable that the vocal tracks were stretched in this process so I couldn’t use many of those recordings. It also was a frustration for the band to switch drummers on an every-other-week schedule. Practices became more tense as we had to work harder and longer to adapt. My professional drummer would complain that the group wasn’t following him and he was right. Most of them were singing the song the way they thought it went based upon rote memory and feel from practicing at home or in the car. Singing with the radio is not the same as singing with the metronome or the band. I encouraged band members to use these tools at home for practice since we did not have a means to implement even a simple metronome at the church. They didn’t and they still didn’t follow the drummer which was a source of ongoing frustration.
In 2020 we did a major upgrade. We built a new stage and bought In-Ear Monitors for our members. This allowed us to implement a metronome for performances for the first time. Thanks to some personnel changes the most inconsistent members of the group moved on. In the next year I implemented a click track for performances when my professional drummer was absent. The first time that he heard our group play with a click track he was extremely moved at how tight the group was. He had never heard us be that tight before and it struck him hard. That simply affirmed the experiences others have reported when they implemented click tracks for their groups. It produces a more coherent, higher quality performance than you get when a bunch of amateurs get together who are working by feeling and memory but are not working with the same structure or goals for excellence in mind. The click track is the unifying feature for everyone.
The charitable church mindset overlooks clumsy errors and a lack of professionalism. But with more livestreaming where people are checking the church out before they attend, it is more important than ever to put on a quality performance. No one wants to go to the ballet and see one of the ballerinas turn out of sync with the others. The error becomes the focus of attention. It is what is remembered and talked about. And so it is with the church. People are often looking for exclusion factors. If they don’t like what they see online they won’t come visit in person. I have heard complaints about sloppy performances over the years but I have never heard anyone say, “That was too professional; too well done. I wouldn’t attend a church like that.” Quality performances are not exclusion factors.
One other point should be addressed and that deals with flexibility. With the proper setup, each performance can have spaces for unrestricted talk or for long improv instrumental sections. All it takes is a little planning ahead of time. The big and famous churches use these systems every week. When the worship leader goes into prayer during a song it is a genuine interlude but the click doesn’t stop. It simply is put into a loop while the band keeps playing along quietly until the leader is finished and then the “continue” button is pressed and the song goes on. While the time of the break may be scripted the prayers and thoughts shared are not fake or ingenuine. Many churches have “altar calls” every week. You know it is coming but it is a genuine call to repentance even if its timing and position in the service is known and predictable. So the use of a metronome or click track has far more upsides than downsides. It doesn’t have to kill any sense of Divine inspiration in the service or place unreasonable limits on what can be done during the service.