Our musicians used to struggle with keeping tempo. The result was sloppy transitions, or the emotion of a moment would knock the tempo out of whack. Like it or not, those kinds of things DO affect the crowd and how they engage with the moment you are trying to support from the stage.
Several years ago, a very well respected musician in our church gave our team a nudge by suggesting they use a click track. At the time, that kind of rubbed some of our fellas the wrong way. “Is he saying we’re not good players?” “I’m sorry, but that’s just not ‘authentic’ enough.” But after some thought, we came to grips with the fact that if he could win a Grammy while using a click track, maybe it was worth some thought.
[SIDENOTE: As an artist, nothing is more authentic than taking your craft seriously. And the first step toward taking your craft seriously is to spend substantial time developing your skill(s) in private. A close second is developing how effectively you can bring your craft into a group setting. That means 'dying to yourself,' and in turn being open to criticism rather than resisting it. Anything that you can learn from others is valuable... Especially if they're better than you, but sometimes even if they're less experienced than you. ]
So we thought it out and decided to give it a try. Right off the bat, some players had trouble with it, but the majority loved it. Suddenly, there was a freedom in how they were able to play because they didn’t feel like they were swimming upstream trying to stay in the groove with an off-tempo player. When everyone was referencing something that was distinct and steady, an area of tension was gone from the stage, and in its place was more room to be creative with his or her own playing.
Once you decide to click, what’s the best way to do it?
You could get all fancy and go the ProTools route. But that’s overkill for most folks. We started by using a simple drum machine. But we quickly found that it was too tough to navigate during transitions (especially when the lights were going to blackout). We finally settled on a hybrid approach: an Macintosh laptop running iTunes and Reason.
Reason is the solution when we’re already using loops that we may want to tweak once on stage, or when we’re already using it as an instrument (using a USB keyboard). But 95% of the time, we’re using iTunes. No, iTunes doesn’t have a metronome feature (that I know of). We went the good old fashioned route: mp3. Our music assistant took a couple of days several years ago creating mp3 tracks in a sequencing program. There is a different mp3 for each of scores of tempos. They’re all in his iTunes Library, and each week he simply creates a playlist for the set with each of the tempos in order, back to back. He labels the tracks with the song titles. The result is a very easy-to-navigate sequence of tempos that can be called up with the arrow key, and started and stopped with the return key and spacebar.
Short, sweet, visual, and tactile. No software or drum machine learning curve if you have fill-in players or decide to have the drummer run things instead of the keys player for the week. (When we have a loop and aren’t using Reason, we create a new track with the tempo panned right, and the loop panned left.)
So… You want to give it a try, but don’t want to spend hours and hours created a bunch of mp3′s? No problem. You can download our collection here!
DOWNLOAD 903MB [download#2#size]