We had practice this morning and I was really happy with how things went. We’re only doing four songs which is less than normal but that meant we could spend more time really working on stuff. Stuff like.. duh duh duh.. drum roll please.. click tracks! Hooray!
I posted earlier this week about click tracks and we decided to give it a try today. I bought a track for “Everlasting God” from PraiseCharts.com and did some work yesterday so that we could use it at practice. The track has loops and pads in Bb and C – we do the song in A so that meant dropping the Bb track down a semitone. Thankfully the software I use, Mixcraft, has this built-in so it’s as easy as telling the software what key you’d like the track to be in. The next step was a little tricky – Mixcraft wasn’t recognizing the track as stereo so even when it was panned hard left or right I was getting BOTH clicks and loops from both sides of my system. Not cool. I used Audacity to separate the track into two separate audio tracks – one that had only click, one that had only loops – and imported those tracks back into Mixcraft. Panning those two tracks – one hard left, one hard right – and then using a minijack to RCA adapter meant we were running loops to one channel on our board and click to the other channel. Following me so far?
Anyways, we ran through the other songs we’re doing tomorrow – Hosanna, Our God Saves and No One Like You – to get the band really in the groove and then we went back to Everlasting God. I took some time to explain to the band what we were doing and why we might want to think about doing this. I’ve found that bands who play to click tracks (whether or not they use loops) are usually able to make a quick jump to being a tighter band that plays in groove. Playing to a click is a big help for bands to take it to that next level. There are also functional reasons t0 play to a click – the songs sound better with added loops or tracks, the ability to use video along with the song, etc etc.
Anyways!
(That’s my word of the day)
We tried it out and it was AWESOME. I was a little hesitant because sometimes it takes drummers a while to learn how to play with a click but Steve rocked it. Seriously. I was impressed. We ran the track at 102 and then thought it was a bit slow so we tried it at 104 and that was too quick. Brought it back to 103. Felt nice in the verse but the chorus was a little draggy. Mixcraft lets you set markers so we are running verse and pre-chorus at 103 and then the chorus bumps up to 104 on the fly. Very cool.
Our band loved it and the tracks filled out the sound really, really nicely. We’ll see who notices that there’s no organ player on stage tomorrow morning :)
Here’s our service outline -
Sunday, February 3, 2007 – “Act One”
Hosanna
Everlasting God
Meet & Greet
Q&A w/ YWAM students
Prayer/Announcements/Offering
Our God Saves
No One Like You
Message – Prayers of Boldness
Prayer Response
Thanks for stopping by the blog. I'm currently on sabbatical this summer - you can read more about my sabbatical here: Personal Update - What's Next
Since I'm away from the blog I've decided to close comments. I love the interaction and discussion that happens with readers and since I'm not able to do that this summer, I'll be very much looking forward to that when I return in August.