The Sunday Musician

Dear Church Music Director,

Thirty years ago you could pull in quite a crowd on a Sunday night just by having live music. Didn't matter if they sounded like the garage band from H-E-double-hockey-sticks – live music was hard to come by. Bands were a novelty. Although the sight of someone whacking at drums might still be a novelty on your stage, I assure you that everywhere else the image is more common than a rerun of 'Friends'. The sight of people playing rock band instruments is utterly ubiquitous. For those of you from Overisel, that means everywhere. You can buy a cell phone that downloads music videos so you can hang up on your husband and watch Clay Aiken while you're driving. Friends, we swim in a culture of music and live bands. The world is like a great big jukebox, and people will (God bless 'em) put their nickel in and expect to hear a song - even in church.

I mean, it’s easy, right?

So you decide (or it's decided for you) that you'll do Steven Curtis Chapman's ‘Great Adventure’ two Sundays from now. Everyone’s all excited about the song, and you have a lot of work to do in a very, very short time if you're going to pull this off. This will take a lot of nickels.

To put your job in perspective, let's take a quick look at how our friend Steven gets a CD ready, along with the accompanying video:

First, the guy's got talent oozing out of him like a Slurpie cup where someone didn’t let go of the handle in time. Maybe you've got that kind of talent, but my guess is that if you did, you wouldn't be trying to do a 60 hour job in 20 hours every week for, well, not very much money. (Yes, you're doing this for the Kingdom, but you wonder if the Apostle Paul ever just took his phone off the hook and watched reruns of NYPD Blue because cops look like their job has less pressure.)

Steven Curtis is also surrounded by players who do nothing but play. These players don't work 50 hours a week managing the shoe department at Wal-Mart. Their entire job is to play their instrument.  I hate them. 

Let's inventory your band:

Drums: a 10^th-grader who plays a fairly solid rock beat, but goes pale when handed anything in ¾ time.

Guitar: the local guitar shop owner who knows every Led Zeppelin lick by heart and hauls in an amplifier loud enough to bring down a light plane.

Bass: a former high school band director in his 50's who picked up bass guitar late in life and nods off when the lights go down for a video. Or just any time he's not playing.

Keyboard: An elementary school art teacher who is sure she could play 'that new music' if you'd only show her how.

Now Steven Curtis and the boys spend days and days rehearsing, then they go into a $300/hr. recording studio and spend days and days making sure everything is exactly the way they like it. Not the tiniest detail goes unattended. They probably spend most of two days just getting the drums to sound right. Maybe longer. Every guitar, every voice, every keyboard, every single drum and cymbal has it's own separate track, and each one gets all the attention it needs. Want the voice to sound like it's in Carnegie Hall? Just dial it in on the Lexicon Reverb. Is that one particular cymbal crash a little loud? Set the automated faders to pull it back just a little, just for that one hit, during the mixdown. The environment is perfectly controlled, and the guy who runs the studio has a four year degree in sound engineering.

Your sound engineer is a garage mechanic who ruined his ears in the front row of a Van Halen concert.

Then they take several days or longer to shoot a video where they play along – PLAY ALONG – with their perfectly controlled recording so they can smile and jump around and get on and off trains and drive cars down the Pacific Coast Highway while they're playing. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this approach, but it's pretty stratospheric.

Your process is ever so slightly different.

Your regular practice room is also used as the Adult Studies room two nights a week, and right now you can't even get into it because it's all set up for the '40 Days of Doing Things On Purpose' thing that's coming up – for which, oh yeah, you're supposed to learn six new praise songs. You get two hours next Wednesday night to get three praise songs ready, a prelude, an offertory, and 'Great Adventure'.  And your singer will burst into tears if she can't hear where to come in - she needs it to sound exactly like the CD. And she's a girl, and isn't this supposed to be a guy's song, and why can't you just get so-and-so to sing this week?

Am I close? Just to show you I feel your pain: the above description of your band is a description of my actual band, some weeks. I loved them all dearly, and they would inevitably be scheduled to play the week it was suggested we do the Doobie's 'Jesus Is Just Alright' as a cool opener.

Quiz question: Now that we've thought this through , how likely is it that your band will accurately reproduce the Steven Curtis Chapman song just like the CD?

Answer: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You don't have a chance. What were you thinking? You got all excited in the meeting and said yes, and now you have to make it happen.

Can you still do the song? Of course. You only have one shot, though, and that's to play it in your own voice. Play it so that it sounds best with your people, your instruments, in your meeting room, for your people. Play it the way it works best for you. You have my permission. Tell them the Band Doctor said it was okay. In fact, it's not just okay - it's imperative, for this reason: otherwise it will sound phony.