Unsplash.com; Gabriel Gurrola
Like its close cousin, pitch correction, the use of prerecorded backing tracks during live performances has followed an evolutionary arc that’s taken them from being music’s dirty little secret to being just another tool in the toolbox. The use of them a decade ago would raise eyebrows. Fast-forward to today, however, and few bother to bat an eyelash if a five-piece band sounds mysteriously like a 50-piece orchestra from the stage.
This shift in attitude is due in large part to how prerecorded music has lost its luster, with most of the revenue in the music industry now derived from sales of tickets, not CDs. The logical extension of that dynamic is that audiences have come to expect the record to be recreated live on stage. However, as is often the case, it’s not that simple when it comes to church.
Strong feelings both ways
“I remember when we first began using them at a very high level, there was a lot of concern,” recalls Ricky Touchette, technical director and an audio engineer at The Cove Church in Mooresville, North Carolina. “It was a huge topic, and people had a lot of strong feelings both ways. There was an issue around authenticity, but the audience now wants to hear the record on stage, and backing tracks are the only way to get that.”
Touchette says it took some time to get the church’s all-volunteer staff consistently trained in the use of tracks. Early on, they’d use stereo tracks, or else would just pan the stems to one side and the click and percussion tracks to the other. But in order to get the best effect, they moved to an online service selling more advanced discrete stems, and then began to mix those stem tracks in a more organic manner. They also began using a more sophisticated infrastructure, with a rack at the drummer’s position with Ableton Live software on a MacBook, instead of an iPad, and a MOTU 828 interface, in order to have more processing power for eight discrete tracks of guitars, bass, keyboard pads, percussion, and background vocals.
“There was a major change in mindset that had to happen before we could make the best use of tracks,” says Touchette. “We needed to learn to treat the stems as though they were actual musicians in the mix.”
“There was a major change in mindset that had to happen before we could make the best use of tracks. We needed to learn to treat the stems as though they were actual musicians in the mix.” Ricky Touchette, Technical Director, Audio Engineer, The Cove Church, Mooresville, NC
The Cove’s staff will train using the live band and tracks during rehearsals. The worship leader will usually first take the tracks home and adjust them for the number of musicians that will actually be on stage for a performance, which will vary from week to week, service to service, and as band members’ availability changes, as well as for the appropriate key signatures, if lead vocals alternate between male and female singers. They’ll then route the individual stem outputs through the church’s FOH console to the IEM outputs, so each musician and vocalist can customize an entire mix. The entire mix file, with the tracks integrated into it, can be Dropboxed to satellite-church locations, where local worship ministers can customize each song for whatever live-music assets will be available there for a service.
“It can get pretty complex,” Touchette concedes, adding that even though the use of backing tracks has become way more widespread and more widely accepted by musicians and churchgoers, they still require a careful touch. “You have to make it believable. You can’t put six or seven guitars in a mix when there’s only one or two on stage. It’s not as easy as it sounds: this isn’t the 1980s, where every band has two guitars, bass, and drums; one song can have as many as 15 or 20 tracks. You have to adjust it for the size of the band you have at each service, and for the expectations of the audience.”
Tracking the transitions
At Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, the congregation’s music experience is further enhanced by the tracks that the worship leaders use because in key instances they are able to program in synthesizer transition parts, which can smooth the changeover between songs. It’s an especially useful feature when tempos and keys shift between songs, says Worship Ministry Director Zach Smith. “There’s no abrupt switch between songs, which makes for a nicer listening experience,” he says. “But we’ve built the tempo map and key changes into the transition, which only the band can hear.”
“[When tempos and keys shift] there’s no abrupt switch between songs, which makes for a nicer listening experience.” Zach Smith, Worship Mininstry Director, Cornerstone Church, San Antonio, TX
Like many churches, Cornerstone’s various services have different musical styles, from more traditional morning services to more concert-like evening ones. Tracks can both enhance those distinctions and help maintain some continuity between them, such as with consistent synthesizer sounds, despite the fact that worship leaders for the various services may have very different preferences when it comes to technology. For instance, the church’s morning service is led by the (Hammond B3) organist, who prefers using Digital Performer with the church’s 180-voice choir and seven-piece brass section, while Smith and his more high-energy band favor Ableton Live. Both use RME Fireface 800 interfaces, placed in racks under the laptop running MultiTracks.com stems.
However, Cornerstone’s worship leaders also create their own content. Smith says they’ll mix and match songs using both original and third-party tracks, which make for nice variety and pacing possibilities, but stresses that it’s critical that worship leaders pay attention to match the playback levels between the two types of track sources.
As prerecorded tracks become more common in house-of-worship settings, they help the worship experience become closer to what congregations have come to expect from entertainment performances. However, that needn’t undermine their ultimate purpose.
“It’s difficult sometimes for our worship leaders to get in the right mindset and realize that today’s worship music does in fact require at least a certain level of the use of tracks,” observes Ricky Touchette. “What’s important to remember is that we all need to be focused towards one goal, for us it is to create and environment where people can encounter God.”
The Cove Church in Mooresville, NC — Ricky Touchette, Central Technical Director 704-655-3000 / cell: 704.999.9905 rickytouchette@covechurch.org
Cornerstone Church ‑ Zachery Smith, Worship Ministry Director (615) 545-5367
Zachery.Smith@sacornerstone.org,
