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The other night, I was chatting with one of the guys in the band, and we started talking about the set list. It got me to thinking about set lists in general, their purpose and their utility.
The purpose of a set list should be fairly obvious; to have a semblance of order to a show, so that every member of the band knows what song is to be played at what time. Kind of what's on my mind right now is the fidelity to which that list must be paid.
I have played in bands were the set list was God and we all conformed to it, rehearsing the same songs in the same order over and over for weeks. On the one hand, it was a very put together show, with spot on transitions and good flow. On the other hand, we kinda had to hope that the crowd liked the order and flow of the songs; otherwise, it was going to be a long night (and there were more than a few of those).
Other times I have played, there was no set list whatsoever. The band leader would signal the key of the tune: 2 fingers up to indicate D (2 sharps), 3 fingers down for E flat (3 flats). He would flash his fingers, start a tune and all of us joined in (either we actually knew the song, or we just faked our way through it good enough). Since we were mostly playing standards and the usual workhorses, we could get by just fine.
For myself, I'm find that both of the above examples are a bit extreme. I prefer to write up the set list just before going on stage. This allows us to check out the crowd at the venue, take into account how we each are feeling and adjust the set accordingly. I think that a band should have a number of transitions and combinations worked out in advance that can be plugged in where they're appropriate and dropped when they're not.
One of the shows that I played recently is kind of a case in point. We had a written out set list for three sets. The first set we played as written, since the crowd was completely ignoring us (basically a paid practice). The second set, though, had people up and dancing, with a good energy to them. That energy fed us as well. So we stripped tunes from all over the place, trying to keep them in the groove. It worked, but it meant completely throwing out the written list. All things being equal, that's a good trade.
The usual timing variations that exist in most music (the guitarist is a little ahead of the bass player who's a little behind the drummer) works well enough in live situations when everyone can be in contact with each other (that contact should keep each other from running too far away from one another). This doesn't fly in a studio situation.
Recording in a studio is far more stressful than playing out live. If you screw up (okay, to be a bit more accurate, when you screw up), no one else other than the people in the audience might be aware of it, and then only if they are paying attention. Even if they are paying attention, they can't go back and try to catch the boo-boo again. Making an album changes that; everyone who listens will be able to catch every mistake made, no matter how large or small. And not only will they hear it, they'll get the golden opportunity to hear it again and again. And since the cliché is true -- no one is a harsher critic than yourself -- when recording, there is an acute awareness of any error whatsoever.
So, in a studio situation, there's lots of stress and pressure and emotions tend to run high (particularly after re-recording the same f-in' song for the seventeenth time). Any natural meter variations that might have already existed between the members of the band will only be exacerbated. Couple that with isolation rooms and the odds of the band staying together quickly decrease. And if the music lines are rhythmically complex in anyway, then things fall apart in very short order.
As a quick digression, when playing in a studio, it's common to have the different members of the band in completely separate rooms (to isolate one person's sound from anothers'). All in all a good thing, as it allows one musician to go back and clean up a flubbed note without affecting any other instruments in the song.
As you might guess, keeping everyone together during a recording can be a challenge. One of the most common ways to do this is to pump a click track into everyone's headphones so they can hear a clear deliniation as to where the beats are at any given time. Most click tracks are produced by an electronic metronome that has some kind of output that can be processed as a signal.
Two primary purposes are met with a click track. Everyone stays together (or close to being together) and a consistent meter allows for a musician to revisit a part and be able to pick up the beat very quickly.
The first time a musician plays with a click track can be rather embarassing. No matter how good someone's internal metronome is, a machine never fails. If there's anything I can suggest to people who are preparing to enter the studio, if you are planning on using a click track, practice with a loud metronome a few times before you walk in the door. It's much cheaper to be flustered at home than at fifty dollars an hour (if not much more).
However, click tracks are far more useful than they are annoying. If you do any kind of studio work for any length of time, you will almost certainly encounter the track fairly quickly. Should the recording project be using any kind of sequencer, click tracks are required (to keep everyone in sync with the machine).
When most people think about concerts and playing out live, the things that lead to mind are the musicians – the singer, the drummer, the guitarist. This is not a bad thing; the band is the primary reason why the concert is happening in the first place. But, it's not only the band that puts a show together.
No band is successful if the team consists only of the musicians. Every band needs support staff: roadies, agents, managers, accountants, lawyers, vendors, etc. And, while all are important, necessary and deserving of respect, I'm going to take some time to single out a few of them (the ones that most people will encounter during their musical career) for special attention.
Sound guy:
This is probably the single most important member of the support staff; he (and for some reason, almost all of the sound people I have encountered are male) is arguably more important than some of the members of the band. He has final control over how the band sounds to the audience. No matter how hot the band is -- you could have Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin and Dennis Chambers on stage, all on fire, in sync together, everything’s perfect, but the band will sound like garbage if the soundman’s zoning out, not paying attention to things with the 2k Hz rolled all the way down and the 500 Hz all the way up on the master parametric EQ. A good soundman can make a bad band sound good, while no band will sound good with a incompetent moron running the desk.
If you happen to find a great sound guy with a good ear, hang on to him for all he’s worth. Buy his gear if you have to, but soundmen with golden ears are irreplaceable. Which brings me to the next point….
While it's generally a good rule of thumb to be as nice to people as you can, it applies even more so the sound guy. No matter how much of jerk he might happen to be, no matter what has happened to you, never take it out on the sound man. Or, at the very minimum, wait until the performance is over and you don’t have to deal with the guy anymore.
When a band performs live, they typically find themselves in one of three scenarios:
• the band runs their own sound,
• the venue has a soundman on staff that the band uses (sometimes by choice, sometimes not), or
• the band has their own soundman.
Of the three setups, the first is usually the least desirable -- while it is true that no one will know what kind of sound the bands wants more than the band itself, generally, the members of the band are far too occupied with the actual playing of music to worry about the overall mix, the overall balance and all the moment to moment adjustments that are required during a show.
When the venue provides their own sound guy, it can be a good thing. He’s likely to be familiar with the acoustics of the venue, as well as the house equipment. In my experiences, a good indicator of the ability of the soundman is whether or not the venue makes his working optional. If it's optional, then they are confident of his skill. If it's not optional, he may still be competent, but the experience level will vary from place to place and time to time. The downside to this arrangement is that the sound guy's loyalties will be to the venue, not the band, and he is less likely to be as familiar with the material the band will be performing.
If the band can afford to bring their own soundman, this tends to be a better solution. He will be sufficiently familiar with the band's material and playing style that he will be able to anticipate changes and cues during the show, and he will understand that his success is directly tied to the success of the band. On the other hand, he'll probably be winging it when it comes to the acoustics of each venue. Good sound guys can figure out the acoustics during sound check relatively quickly, but that's only going to go so far.
The optimal solution is when the band brings their own sound guy and he coordinates with the venue to best fit the band's sound to the acoustics of the venue. In many higher end places, this is the norm, but not always.
Roadies:
Roadies get the grunt work of a show. Loading in gear and loading out gear is probably the worst part of any gig. When bands are starting out, they are their own roadies (with whatever help they can find). This is usually par for the course until a fair amount of success has been attained.
I know that I cannot wait until I get to the place where I can afford to have someone else do this bit of the work for me. Even still, even the most successful of bands typically don't have simple muscle as part of their traveling crew. Instead, these bands have contract riders which specify a number of people at each venue to help (item #10, paragraph 2) with loading and unloading. The roadies that travel with the band usually have multiple duties (security, gopher, support system) and extra skills (electrician, instrument tech, amateur psychologist). And speaking of extra skills....
Techs:
Techs are the unsung heroes of a show. They are the people who ensure that the band's setup and instruments are right. It can be a pretty thankless job, as some musicians tend to be a little bit picky when it comes to their setup and the horror stories of abuse rained down on techs from various musicians are legendary (Buddy Rich quickly comes to mind). If you ever go to a show and you see someone dressed in black run up to a musician and hand him a new guitar, or switch snare drums for her, then you've just seen a tech in action. It's part of the tech's job to make sure that all the instruments on stage work correctly throughout the entire show.
Most bands don't get to the level where they have the luxury of techs; rather, the band acts as their own techs. And, most techs typically pull double duty as roadies for the gear on which they work. If you are lucky enough to have a tech, try to keep in mind that they are probably as passionate about the music and the instrument as you are and treat them accordingly. And, sometimes the techs play on stage when a member of the band gets hurt (see #23).
Agents:
When a band is just starting out, the hardest part of the business is getting anyone to listen to them. And even harder still is getting anyone to pay for the privilege of listening to an unknown band. The primary job of an agent is to get bands work. Once the work is available, the secondary job of the agent is to get the best deal possible for the band at the specific gig. During the earlier part of a band's career, this is a hard slog, with lots of frustrating phone calls and unreturned messages. When a band is very successful, an agent may get overwhelmed with people wanting the band to come to their venue and perform. In the middle, the agent will typically have both ends -- lots of lower tier venues requesting the band and frustration of not being able to get into the top tier venues.
Managers:
Managers have some of the same duties as agents, but that doesn't really begin to scratch the surface. Managers are more involved with almost all business decisions of the band -- the promotion and marketing, producing of CDs, touring, handling personnel, interacting with other businesses, working with record labels, fielding requests for the band's time and that's just a small list. Good managers take a massive load of a band's shoulders. Bad managers can bankrupt you (just ask Billy Joel).
Others:
The above people should hardly be considered an end all-be all listing; it's just a start. Successful bands need accountants who are familiar with the music industry so as to hunt down every cent buried in royalty agreements; entertainment law is it’s own arcane specialty that most lawyers do not understand well enough to represent a band’s interests with sufficient zeal (not to mention that lawyers tend to know everyone in the business and are good intermediaries through which to make connections); lighting engineers who work the lights during a show (which can either greatly heighten a performance or dash it to bits); even merchandisers who help the band make a few extra bucks by selling CDs and such.
The long and short of it is to remember that there are a small army of people involved in a successful show. No matter how big anyone gets, they didn't get there alone, and they surely do not stay there alone. So, if you're a musician, be appreciative of their work; if you're a fan, just keep the supporting staff in mind.
I was thinking more about the meter of the drummer that Rich had brought out to play and why meter is so very important for musicians to have. And why it is a good thing for drummers to have it in copious quantities.
For starters, I should probably make mention about some musical terms like "meter", "tempo" and "rhythm". Music is charted in a structure (called a time signature) that lists the how many beats are allowed per measure over what kind of note should be considered one beat (i.e. 3/4 indicates that each measure will have three quarter notes per measure, whereas 7/8 says that there will be seven eighth notes per measure).
Rhythm is how the all of the notes and pauses are organized in a set pattern. Individual rhythms expressions can span measures or can be contained wholly within a measure and while the rhythmic patterns may or may not be repeated throughout a song, they typically are regularly repeated.
The tempo of a song is how many beats elapse in a given period of time. A typical measurement of tempo is beats per minute (bpm). A measure with a time signature of 4/4 (four quarter notes per measure) at a tempo of 120bpm should take 2 seconds and the same measure at 100bpm should take 1 and two-thirds seconds. While neither ones of those examples may not seem like a lot of time, songs are tend to consist quite a few measures (typically three digits worth).
Meter is the length of one measure of music. In the first example, about two seconds.
Hopefully, that should satisfy the sticklers for vocabulary. Technically, this particular piece of writing is more about tempo than meter, but it has been my experience that most of the musicians that I encounter have tended to use "tempo," "meter," and "time" interchangeably when talking about a musician's ability to play at a constant pace.
Some of the people I have played with call me the "Meter Nazi." Typically, it’s because I tend to point out exactly where in a song we either sped up or dragged behind. In fact, I used to think that I had good meter, until I started to study with Anthony. Then he sat me down with a metronome and had me play a few things, letting me know that I was pretty consistently rushing the 3rd beat of most measures that I was playing and most of the other beats in some of measures. My, that was humbling. Well, humiliating may be a more accurate way of putting it.
Anyway, bass guitar is a somewhat unusual instrument in music. It's both a rhythm and a melodic instrument, so it has to hold down the rhythm while supporting the rest of the instruments. While there are some musicians who seem to favor melody over rhythm and others who tend to focus on maintaining the rhythmic structure, both are essential for good grooving basslines. The ones who can do both are rightly fully considered to be masters of the instrument.
One of the things that I really appreciate about good drummers is how well they are able to hold down the meter. When a bass player has a solid drummer supporting the rhythms, it frees him up from having to do all the maintenance that is required to keep the rest of the band in time. Now, that doesn't mean that the bass player can just wander off into space, playing notes in whatever tempo happens to pop into his pretty little head, but a strong drummer can build out a tight pocket. And then the bass line can sit just a bit behind the beat or ahead of it, and that breathes depth into the music.
And here's a little observation that I have made over the years. Good drummers understand time, meter and rhythm. Great drummers understand that drums are not only a rhythm instrument, that they are melodic as well. From something simple as tuning the toms to minor 3rds for a darker sound to choosing an array of cymbals and using their different tonalities to color the sound (as opposed to hitting the whichever cymbal happens to be most convenient to the drummer's hand at the time), the drummers that I go out of my way to play with are the ones that have rock solid time and approach their instrument as more than just backbeats.
When the drummer is locked on to the tempo, she and the bass player can start to work together. Her pattern on the kick drum will set up the rhythmic choices for his bass line. He can double up the same pattern (which will bring a lot emphasis to the bass line and groove – check out this one hit wonder from the 80’s for an example), build on top of the pattern (accenting the doubled notes while growing the feel – the examples are too numerous to mention, but here’s one anyway), he can play against it (doing a counterpoint to add complexity to the overall song – the rhythmic intricacy of this song beggars the belief to start with: that Jamerson played the entire line with one finger while lying down on this back is just astounding) or the bass player can do a combination of these three techniques at the same time. The typical bass line tends to heavily favor the first two approaches, while almost all bass lines utilize all three combinations at one time or another.
Most of western music is built around a 4/4 meter. I can't speak that much to Eastern music -- as much as I have listened to it, I know that I'm only scratching the surface. For most of us, 4/4 time is deeply ingrained into our psyche. Turn on the radio and listen to almost any song. Find the beat and count it; there will almost certainly be four beats in between the first emphasized beat you hear and the equally emphasized beat.
Still, not all music is in 4/4. Waltzes are traditionally in 3/4 time (think of the Blue Danube from the scene in 2001 when the shuttle docks with the space station), flamenco is traditionally in 12/8 and Celtic music leans towards 7/8. And, of course, in American jazz, any time signature is up for grabs.
Counting out the meter can be an exercise all in itself. Speaking for myself, I don't like to count in my head much past five. Once I go past five, I break the count down into smaller numbers that add up the way I want. For example, a song in 11/8 might be counted as 4-4-3 (1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3), 4-3-4, 3-4-4, 3-3-3-2, 4-2-3-2 or any other of the various pernumerations that would still produce 11.
The break down is important because it changes the way in which I approach the music. Playing 11/8 as 4-4-3 makes the song feel like a 4/4 groove with a truncated third measure. Playing it as 3-3-3-2 brings a strong triplet feel to the tune. And 3-4-4 takes the 4/4 groove and keeps it off balance from the outset.
Once the tempo and the feel have been decided and all the musicians are on the same page (or all in agreeance about the individual pages they are all on), the music can take shape. While it is possible for a song to be coherent with each musician playing a different meter (I can recall a jazz composition from years ago that had the drummer in 3/4, the bass line in 4/4, the keys in 5/4 and the guitar in 7/4, but that’s far and away the exception), in most circumstances, everyone starts and ends in the same frame of time. Each segment of the song needs to have at least one instrument holding down the tempo so the rest of the musicians can key off of that part. More often than not, it’s the drummer that everyone else uses as their reference point, but this is not always the case. When the drummer’s not holding down the fort, the role almost always falls to the bass line. But, most of the time, it’s the drummer hold keeps time for the entire group throughout the entire song.
Speaking for myself, I have played a number of shows with musicians of less than perfect time. When I was studying with Kai, I asked him pretty much point blank how he deals with other musicians that have meter issues. He commiserated with me, relating to me a few stories about how he has had to deal with it over the years. But basically, we both try to solve the same problem in a similar fashion: If other people are rushing, simplify the bass line and drive home the beat; if they drag, add in some more notes to make things feel faster. Do this for a while (like three or four measures) and if they don’t catch on, go with it as best you can for the song and then have a chat with the other musician(s) when you get a chance.
If the band is comprised of people with innate good meter, the tempo issue doesn’t automatically go away – each member of the band has to be able to listen to the other musicians to make sure the meter is in sync. When that happens one of the more critical housekeeping elements of making music takes care of itself. The more in tune each member of the group is to the shared tempo, the more relaxed everyone is and the more organic the music becomes. And that’s when the joy of playing begins to shine through.