Less Is More - Pt. 1
The old saying that less is more is accurate when it pertains to building your live show, musically.
When I first joined my previous band, we had three guitarists at the time. I received feedback from different family members and friends saying how cluttered we sounded live. There are a few things that factored into that cluttered sound, but the main problem was having three guitar players! After one of them left a couple months into my tenure with them, our live sound cleaned up a bit. Once, while opening on a three-month tour, our lead guitarist couldn’t make the final leg of the tour. Our sound was even more clean!
There was another time when I had an artist send me their stem files to one of their songs, which had almost 100 tracks! Several of those tracks were titled “Noise’, “Noise” and “More Noise”!
The noise tracks were white noise, which can be used at times over an instrument track as an effect, not an audio track itself. I spoke with a few different audio engineers about this use of the white noise, and they believed it was used to simply eat up certain frequency ranges. The first thing I did when working on his tracks for his live show, was eliminate all the white noise tracks.
If you listen to the difference between Contemporary Christian Music and Mainstream Music played on radio today, many CCM artist’s vocals sit on top of everything! Some is on top so much that it actually sounds out of place with how loud it is in comparison to the rest of music. Now, if you listen to a modern mainstream song, the vocal sits inside the music, but yet there is so much space surrounding it. There typically isn’t a lot going on in the song musically, but the vocal is still the feature without it being over the top.
My band has started using the same concept we employ for our live performances and applying it in our studio recordings – if a certain instrument in a song doesn’t have a purpose, it’s not going in the song. Doing everything onstage with a purpose also applies in choosing the parts you play and what you have in the tracks. We’ll get more into building tracks in my next post.
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Have you ever walked off stage, after a performance, where you felt like you were just trying to survive the show? Maybe nerves took over, you felt underprepared, or external pressures made it difficult to be fully present. You’re not alone. During our recent Q&A at Second Saturdays, one of the artists put into words what so many musicians experience: that feeling of just trying to get through the performance instead of truly being present and engaged.
What if performing didn’t feel like survival? What if you could step on stage with confidence, fully connected to your music, your message, and your audience?