Church Music

The weekend after next my wife and I are attending the As One Voice Conference in Sydney. I’m hoping for some inspiration to get more motivated with our parish music program.  The As One Voice: The Next Generation is likely to feature prominently at the conference.   I’ve started going through the songs and will start blogging them soon.  So far several are actually singable, which is a start.  One or two are never going to be sung by a congregation due to severely overcomplicated music.

I am reminded of the controversy over the benefits of breast feeding over bottle feeding.  Of course breast is best but sometimes it isn’t just isn’t going to happen and it’s no use making the mother feel even worse by going on about.

Of course real musicians are better but just try to find them and get them to commit to playing.  Singing to some sort of canned backing is I fear going to become more common and I think it can be done in ways that are acceptable. 

What is often not appreciated is that is actually harder to sing to a backing than a real musician.  Human players can adjust to a group of singers, but no-one defeats a backing track – they always win.  You actually have to rehearse more with a backing track than the real thing.

Reason make some good points about this here but I’ll add my opinions for good measure.

Singing to CDs is the least best option.   These are not adaptable with respect to key, length and tempo and most are of underwhelming quality.

Professionally made backings are available but I don’t use them so I can’t comment.

MIDI is ancient technology but is easily editable to change key, tempo, etc and easy to learn how to use.  Many keyboards can record and play MIDI, which is good for keyboard players but no good for guitarists.  It is vital to use a good soundcard or it will sound awful and it has dreadful habit of sounding vastly different on different equipment. A solution to this is to convert the file to MP3. This makes it much larger but more predictable.  MIDI is OK for keyboard sounds but awful for guitar sounds.  MIDI has a problem in that it can be backwards engineered into sheet music and so is a copyright problem.

Better still is software such as Band in a Box that makes MIDI tracks easy to make and has, in the last few years, overcome MIDI cheesiness with their RealTracks. 

I use backings less than I used to although some of my old MIDI backings are still used at our Church by some music groups when their musicians are unavailable.  When I do use them I have updated them through a recent version of BIAB and convert them MP3s.

As an example, listen to David Haas’s “Table Song”, a favourite hymn at Church.  I must have done the original MIDI version years ago and kept just the melody and descant lines in a new version recently.  I tend to get rid of the melody line if the song is well known but they are useful for making sure you are still in the right place.

[audio:https://www.sixmaddens.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Table-Song.mp3|titles=Table Song]

Table Song

It would make a great deal of sense to have a clearing house for exchanging the tracks made within a parish to other parishes.  If a way to do this that kept it to churches with copyright clearance could be found, I’m sure it would beneficial.

A few times a month I play at mass at the local Catholic Church. I play guitar and some family and friends lead the singing.  In the absence of further musical assistance I sometimes use backings I have made myself to help out.  It occurred to me that this must be a common enough activity and I thought there must be some blogs talking about the music we play in the Catholic Church.

There are, but few that go beyond slagging off anything that isn’t chant.  Others are very Cathedral based and divorced from the realities of small parishes with few resources.

It appears I have to create the blog I wanted to read and see where it takes me.  I’m happy to hear of other resources and I will link to those I find.

I’ll put up backing tracks of hymns from time to time and I plan to blog the new “As One Voice” Collection as I work my way through it.

Let’s see how it goes.