Should Our Sunday Songs Sound Like the Recordings?

David Zimmer: Hello, and welcome to the Sound Plus Doctrine podcast. My name is David Zimmer.

Bob Kauflin: My name is Bob Kauflin.

DZ: And, Bob, what are we talking about today?

BK: Aren’t you supposed to say what we’re talking about? I know what we’re talking about. And I wanted to say this title because I just think it’s fun to say.

DZ: I want to hear you say it.

BK: Okay. Should our Sunday songs sound like the recordings?

DZ: Wow. Should we check in with Grace and how the audio sounded? Why did you pick that title?

BK: It’s so great.

DZ: A lot of alliteration.

BK: Should our Sunday songs sound like the recordings? Is there another word for recordings that we could use?

DZ: Yeah. No. That’s good.

BK: Okay. All right. Should our Sunday songs sound like the recordings? This doesn’t apply to everybody. Recognize that and if you’re singing from hymnals and you got a piano, you’re not thinking, oh…

DZ: Yeah. Do it they did a thousand years ago.

BK: Yeah. This recording I just heard… Hopefully you’re not doing that. But if you’re using modern contemporary songs, of which there are recordings out there, you may be asking that question, how much do we do this like the recording? We’ve had numerous experiences.

DZ: Oh, yeah. And we get this question a lot. Not only sent in to us, but we get this question a lot when we’re talking to teams and we’re at different churches and when we’re in different countries we get this question.

BK: Yes. Well, I remember we took a team to the Philippines. It was 2013, ’14. And we were playing with their bands for… We did a conference there, and the musicians played all the songs exactly like our recordings.

DZ: Yeah. Incredible musicians.

BK: It was a surprise to me. They had learned it so well, they were all great. If you use Planning Center, we use Planning Center, and you can attach an arrangement of a song. If you add a new song, well which arrangement do you want to do? And so they list out the arrangements for you. And when you import it, if you import that song. Because I’ve noticed this with our songs, Sovereign Grace songs, it gives you verse, V1, chorus, V2, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, and it lists all that out for you. So they’re saying, “Oh, you must want to do this just it’s done on the recording.” We’ll have drummers join the church… Specifically drummers who have asked, as they’re getting ready for the first Sunday. “Okay. What are the songs? Which arrangement is it?” And sometimes there’s no arrangement. It’s a hymn that we just sing. And I’d say, “Just come ready to jam, just figure it out as we go.”

DZ: And their face goes pale white.

BK: Yeah. And sometimes I forget to tell them. And so they come to the rehearsal on Sunday morning. And it’s like we do something different and then… Yeah, I’m sorry, what? Anyway, so we’re going to break this down, as we often do, into two sections. One would be the advantages and the other be the disadvantages. Maybe a third section, I think, here, maybe not. We’ll see how it unfolds. And we did another podcast on backing tracks.

DZ: Yeah. Multi tracks. Very similar to this conversation but different.

BK: There’s some overlap. It’s not exactly the same. I put some of these points down. And, David, I would love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Some of the advantages of. First, everyone learns the song, and when you come together, it just all fits together. It’s really great.

DZ: Very streamlined.

BK: “What should you play?” “Well, just play what’s on the recording.” “Oh, okay. How about this?” “No, just play what’s on the recording.” Yeah. So there’s that, it eliminates the arguing about, “Well, what should we do?” “No, just do what’s on the recording.” It can streamline your rehearsals. I think that’s a real advantage.

DZ: Well, Sovereign Grace music, we take the time and energy and the money and to get into a room, to spend days arranging songs. And those are constantly edited and changed and tweaked and to get to the place where we go. This seems and feels the most concise version for this song. So as professionals who do this, there is an advantage to our time and labor.

BK: Well, that’s another advantage. You can learn arranging principles from recordings. Assuming it’s good arranging. And I think… For Sovereign Grace, our arranging has gotten better over the years. There’s that fine line between doing what you enjoy as a creative artist and doing what’s going to serve the congregation. I think we’ve gotten better at that over the years. But if you know nothing about arranging, listening to a recording and copying what they do can be a great way to learn that. If you’re aware you’re learning principles and not just doing a part. “Oh, did you notice the piano doesn’t come in until the chorus?” “Did you notice the electric guitar player is out on verse two?” What? So our temptation is, I’m in front. I should play. No, they don’t do that on recordings.

DZ: That’s great. Another point is just even the choices that were made in the arranging that you’re hearing right now, like you said, if they’re good, those instrumentalists are thinking carefully about, where am I and how do I fit with everybody? That is helpful. So that’s exactly what you’re saying. Oh, okay. I hear that guitar players in this range, so that keeps me from jumping two octaves higher. And being louder or overpowering or something like that. I think that’s helpful.

BK: Which gets to another advantage, I think is just learning how to play your individual instrument.

DZ: Yeah. It can train people. Yeah.

BK: A drummer can learn what beats are helpful. A guitar player, like you said, what voicings? What range? What riffs? Keyboards. What are some good riffs? What are voicings? Where on the piano do I play? Do I use my left hand? All those kinds of things? Vocal harmonies can be learned from recordings. Bass patterns, all those and whatever other instruments are out there, you can learn from the recording. Oh, this really fits. And again, that’s assuming it really fits. But we’re. We’re assuming these are good recordings. And you can actually learn things from them.

DZ: Yeah. And if you’ve been in music for a long time and you’re tempted to feel like, well, I just do whatever I want, I’m capable enough to just… And I don’t need anybody’s help. What is a cool thing is when you hear a part, like a piano part or a guitar part, and you go, “Oh, that’s so unique and fresh.” There’s another cool advantage to that. I remember when ‘Is He Worthy’ came out…

BK: I was just thinking…

DZ: Were you really? I was like, “I gotta learn that opening piano part from Ben.”

BK: Ben Shive.

DZ: Yeah. I just thought… Or Another part I really love is what you played on ‘Lord Have Mercy’ the Marc Willerton song. What album is that on ‘Glorious Christ’.

BK: I think so.

DZ: Is it? We don’t even know our own albums, but…

BK: No it’s on ‘Prayers of the Saints’.

DZ: ‘Prayers of the Saints’. Okay. But your piano part on that in 12/8 was just so cool. I wanted to learn it. I do think there is an advantage to go, “Oh, I could still grow and learn these parts.”

BK: Yeah. It’s like teaching without you don’t have to pay anything for it.

DZ: Yeah, it’s right there.

BK: Yeah, you stream it, you listen to it.

DZ: True.

BK: And in some ways, it makes you better than you are. If you couldn’t come up with that idea, come up with that part could be either because of creativity or because of technical skills. Makes you sound better than you are. So that’s really great. And then you mentioned some earlier when we were talking about this, people are used to hearing it that way, the song. And so there can be an engagement and identification that says, “Oh, it’s this song. Okay, great.” whether that’s the intro lick or whatever. Just this familiarity that draws people in. So there are probably other advantages. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’m sure there are. If you know of some, leave them in the comments, and we will happy to have people look at them.

BK: All right, so what are some of the disadvantages of doing it exactly the recordings? Because as we’ve been in different places, we’ve sensed that… Obviously a conference is a different setting than a Sunday morning. So we’re talking about Sunday mornings. We were talking about streamlining rehearsals earlier and when you go in to be with a band and they know it exactly like it’s been on the recording, you go, “Oh, great. This is so easy.” But Sunday mornings are a little different. You’re using volunteers. You have opportunities to do different things each Sunday. So in thinking about this, jotted down some notes and the first thing I put down was generally recordings aren’t made with Sunday mornings in mind, generally. You think of… Especially some of the bigger artists who are producing music… Yeah, thank God for Keith & Kristyn Getty. But they had their full band up there doing their songs. Now they do them in other arrangements as well. But when you hear that full arrangement, they’re not thinking, “How’s it going to sound on your Sunday morning?” They’re thinking, “How’s it going to sound at the Sing conference with 8,000 people?”

DZ: Yeah. And professionals.

BK: I don’t know what they’re thinking, actually, but it sounds great there. And professional musicians and… Yeah. But we’ve tried to do this more, but one song that I know, if I could record it again, I would. And that was ‘When Christ Our Life Appears’ which begins with a big intro. And then when Christ our life appears. And I wish… When we do it on Sunday, we hardly ever use that intro.

DZ: Yeah, I don’t remember a time we have.

BK: Well, yeah, it’s like it doesn’t fit, ‘when Christ our life appears, these trials that wait… ‘ It’s just like let’s reflect on this rather than having to be this big intro. Now on an album you can have the big intro. That’s fine. Or ‘Come Praise and Glorify’ it’s an older Sovereign Grace song. You did the drum intro for that. That’s great. But we don’t generally start it with that drum intro.

DZ: And it’s not dependent on it. We’re going to talk about that. But it’s not dependent upon the arrangement. One advantage that we had, right at the end is that it’s familiar. When I think of a disadvantage along the same lines that you’re saying, sometimes it can feel if you do the arrangement exactly. It can almost seem performative. And that’s not your intention. I think a lot of these advantages that we shared it streamlines rehearsals. Those things are great things. But you can lack a sensitivity of the moment. To your point ‘When Christ Our Life Appears’ that’s so reflective. When we were arranging that song, we were arranging 14 songs. That was probably on a Wednesday afternoon. We were really tired. Things were starting to sound the same. So we did a different arrangement.

BK: Open the curtain here.

DZ: But my point is we can’t think perfectly, “Oh, this is exactly how this song should feel.”

BK: We’re trying to serve the song.

DZ: Definitely doing our best. But even the arrangers aren’t obviously infallible for what arrangement you should be doing.

BK: And I think on a recording, again, you often are thinking, We got 10 seconds, 15 seconds to encourage someone to keep listening to this. You know that mindset of, “Well, how are we going to get people to listen?” Well, that first 15 seconds counts a lot. Not so much on a Sunday morning.

DZ: So. True. Yeah. That’s great.

BK: That’s one thought. Second, doing exactly the recording doesn’t always allow for context. And thought of a… There’s a flow of the album or the song, like we were just talking about versus the flow of your meeting. Just this past Sunday, we were coming out of a reflective moment. It was actually a spontaneous moment where we’d sung a song, and I encouraged us to be thinking about something. And it was a… Well let’s just reflect on this. And the next song was ‘Christ Our Hope In Life And Death’. It just made no sense to do that. I don’t even know how we rehearsed it, but when we came out of that time, it was just, ‘what is our hope in life and death’. Yeah, let’s ask that question. And you build the song to the place where it’s celebrative and it’s all those things. But if we had just done the recording, it would have been so out of place.

DZ: Yeah. What you’re saying is you’re not bound… The arrangement’s helpful because that’s a great, memorable turn. I love the intro of that song. And we’ve done that. You’re not saying, “Don’t ever do that.” You’re saying, “If you don’t have any flexibility, you’re not really reading the moment. You’re not really reading the flow of the meeting.”

BK: Yeah. And we were talking about this before. Who exactly is this for? I think the problem that we’ve seen is just this loyalty, this devotion to. This inflexibility about doing a song differently on Sunday mornings than we’ve heard it on the recording. And a lot of our podcasts, we’re just trying to talk about… Get us into a conversation about, “Are we thinking about this biblically? Are we thinking about this pastorally? Are we thinking about this theologically?” Because that’s what matters. There are a lot of things we can do that seem to work that aren’t necessarily pastoring people’s hearts.

DZ: That’s so good.

BK: And that’s what we want to do. We want to shepherd them. And doing a song like the recording might do that at one point, but then it might not at another point. Here’s another example. After a message we might do a song that maybe starts more reflectively. And I’ll say, let’s bring the drums in the first verse, because it’s going to be in response to the message and we’re going to be ready to sing.

DZ: It feels more celebratory.

BK: Yes. So all that kind of stuff, starting a meeting, you may want to either increase the energy or bring the energy down. And again, if it’s just you and a guitar, you might think, “Well, this doesn’t really apply to me.” But, yeah, it does. You can still try to mimic a recording, which you don’t need to. It might be helpful. It might not be. Which leads into the third point. Instrumentation on a recording doesn’t always line up with what you have, in your church.

DZ: Most definitely.

BK: Yeah. If you’ve got a piano, guitar, and all the arrangements that you hear of these songs are big band drums, bass, pads, everything. Yeah. It’s a fool’s errand to try and do it like the recording. And that’s where we get into to multi tracks, backing tracks. “Oh, it’s got to sound like the recording.” Now, if you think that you should listen to our podcast on multi tracks. But we see… Oh, gosh, I see videos of churches trying to duplicate what’s on the recording, but their instrumentation just is not that. They have a cajon, they have a pianist who reads notes and the guitar player who’s kind of coming along, and a violinist. And they’re trying to do this thing that features electric guitar and big drum solo, big drum fills, and it’s just like, this is not helpful, go with what you got. You got pianist who reads notes and you guys congregation who can sing. All right, let’s use those.

DZ: That brings up a funny point that I thought about a lot, is the fact that a lot of music that is being produced today, more in the CCM world, less in the songs for Sunday world. But a lot of those songs are intended for arenas. They are mastered. They are produced. The parts are designed to sound amazing in an arena, as backing tracks. And then what we see so often is a tiny church using the arena sized drums or the arena sized guitar in their context. And it just misses what we’re talking about.

BK: It’s a disconnect.

DZ: There’s a disconnect there because it’s saying, this works here, it will work here. And I think this conversation is important because your people are coming into your services not necessarily wanting to hear the recordings they hear on the radio throughout the week.

BK: Some people do, but not everybody. And some people aren’t even listening. They didn’t know those recordings.

DZ: They’re coming into… A lot of your people are crawling into church and just going, “I need truth, I need help, I need… ” Yeah.

BK: Well, just the other day I watched a Sunday service from someone and the congregation probably average age was at least 55, and they’re leading songs that are being generated out of a younger, modern worship scene. And I just thought, “Yeah, that is not… I’m not sure what the goal is here.” Is the goal to do the most popular songs in some sense or is it to serve your congregation? Because from what I can see, it doesn’t look as though those songs are serving that congregation. And if you try then to do them like they do them on the recording.

DZ: Even more so. Yes.

BK: Wider gap. I think part of that is another disadvantage. It assigns an effectiveness to an arrangement that isn’t necessarily accurate. One of the things we’re trying to do, and I know others are as well, is to do songs in different formats, different ways. Full band, acoustic versions, two or three instruments, solo whatever. Different arrangements which we’re trying to communicate. Look, you don’t have to do this arrangement. If you want to, great. But you can do it the way you want to do it. Because it’s about the song. I just think it’s so significant that the Lord God in his wisdom didn’t give us a soundtrack with the Bible. We just have the words. Saying the music’s going to change. I love it when people say, “Let’s do the traditional songs.” I said, “Well, if we had that mindset from the beginning, we’d be singing Middle Eastern folk songs.” We’d never change.

BK: Music does change over time. There’s no one style that captures everything that’s magnificent about God or one style that captures every response that we should have to God. There’s a variety of music that we can use which shows that one arrangement may not be the only way you can do a song. And sometimes we’ve slowed down a fast song, sped up a slow song, or at least given it more energy, and the effect is just great. Because it’s the words that are having the impact on people.

DZ: Yeah. And if the song is good, you should be able to do it. You should be able to hold people’s attention when it’s just an acoustic guitar or when it’s a full band. Those are the songs we’re attempting to write where it could sound good in any context. And we mentioned the Getty’s earlier; same, they’re attempting to do the same thing. Same with CityAlight, simple arrangements to go the song is what’s most important. We could put a bunch of people on it, but the good songs that we want to write in any context are what’s important.

BK: Yes. And to be clear, others are doing that as well.

DZ: Oh, great.

BK: Those are the groups the Getty’s and the CityAlight that we tend to be grouped with. But there are others in contemporary modern worship that are seeking to do the same thing. But if we’re not clear on it, we can begin to get this sense that the arrangement is the way it’s done. It’s almost like a Top 40 Worship Hits where you… “This is the way it sounds, the way it’s done. This is the way we’re going to do it.” That’s not what a church is. That’s not what a congregation is. Okay, we got to move on. This is an important one. Being tied to the recording limits the ability to be spontaneous, which means you mentioned earlier to serve the moment, to serve the context, to say there’s something happening here that the recording didn’t anticipate.

BK: And it doesn’t have to be crazy. It could be just we’re going to repeat that verse or we’re going to repeat that last line. And I’ve always thought it was humorous when I’ve heard churches sing, ‘Yet Not I’. Which I just think is one of the classic hymns of the modern era by CityAlight. When they recorded it, they record that they were to end the song. They do the last half of the fourth verse, ‘To this I hold my only hope is Jesus all the glory evermore to him when the race is complete still my lips shall repeat yet not I but through Christ in me.’ Then they repeat that last half. Same thing. Then they repeat the last half of the last half. ‘When the race is complete, still my lips shall repeat yet not I but through Christ in me.’ Then they repeat the last half of that last half twice, ‘Yet not I but through Christ in me, yet not I but through Christ in me.’ So I thought, “Okay, that’s great. You can do that.”

DZ: They should listen to our podcast on repetition. Unbelievable, CityAlight.

BK: That is great that they do that. But you don’t have to do it that way every single time, because it just builds into us, this mindset. “Well, that’s just the way you do the song.” No, you can just stop it at the end or just repeat the last half and end the song. You can do it different ways. Yeah. Just to be able to serve the moment and to be able to say, “Yeah, the way it was done, the recording is not necessarily the way it has to be done.” And if you wonder, how to develop that, you can practice it during your rehearsals. I’ve had some questions about this recently. How do you get that place? Well, in your rehearsal, mix it up. Don’t just rehearse the song three times. You play the song three times. I was just with the band. They played the song three times. Why don’t you do something different the second time? Say, “We’re going to repeat this right here.” make sure everybody can hear you as a leader, and then just see if people are following. That gives you the ability then, in the service, in the actual meeting, to do something different. Now if you’re following the recording exactly, you won’t be able to do that. And no one else would follow you anyway because they’re trying to nail down the recording.

BK: Another disadvantage. It may be too complicated. I think of some of the things we’ve recorded, even that beautiful introduction to sing, or ‘Is He Worthy’ It’s just so beautiful. Yeah. You may not be able to do that. It’s okay. The effectiveness of that song is not dependent on your getting that. And I remember you correcting me when I was playing that riff. You said, “No, it goes like this.”

DZ: That’s not how I wrote it Bob.

BK: “The spirit will not move unless you do it like I wrote it.” Yeah. So it may be too complicated, and then it doesn’t… This is, one that we’ve tried to emphasize at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville and would love to see more churches emphasize. And that is just developing musical taste and sensibilities. Which playing like a recording can develop, but you don’t stay there. So it might be… It’s the difference on a Sunday morning rehearsal between saying, “Play it like this, just the recording.” versus, “What do you feel here?” we were talking earlier about a situation where a drummer was playing… Share that story.

DZ: Yeah. At a church…

BK: Because there’s a tension here.

DZ: Yeah, it’s a good tension. At a church, there was a drummer that was playing ‘Come Praise and Glorify’. But the song leader, he was playing it different. And the song leader said, “Hey, can you play it closer to… It doesn’t feel right. Something feels off.” And he said to the leader, “Well, I don’t that part. I don’t that drummer.”

BK: That was you drumming?

DZ: Yes, it was. Perfectly fine. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. So it brought up a good discussion between us, which we’ll try to abridge. But it’s the question of feel. It’s like I think as a drummer, you don’t want to play something so wild apart from the feel, just because you go, “Well, I’m not going to play the recording.” And also, you want to be competent enough to play close to the feel, even if you don’t want to play the part.

BK: If you don’t like it. Yeah.

DZ: Yeah. If you don’t it. Yeah, it brings up this discussion of, well, is the arranging helpful? Or should you only do what you feel? And so that’s what we were discussing.

BK: Yeah. There should always be… Me as a leader, I feel responsibility to ask the musicians to play something that feels good. There’s not this chaos, this freedom, “Just do whatever you want.” But I will often say to an electric player or acoustic player, “Well, what do you feel there?” Where I’ll be listening for what they’re doing during rehearsal. “Oh, do that. That’s great.” Just to get what its in there, what’s in them out. “Okay. If you’re comfortable with that. Great. Let’s do that.” But if what they’re playing is clashing with what everybody else is doing or isn’t as good as what the recording was, then I’d say, “Yeah, why don’t you just play what’s on the recording?” I think that really works.

DZ: That’s good. What we’re saying is it’s a helpful standard, the recording. But it isn’t the end all.

BK: Because every Sunday we have this opportunity to make music together, to respond to what the Spirit’s doing in that moment at that meeting for those people. And we can use the recording, but we just don’t have to be limited by it. And I would say that to churches, like big churches that they have all the stops, they have all the bells and whistles, they have all the gear, they can do exactly like recording every Sunday. It’s amazing. Your best sound is your congregation. That’s the best sound. Structure your arrangements to maximize their sound and look for ways to open up windows for them to hear only themselves. Because you don’t have that on a recording. Some live recordings occasionally will have something acapella, but for a big church, that’s just… I’m just throwing out a challenge. I’m just saying give it a break sometimes. Just don’t do what’s on the recording. Let the congregation just sing. Those can be some of the most meaningful moments. God gave you, the musicians in your church, to support the singing of the church in ways that bring him glory and magnify Christ and build the church. Recordings are there simply to serve that end.

BK: So we want to use them for that purpose. Not dis them, not say, “What do they know? We work hard on those recordings, doggone it.” but to use them in a way that really serves your people. It takes a little more time, a little more thought, but I think in the end you’ll be really grateful, your people will be more grateful and I think they’ll be able to see God’s glory more clearly because it’s not tied to a particular arrangement.

DZ: That’s great.

BK: Does that make sense?

DZ: Yeah. Thank you, Bob, for your thoughts.

BK: Well, thank you for your thoughts.

DZ: Yeah. And thank you for listening to this podcast. Thanks.

S3: Thank you for listening to Sound Doctrine, the podcast of Sovereign Grace Music. Sovereign Grace Music exists to produce Christ exalting songs and training for the church from our local churches. For more information, free sheet music translations and training resources, you can Visit us at sovereigngracemusic.org.