Band Improvement Book Chapter 8 Excerpt

Chapter 8 Excerpt

“The Keys To Greatness”

Now that you have a better idea of how your individual skill as a player determines how your band sounds, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of putting all the pieces together to make your band sound great.

This entire section has tips for taking your band’s performance to the next level. I promise you that if you spend even a little time on each of these items, you’ll see positive results immediately. As with everything in life, the more work you put in, the better the result will be.

Dynamics

If you learn only one thing from this book and DVD it’s that playing with dynamics is the greatest key to making your band sound great. It’s an improvement that both you (the band) and your audience will notice immediately, and will automatically separate you from about 90% of other bands on the planet.

So what are dynamics? Simply, it means playing quietly or with less intensity in certain places in a song, and louder or with more intensity in other places. Most bands are oblivious to dynamics and play at one volume throughout the entire song, song after song, set after set. This gets boring and tedious for the audience very quickly.

Generally speaking, here’s how you do it.

When the song starts the band plays fairly loudly, about 7 or 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

When the vocal or lead instrument (if the group is instrumental) comes in at the verse, the band drops down to about 4 or 5.

When the chorus comes in, the volume level comes back up to a 7 or 8.

When the 2nd verse begins, the band drops down to a 5 or 6 level (notice it’s a little louder than the first verse, but not as loud as the chorus).

When the 2nd chorus begins, the band comes back up to a 7 or 8.

When the bridge, or whatever section is the peak of the song, the band comes all the way up to 9 or 10.

The band drops down to 7 or 8 for the outro of the song.

If the song has a breakdown, the level might come down as low as a 1 or 2.

While the level of intensity (and as a result, volume level) may change from the numbers indicated above for each song and depending on what finally feels the best, that’s basically how it’s done. If the band plays the song dynamically, the song breathes volume-wise. Going from loud to quiet or quiet to loud is called “tension and release” and it’s a basic quality of all art forms (in painting it would be dark to light colors, photography it would be light to shadows, etc.). Tension and release keeps things interesting.

The Secret To Dynamics

When you play loudly, play as loudly as you can.

When you play softly, play as softly as you can!

There are a few byproducts from playing dynamically too. The vocals can be heard better because there’s more space and fewer loud instruments to fight against (easier on the singer as well). Songs become more fun to play because there’s true interaction with the other players to make it work, and as a result, the band automatically gets tighter. And the audience perceives dynamics in a way that you wouldn’t expect - suddenly they’ll start telling you how tight you sound.

Dynamics also applies to a set or show as well. You might start off with a couple of songs that are a 7 or 8 in intensity, back off to a ballad or something acoustic in the middle of the set that’s a 3 or 4, then end the set with an 8 or 10. Once again, tension and release.

For a really great example of dynamics, listen to “Smells Like Team Spirit” by Nirvana where the verses are at about a 5, the pre-chorus at 7 and the chorus just roar at 10.

How to learn to play dynamically

Most bands learn to play dynamically naturally without thinking if just one player is dynamics-aware and the others follow (it helps if that one aware person is the drummer). Usually if a band is together for a long enough time and plays enough gigs, dynamics will magically seep into its playing after the band begins to get some self-awareness of just what it takes to get a crowd going. You can bypass years of waiting for these things to happen by themselves by just using the following method.

When the band learns a song, treat the dynamics as an integral part of the song (because they are) and spend as much time learning them the same way that you would with the chord changes and groove. As shown above, map out each section of the song on a loudness scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the loudest.

Now the next step is the most important - make sure that each band member agrees on how loud or quiet each dynamic number is. In other words, be sure that the drummer’s 8 level is the same as the rhythm guitar player’s, and the 2 level of the bass player is the same as the lead guitarist. After that’s commonly agreed upon, rehearse the dynamics of a song until they’re second nature, then watch the audience take notice.

Don’t Confuse Volume Level With Intensity

A common complaint from a band that’s being taught dynamics is, “The song just doesn’t drive when we play the verse (or any other section) quietly.” That’s because it’s easy to confuse volume level with intensity.

To Play At The Same Intensity At A Lower Level

Make sure the Attacks and Releases are the same.

Make sure the Tempo is the same.

Make sure the internal Dynamics of each individual player is the same.

Most bands tend to get sloppier the softer they play. They begin to play the individual beats at slightly different levels and even have slight tempo variations between beats. As a result, playing softly sounds wimpy. Another thing that happens is that the band is so used to playing at one (usually loud) level, that anything compared to that level sounds so different that it’s perceived as less exciting. The same thing happens when you drive your car at 80 MPH for a long time. When you bring it back to 65, it feels slow even though it’s not. And finally, the internal dynamics of each individual (remember those from back in Chapter 1?) usually go out the window. Instead of playing crisp yet quiet with the same attack and releases as at the higher volume level, the attack and releases get relaxed so the playing becomes less precise.

So the real trick is learning to actually play with the same intensity at lower levels. Make sure the tempo is even, the groove stays the same as at the higher volume, and the attacks and releases are the crisp and you should be powerful at any volume level.

Builds

Another part to playing dynamically is playing attention to builds. Builds usually occur during turn-arounds (like the two or four bars between the verse and chorus), but can sometimes occur at the beginning or ending of a song too. For a good example you’ll find a build at the beginning of each section of Rush’s Spirit of Radio. Once again, all band members have to play the build the same way, starting from the same low volume to about the same high volume. Builds are easy to overlook and many times a band will think that it’s performing one well if it just plays the rhythm of the build cleanly. But a build is called that for a reason, since just playing it cleanly doesn’t mean much unless there’s an actual volume difference.

Play Together – Listen To Each Other

One of the fundamental errors that band members frequently make is not listening closely to the rest of the band. It’s easy to just focus on yourself, but in order to play well together, it’s listening to everyone else that really counts. This is the single most important action you can take when playing with other musicians.

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I was delighted to realise that Bobby Owsinski actually delivers even more than I was hoping for. There’s a great deal of useful material here for both seasoned pros and those starting out in their first band. Highly recommended

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