Recording at Home
Tap the "Record" button on your phone screen. Press "R" to start Garageband recording.
The metronome in your right ear starts brightly clicking off two bars of blank time. Swipe left with four fingers on the trackpad to switch desktops to your music and notes.
Step back, counting clicks in your head; check that you're centred on camera.
Settle the guitar strap against your shoulder, counting clicks, check the first chord.
Smile at the camera, counting clicks. Three muted strums to align the track later.
Relax. You're leading worship. You're playing for your friends.
The piano track starts, V. absolutely in time like the actual music professional she is.
Counting clicks.
Remember, you're coming in on the pickup to the second line of the intro.
Relax. If you mess it up, you can just start everything over again.
And you do.
You do.
I could never play piano in front of anyone without a tight stitch instantly forming in the muscles of my back. I can still feel it, a slash of knowledge across my core that I should be perfect but I'm not. I knew I'd make a mistake, eventually, and the performance would be ruined. Every one of my ten fingers represented a separate risk of failure. The guitar introduced me to an entirely different experience of music. I first started playing guitar in a casual ensemble class, and found it so freeing when my mistakes were insignificant to the music. If I couldn't strum in time or find the chord shape fast enough, the song went on and I could drop back in. My hands worked together, and there was almost no mistake that couldn't be recovered by laughing and carrying on. It wasn't about me.
I love how folk or gospel music (I include most contemporary Christian worship in this broad category) transcends the notes being played. Musicologists have verbed the noun to talk about "musicking," the collective experience of playing and participating in music, whether enthusiastically singing/dancing along or respectfully holding your applause until the end of a work. Especially in genres where the point of the music is the energy or experience of the performance and that relationship it creates among the musicians and audience, it's less about the musicians' technical facility than it is their ability to create that collective experience. (Alan Doyle and his trio can belt out a pitchy melody with beers in hand but if it's "Barrett's Privateers" at the Lower Deck in Halifax, no one is complaining about tuning: they're all too busy belting [and drinking] along!)
What happens, though, if the energy of the room and the immediacy of those relationships is taken away? Musicians felt it keenly in lockdown, but anyone doing work of performing or presenting can identify with the feeling of being adrift, disconnected, like driving in a dream where the car is floating along the road and you can't tell if the steering wheel is connected to anything but it's all you have so you turn it anyways. Without the immediate feedback that's the life force of performing, the self view on Zoom seems to turn everything back on yourself. I felt this keenly as I taught on camera. Narcissus was killed by the perfection he saw in his own reflection, but all I felt was the thousand cuts of my own imperfections.
Those years at the piano paid off last April, though, when our church started streaming prerecorded worship services and I picked up my guitar to record at home for the first time. Each musician had to record our part separately, which meant that the single most important element of the music was timing. Imagine four runners being asked to jog the track in an exact line abreast, crossing the finish line simultaneously. Now set up a video camera and ask them to make the run individually so that you can layer the takes for the same effect. All of the physical cues the runners rely on to stay on pace are gone. When we were recording, the click of the metronome was all we had to align each entrance, each chord, each cut, keeping us physically distanced but musically tight.
I've produced a lot of good work thanks to the saying "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Those years of striving for perfection with the metronome at the piano gave me an essential tool for "musicking" in a pandemic, though. It was a lifeline to relationship. The demanding click of the metronome told me where my bandmates were, where they would be—it let me predict the future. I couldn't see the pianist's head nodding, but I knew exactly when her intro would start or where the vocalist's melody line would come in later. That through-line of timing held us together as we built dynamic rises and falls together, layered in driving momentum or reflective arpeggios, and fought to create something that our community could musick with too.
When it came to aiming for perfection recording at home, I often lost, spending an hour or more on each track, sweating, exhausted, and sore from smiling at the camera. I got faster with practice, though, and gradually relaxed about getting every piece perfect as I heard my minor mistakes get lost in the musicking of the assembled song. Reality also intervened. I simply couldn't do everything over and over again, so by the second and third services I recorded for over the course of the summer, I had to let a take that was close enough be enough, because it was this or nothing.
Were you expecting a moral to this story? What I learned was that my musical timing can be pretty tight when I focus on it, and my fear of disappointing perfection was preventing me from looking at it too closely. The perfect can be the enemy of the good, but that doesn't mean it has to be your enemy too.
