I’m always on the search for music gear that I want/need/lust after. I also have nowhere close to the amount of money I need to get the gear I thirst after. Craigslist is an obvious place to start when looking for local gear that people are trying to part with. The problem is so are thousands of other people in your area so the chances of you searching just at the right time to score the right gear at the right price aren’t all that great. Enter Craigslist RSS feeds.

1. Search in Craigslist for whatever specific gear you’re looking for

2. Copy RSS feed for search criteria

3. Add it to your RSS reader of choice

You can see that I have a few saved searches and I check everyday to see if any new items come up. I’m usually first to respond when they do. Although now maybe a few more Phoenix people are hip to Craigslist RSS feeds and I have some competition on my hands.

In any case this is a great way to score good deals. Happy shopping.

A vocal cue track is an audio track set to a click, and usually ran along side of a loop, that is sent to your in ear monitors only and serves as a helper track, guiding you inside your arrangement. The primary purpose is to keep the band in sync with the arrangement and is especially important when using loops. If you get off the loop disaster can come quick and hard.

You can create a vocal cue track in your audio recording software of choice. What I do is just import my loop to GarageBand, create a new vocal cue track and record along side the loop, then just export the vocal cue track by itself. If you are running integrated clicks inside your loop, that is panning a click in the left channel with the loop in the right, then you’d just add the vocal cue track to the left click channel as well. I don’t do this because I use Ableton and it handles my click track dynamically which gives me more flexibility. Once you have a loop track and/or vocal cue track here’s what you do in Ableton, this is a complete tutorial of running loops and vocal cue tracks in Ableton.

1. In Session View add your loop track to the Audio channel

2. Add additional Audio Channel for vocal cue track

3. Add vocal cue track to accompanying loop “scene”

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Bryan Nelson at Vertical Resonator recently did a post showing how his church actually syncs two live bands in 2 different rooms for their worship service. He leads worship at Topeka Bible Church and is really doing some great creative stuff. The two bands play the same set, at the exact same time in 2 different rooms and are forced to do this due to the bleed through in the rooms they are in. It’s a really awesome and interesting setup. Here’s the full diagram showing the setup.

I receive a lot of questions and requests for transposing my loops so I thought I might as well give a tutorial on how it’s done. It’s really quite simple to do in Reason, so let’s get started. This tutorial assumes you have Reason and have opened some project.

1. Select pitched midi notes

You want to select all the pitched midi notes, you do not need or want to select non-pitched midi notes like drum kits or percussion instruments. For those changing the midi note actually changes the instrument. So usually what I’ll do is organize my project so that non-pitched instruments are all at the bottom or top to make selecting all the others quite easy.

After drawing a box around all your midi notes it should look something like this:

2. Set the semi-tones in Tool Window

In the Tool Window click the “Tools” menu item. Then set the semi-tone adjustment you want to make. A semi-tone is a half step. So if you want to raise the key a full step you’d set the semi-tones to 2, if you want to lower the key 2 full steps you’d set the semi-tones to -4. A semi-tone level of 0 would be no adjustment, it’s where you are currently.

3. Click apply

Now all that’s left is clicking Apply and you’re all set.

I created a screencast to show you just how easy it is to create your own click tracks in Garage Band. You might also be interested in my post on an OSX BPM widget that lets you tap out the BPM for songs in your iTunes library. You can click through to the video on Vimeo to see it in HD where you can make out the menu options a bit better.

How to create your own click track in Garage Band from Our Rising Sound on Vimeo.

Micah D. sent in this question on the “How to introduce click tracks to your band” post.

How do I put the click track through monitors [and] the loop … through the main speakers?

Good question. The goal is to get the loop playing through the mains and available to monitor mixes but the click only in monitors and not through the mains. Getting the loop to play through the mains is just like getting any signal to the mains so I’ll assume that part needs no explanation and focus on getting a click isolated in monitor mixes and not mains. There are a couple ways to do this, I’ll start with the best and most flexible way that I know of.

1. Route the click signal to the board on an isolated channel. How exactly you do this depends on what is generating your click. In my case I take the left channel from my audio interface which carries the click signal generated by Ableton Live. The right channel carries the loop signal. Ableton makes it easy to split your click signal. In my upcoming posts on how to create your own click tracks I’ll show how to go about doing this.
2. Take the click channel’s fader all the way down. This of course turns it off in the main house mix.
3. Use your pre-fade aux sends on the board to control monitor levels. In order for your monitors to pickup the click with the fader all the way down these sends must be on a pre-fade send. That basically means that the fader doesn’t come into play at all in the aux send level. Post-fade takes into account where the fader is at.

Wikipedia does a better job at explaining pre/post fade aux sends:

The Auxiliary send routes a split of the incoming signal to an auxiliary bus which can then be used with external devices. Auxiliary sends can either be pre-fader or post-fader, in that the level of a pre-fade send is set by the Auxiliary send control, whereas post-fade sends depend on the position of the channel fader as well. Auxiliary sends can be used to send the signal to an external processor such as a reverb, which can then be routed back through another channel or designated auxiliary returns on the mixer. These will normally be post-fader. Pre-fade auxiliary sends can be used to provide a monitor mix to musicians onstage, this mix is thus independent of the main mix.

What to watch out for?

You want to listen for channel bleed through where your click is still audible in the house even though the fader is all the way down. We recently had this issue and the cause, besides the board being to blame, is how hot a signal was being sent to the board. The click channel was clipping, so we fixed our gain structure and brought it down a lot and that helped our bleed.

Other options: In ear monitor pack Mix-In

Another way of doing this is using the Mix-In input on your in ear monitor packs. Most in ear monitoring packs have a 1/4″ in. input for mixing in some auxillary signal. You could use a multi-channel headphone amp to carry the click signal and then take the 1/4″ in. outs on each channel to all your monitor packs.

This isn’t a great way of doing this if not for complexity sake then for the cabling mess, but maybe if you had limited aux sends on your board this could come in handy.

I hope that helps.

Why use a click?

I don’t want to assume we all know and appreciate the benefits of a click so I figured I’d start here. A click insures your band plays a song in the correct time and keeps your band in the correct time through the duration of the song. Without using a click it’s very easy to mess up both, either you start the song too slow or fast or you speed up and slow down in the middle of the song. Additionally, now that your band is all synced to perfect time you can use loops or visual effects like a timed lyric presentation.

How do you start using a click?

1. Drummer must get comfortable

If your drummer has never played with a click or metronome before this can be a difficult transition. You’ll quickly discover how good or bad your time is. Some drummers have a great internal clock and are just naturally able to keep great time. Others it takes a lot of practice with a click to stay in time. So first step would be some individual work with the drummer to make sure he’s comfortable and able to play with a click.

2. Monitoring setup

Monitoring requirements will vary greatly depending on factors like if you’re going to use loops, use timed visual effects, use click cued intros, etc… Some bands use in ears for all musicians so they can hear clicks and cues, others only have some players/singers with in ears. Quite simply the goal is to send the click to isolated(in ears or headphone) monitors for whichever players/singers need it and keeping it out of the main house mix so the congregation doesn’t hear it.

At the very minimum the drummer obviously needs the click in their in ears/headphones. The rest of the band would just have to follow the drummer closely and stay on his time because he can’t come off the click. This may be a major adjustment for bands that are used to speeding up(unknowingly) and the drummer typically sped up with them, but that wouldn’t be the case anymore.

For that reason I would strongly suggest the drummer and band leader have the click in their monitor. That will really help stabilize the band time wise. Even in this case you still would have musicians and singers with no click which can get tricky if that musician or singer is performing without any drum/band leader accompaniment. They could easily get off time, so what ends up happening is your drummer has to keep time on stage with the sticks and that just stinks and could ruin the vibe.

So we’re left with the optimal solution which is everyone in the band on in ears, everyone who needs the click has the option to have it sent to their monitor mix. This is the setup my band uses and it’s fantastic. We have quite a few songs where we all come in on 1, vocals and band. We’re able to hit these intros with no problem and without stick hits or other distracting cues. All our cues are isolated from the congregation and we know just where we are in a song.

3. Phase in

Start simply and slowly. Getting comfortable playing to a click takes some time and depending on the skill level of the drummer can take a looong time. Use a click in practice for a while before you start using it live.

Later this week I’ll post on various methods for creating click tracks and playing them live.

This site talks a lot of using loops in worship and I wanted to take a minute and talk about how to setup your laptop for playing any kind of audio live off your Mac. This posts focuses on mac because if you are relying on a windows machine to play any kind of live audio then you’ve already violated rule #1 which is:

When using a computer for any important, enjoyable or useful purpose make sure it’s a Mac.

If you’re still reading I’ll assume you haven’t violated rule #1 and congratulate you on your complete salvation. The 7 steps below will make sure that only your intended audio will be played on not any system alerts, make sure your system is isolated and configure display settings. It won’t get into specific application settings or audio interface settings. I’ll dive into those in separate posts for a specific application. This is a general post for all apps running on a Mac.

1. Quit all non-essential applications

Make sure you “quit” and not close.

2. Turn off Wi-Fi (no network connection)

If your machine has a network connection all sorts of background processes will fire, like MobileMe syncing, Time Machine backups, etc… You don’t want any CPU diverted from your audio apps.

3. Turn off system audio alerts

You don’t want any audio sent to any speaker set that isn’t coming from your main audio app. Goto System Preferences and select Sound.

Uncheck all 3 system alerts options.

Even if you have your system alerts selected to play through internal speakers instead of your audio interface, you still don’t want these alerts to play.

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