When 1500 People are Staring at You, There’s No Room for a Mistake...
Imagine you’re in the heat of the moment. You’re faced with a split-second seemingly "life-or-death" decision, and about 1500 people are watching you. Something’s gone wrong, and it’s suddenly up to you to solve the problem. However, there’s a huge risk involved, and you have no idea what might result from the action you’re about to take. You’ll either be a hero…or you’ll mess everything up and there will be no fixing it.
Yes, I know that sounds overly dramatic. But that’s the situation I was in on a gig one time, and that’s exactly how I felt.
I was playing one Sunday morning at a large church. The structure of the service that day was unique, and the band was just playing an opening song. After that, we were done for the service. This was a typical "rock" setup with drums, bass, guitars, keys, and lots of vocalists. There was also a large choir behind us, and there were backing tracks. LOTS of tracks. Our single opening song was pretty upbeat, and there were loads of important guitar layers, synth parts, and electronic effects all on this backing track. Everything on the track was "cued out," and there was a two-bar count-in at the top to give us plenty of time to hit the downbeat together.
Now in a lot of situations like this, I’d be running the track myself through Ableton on my laptop. In this instance, however, the sound man was running it from front-of-house back at the sound booth.
An onscreen countdown prepared everyone for the start of the service, and we all took our places with our instruments and prepared to listen for the count-in as the time approached 0:00. The countdown on the screen ended, the house music stopped, and the lights came up on stage. The sound man should be starting the count-in about now…. I thought to myself. Nothing.
Everyone in the crowd was sitting there staring at the stage, and everyone on stage stood there trying to look natural (as if the service was supposed to start like this!). We were all fighting that urge to look around and show our panic, but everyone remained composed as we stood there with high hopes of the track coming to our rescue. After about 7 seconds that felt like an eternity, I knew I was going to have to count this off and start the song. Otherwise this would just get more and more awkward. But there was a problem with this strategy. The sound guy was in the back scrambling. What if he was trying to get the track started? What if it had started, but there was a delay for some reason? In other words, what if I counted the song off…but the track suddenly started in the middle of my count off?? If that happened I’d have to squelch my count off and look like I’d completely messed up the beginning of the song. Or worse, it might happen that I can keep my count-off but the band could end up a beat off from the tracks. The sound guy might not notice, and we’d play the whole song a beat off. Some musicians would probably go with the track, and others would go with the original count off. It would be a disaster! All of these things were running through my mind in that eternal 5 seconds. Do I wait another second in hopes that the track will start….Or do I count off right now? Do I wait…Or do I count off???….
Finally I gave up on debating this in my head, and I counted off the song. We all started playing, and there was no sign of the backing tracks. I happened to land the tempo at least within a bpm or two, so everything felt fine. We’d survived.
A couple of quick thoughts before I finish the story:
- This scenario showed me that I had a real fear of "messing up" or "not looking good" on stage. This wasn’t unreasonable, seeing as how we all want to do a good job. I had to check my motives though (good topic for another email!).
- I was glad that I knew the song really well. I already had it playing in my head, so counting it off at the correct tempo wasn’t a guessing game.
After the service, no one in the band seemed to know what went wrong back at the sound booth. During the busy-ness of the remainder of the service, I didn’t get a chance to ask the sound man what happened. I probably should have, because we’d only played the first of two services at this point. We still had to do this again later in the morning!
The time came for service number two, and guess what happened? The same thing. I think I was expecting it at this point, and everyone on stage was ready for my count off. I did the same thing I did in the first service, and the song went fine. No tracks ever came in. I have no idea what went wrong that morning, but it’s worth noting that the only people aware of the blunder were the people on stage (plus the sound guy, I would think). No one in the congregation that entire morning ever knew that something went wrong. They noticed the awkward pause, I’m sure, but that pause was definitely shorter the second go around. All in all, this wasn’t a bad morning.
I learned that I needed to worry a little bit less about what I looked like. I needed to be ready to help the band in whatever way I could…even if the result could have looked awkward on my part. I’m glad that I did what I did there, but I should have been less terrified about it in the heat of the moment. I’m also glad that I knew that song really well so that I didn’t have to spend additional precious seconds calculating the correct tempo to count off. This was one of those valuable learning experiences that was a little scary but that taught me how to prepare for the future. Thankfully the worst outcome didn’t happen that day, and we all made it unscathed. On top of that, I was reminded to be ready for anything in these kinds of situations.
God Bless,
Stephen
