How We Learn Music
Darcy Watkins – August 10, 2024
To understand the status quo of worship teams I like to poke fun at us using a dualism. This dualism may be useful for self-evaluation, but it should somewhat be taken with a grain of salt. Don’t be afraid to have a good laugh at yourself as you read on. So, let’s proceed. At one extreme, we have the Butcher Band. At the other extreme, we have the Copycat Band. Where do you sit as a musician? Where do you think your team sits?
The butcher band is the fly by the seat of your pants band where everyone shows up, contributes a part and usually plays by ear. You aren’t devastated (emotionally scarred) if you hit a wrong note. You move on. A butcher band will pick up any piece and play it proficient enough to support the congregation in worship. People have no difficulty joining in or singing along. The only problem is that every song sort of sounds the same. The same riffs are used over and over for every song. If the drummer sounds polka, perhaps every song comes out sounding polka. Fortunately, butcher bands have no fear or pride so they will go with whatever flow the leader wants. They may not sound the greatest, but you can always rely on them. They care more about the moments of worship than the style of music. The music is just a tool.
The copycat band is obsessed with closely copying a reference CD recording. Everything is exactly as per a specific recording. They don’t just learn a song, but they learn a specific “version” of that song. Every drum lick, every guitar riff must match the recording, or “it’s done wrong”. This can work so long as the songs are done in the recorded key or one that is easy to adapt it to. It can be difficult to adapt to the whims of the leader for the moments of worship. The leader is often at the mercy of the recorded arrangements to provide the form. Fortunately, copycat bands have a variety of reference recordings to choose from. Copycat bands typically want to be at their best out of sense of excellence and will avoid unpredictable things. Sometimes, all the songs still sound the same, but that is more on what the team copies than on the team itself.
Butcher bands typically deliver better in terms of consistent support of worship. Copycat bands typically sound better and are easier to listen to. Either can work, and both can flop. Ultimately, it depends a lot on the leadership and the commitment of the musicians.
From my personal experience, I observe that butcher bands tend to be drawn more from a mix of middle aged, experienced but mostly non-professional musicians. They rely on the calibre of the musicians and an unwritten expectation that they be able to jam and meld together spontaneously. The resulting sound reflects the musical background, and tastes of the musicians involved. Copycat bands tend to be drawn more from mix of less experienced, more professionally driven but mostly younger musicians. They rely on each musician doing their “homework”, learning their part from the reference recording and showing up ready to play it. The resulting sound tends to be more polished and more like the “version” that they are using as a reference.
Where life gets interesting is when you mix up musicians from both camps. The butcher band musicians are criticized for getting their parts “wrong” or sounding too “old”. Copycat musicians complain that the butcher musicians don’t learn their parts properly, perhaps that they don’t even take the ministry seriously. On the other hand, the copycat band musicians get criticized for being inflexible or for lack of creativity. They cannot adapt to spontaneous (unrehearsed) changes. They avoid improvisation.
So, if there are elements of truth here, the copycat element represents our musical and artistic influences as we develop and grow as musicians and the butcher element represents synthesis of our own musical expression. The rest is just a matter of how we work out our differences in an environment of mutual respect so that we grow as a team. Most of the time, due to constraints related to equipment and musicians, we must operate somewhere in between the two extremes. But I think the dualism is still fun so that we can have a good laugh at ourselves thus to not take ourselves too seriously.
I noticed the change in trend as a new generation of youth started getting involved in worship ministry. The change was a coupling of the fact that teenagers can be very sensitive about making mistakes in front of everybody, so they want to get it right. This was coupled with a change in how we learn worship music.
In the 1980’s and the 1990’s, most worship teams tended to be butcher bands, while sometimes attempting to emulate a trick or two heard on a recording. In those days, it was not unusual to learn a song from a lead sheet (aka fakebook) format without ever having listened to a recording. This would be a music score of the melody line, notated with the lyrics and the chords. You made up your own arrangement (or “version”) of the song. In the last 20 years or so, songs have been learned more from recordings, from portable recorders, iPods, YouTube videos, Spotify, etc. Hence most worship teams now tend to be more like copycat bands.
So, in conclusion, I see that the copycat element is part of the foundation of how we start as musicians formed by our artistic influences. The butcher element, on the other hand, represents how we develop beyond emulating our artistic influences to being artists in our own right. We start with the foundation of artistic influences and evolve towards artistic expression. And of course, there will be stylistic differences and preferences from generation to generation. We just must be respectful of each other and make room for each other’s expressions.