KEYS
ARE YOU‘ BRIGHT’ ENOUGH? | David Pfaltzgraff
Photo by Federico Telesca on Unsplash
My family and I moved last Fall and we’ ve been settling in at a great local church. This church has a talented roster of musicians that means most of the time the bands are quite full. It’ s very uncommon to have less than two electrics, acoustic, bass, drums, and a piano / keys position along with light usage of tracks for percussion, synth bass, etc.
I’ ve been enjoying getting plugged into the rotation, but it’ s taken some effort to learn all new songs on the keyboard and prepare keys patches for songs I’ ve never had to play before. As I’ ve been going through this rhythm week after week, I began to notice something. As I prepared at home, I’ d feel good about the balance of my keys sounds, the parts and note placement, and my contribution to what I figured the overall band would be up to. But several weeks in a row, as I got to soundcheck and rehearsal, I found that my sounds and parts were disappearing in the mix, getting buried once in a live context.
After some discussion with front of house( and no small amount of sound-design soul- searching) I began to hone in on what I was missing at home and the answer ended up being simple: brightness.
When we call a sound‘ bright’ it’ s more of a feeling than a technical definition, so I thought it’ d be helpful to break that term down into more manageable chunks that you can think about as you pick your parts and design sounds for your next worship service.
GET UP( PER MIDS)
A lot of the time, we worship keys players pick sounds based on their warmth, their lushness, and their ability to serve as‘ glue, all characteristics that most often derive from the low-midrange. And that’ s great, much of modern worship music needs that space to be filled from the keyboard. But one of the most overlooked parts of the sonic spectrum in our world is the upper midrange- that critical zone between roughly 2kHz and 4 or 5kHz where clarity, presence, and energy live.
This range is where a piano or synth can either
cut through a mix or disappear completely. It’ s also where a well-voiced chord becomes more than just background texture, ensuring the specific impact of that voicing is clearly intelligible. This was part of where my problem came from. In a solo context it’ s a lot easier to overlook a lack of upper mids, because human ears are quite sensitive to these frequencies in the first place. In other words, we’ re very good at hearing them, so we tend to not need much in order to appreciate them, until the overall sonic space starts to get more crowded.
On the other hand, too much energy in this range can make things brittle or even painful in a worship context. For me it was important to bring up the song I was practicing at home at a meaningful volume to get a better sense of whether my parts and programming would disappear or not.
START SOMETHING
Transient content refers to the percussive‘ attack’ or initial moments of a sound. It’ s the click of a pluck, the snap of a piano hammer,
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