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Behind the Music: Programming 101 Part 1

Programming. What is it? Who does it? Where is its place in the worship scene? Programming has become an essential part of popular music in general and as a result has also filtered into the genre of worship. I’m going to be doing a two-part series here on programming for worship in general and more specifically, for The Remedy. Part 1 will focus on what exactly programming entails, how to get started with it, the mistakes that we’ve made, and the software that we use to make it happen.

We use the term “programming” to essentially encapsulate all of the sounds in our music that are not created with what are thought of as typical instruments –guitars, drums, vocals, pianos, etc. – and are pre-written and tracked out to play behind our primary instruments. Programming can be extremely basic, consisting simply of ambient synths and pads to fill out your mix, or it can be extremely layered and include loops, percussion, synthesized leads, swells, heavily processed vocals/guitars/drums, sound effects, and so much more. The reason we’ve incorporated programming so heavily into our production is because in a worship setting, it allows us to create smoother transitions, set specific tones for various parts of a set, and create a unique sound so that we don’t end up being another Hillsong clone.(not that we don’t love Hillsong, but we like being different!).

So, just like any other facet of music, there are a million ways to approach programming, all with their own pros and cons. The first approach, which we initially began with, is finding a website online Loop Community and Loops in Worship are great places to start) that has loops and tracks available for download. This is a good way to start out if you aren’t familiar with music software packages or don’t know what kind of sounds you’re looking for. The second approach is to find a particular person (through these sites or other resources) whose work you like, and have them make custom tracks tailored specifically for you. The third approach (the most difficult yet most rewarding) is to create the tracks yourself. This is going to involve a lot of hard work, mistakes, and frustration but as someone who went through it and is still going through it, don’t get discouraged! Once you get over the initial learning hump, it gets addicting and you’ll have a ton of fun.

As I wrap up here, I’ll just give you a basic overview of the processes and software we’ve run through up to this point. As I mentioned before, our first experience with programming was downloading premade tracks from LoopCommunity and running them live through Protools. While we love using ProTools in the studio, it proved to be quite frustrating to use live as we had a lot of computer performance errors and crashes and hardly ever had tracks run all the way through. Shortly after we started using loops, I was introduced to Propellerhead’s Reason which has become a staple item in our programming system. I use Reason as my primary DAW to write and arrange the tracks and recently have begun running it live as a sound bank for pads and percussion elements (I’ll talk about that in the next entry). After months of struggling with ProTools issues, we started to simply export the Reason tracks into mp3s and run them live through iTunes. This is actually a pretty standard method, even for top bands in the music industry. After implementing this method for awhile, I got bored and decided I didn’t have enough control over the system and needed to upgrade. I began researching other methods and immediately got hooked on Ableton Live. Live allows you to set up different scenes which you can use as whole songs or divide into individual song elements such as verse, chorus, bridge, etc. in order to have even more precise control over where the song goes. Next time, I’ll go more in depth with these programs, the hardware that I use to control them, and how we implement all of it in a live situation.