As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, for seventeen years and counting, I've had the pleasure of working with drummer Curtis Leippi, a musician of great technical skill, musicality and curiosity. Despite all his musical capabilities, however, there is one skill he has often demonstrated in several of his other ensembles, yet has never used in Mike Luno Band; in fact, he may never use it in this outfit.

Curtis is an ace at accompanying sequencers, whether live or in studio.
For those unfamiliar with the term, this means the ability to play drums convincingly to pre-recorded or computer-generated music tracks.
Speaking as someone with some rudimentary drum kit skills, I can tell you this is a challenge to do, and devilishly difficult to do well. Staying locked into a computer-generated tempo at all times throughout a song is not easy; and making it sound as though the computer is following the drummer rather than vice-versa is an exercise in extreme precision masquerading as spontaneity. Still, I've seen Curtis do it often enough, and in fact played in a couple of sequence-heavy cover bands with the man. He's got it mastered. The band follows the drummer, but the drummer, through headphones, follows the computer or electronic music player.
Sequencing is usually used to fill out a band's orchestrations, especially in a live setting. If you have a three-person band, but you'd like to play a few tunes that call for four-part vocal harmonies and two keyboard parts in addition to guitar, bass and drums, a sequencer can cover your keyboard and backing-vocal duties. Or, if your lead singer would rather concentrate on her dancing as she “sings” her song, sequencing allows her to lip-sync instead. Voila – perfect vocal performance, and stellar dance routine.
That is, when it all works properly.
Katy Perry would seem to be the most recent victim of a high-profile sequenced performance-gone-wrong. In a European TV special last week, her number was cut short by the host of the show as her mouth movements were completely unrelated to the audio performance – to which she seemed completely unaware (the monitor feed in her ear-pieces was probably different from what was reaching the audience through the main speakers) . To her credit, she re-started the song and sang it completely live, dance moves and all. While her voice hugely lacked the polish and ease of the studio version she'd tried to lip-sync to earlier, it was far from a disastrous performance. This Empress indeed has real clothes, even if showing off the originals was not her first choice.
Technical glitches and human error are certainly a major pitfall of sequenced songs. In the days when Curtis and I played in a couple of Victoria-based cover bands that relied hugely on sequenced tracks, nearly every show had some sort of malfunction, from wrong songs cuing up to the whole system suddenly shutting down due to a Windows Update. Considering all that could go wrong in each show, our techie/lead singer performed a herculean task in constructing and operating all the sequences we used. Still – it has its drawbacks.
Granted, I was done with that band by around 2007, and the technology was improving during and since those days. Technical glitches are far less of an issue these days, but there's another aspect that bothers me about the practice.
Honesty and genuineness have high standards. If you knew for a fact that only 80% of what I tell you is true, gentle reader, you'd have good reason to pay my words no attention. Once the things I say are tainted by un-truth, my word would be deemed unreliable, compromised. Some of us may even maintain friendships with people who we know lie to us regularly ('though personally – it's more than I could tolerate), but we'd know better than to put any stock in that person's words, whatever our affections might be for that person otherwise. Inauthenticity is a value-killer. It's not like school, where 50% is a pass and 86% gets you top marks. Authenticity requires purity – 100%.
So let's say Joe Non-Musician goes out to see a local band. A few songs into the set, Joe notices that he hears keyboards in the band's sound, but sees no keyboardist onstage. Must be pre-recorded, he thinks. He then notices that the backing vocals seem very full and polished...probably pre-recorded too. Joe starts to wonder how much of the performance is real, and the better the various components of the sound, the more suspect they are. Joe goes home feeling that he's witnessed a cheap knock-off of the band rather than the band itself. Decent enough music, but not quite a satisfying experience.
Granted, I may be projecting my own prejudices upon ol' Joe. When I go to see a band or artist perform, I go to see that artist in that moment – how he/she interacts musically and otherwise with his or her bandmates, how the vocal and instrumental approach of that performance differs (or not) from the recorded version, what effect the audience has on the artist and vice versa. For an element of that performance to be impervious to 'the moment' because it was created at some other time, I might as well be watching automatons. Am I alone in this? I suspect not, but I may not be in the majority, either. In the days when Curtis and I played in our sequenced-cover-tunes outfit, our frontman was once called away to help out with the music software operating system of an artist performing that night at Victoria's Memorial Arena, by far the biggest room in town. The act? Black Eyed Peas (no, Fergie does not interact with mere mortals, so don't even try). To date, they've played to a few more people than I have.
Curtis has often expressed interest in MLB performing with sequenced tracks in order to fill out the backing vocals or add keyboard, and I've done my best to keep an open mind. Frankly, I didn't even like it when the Police brought backing vocalists on tour or how Pink Floyd got into the habit of bringing more than four core musicians onstage, so perhaps my resistance is just something in my genes or my classical background. I never say never, so maybe there will be a MLB + Hal 9000 version of this band sometime in the future – but I wouldn't hold my breath.
To breathe is human, after all.