How to Use Tracks in Spontaneous Moments of Worship in Ableton with Evan Fernald of TBCO

Watch on YouTube

In this episode of The Worship Keys, Carson Bruce chats with Evan Fernald from The Belonging Co. about all things tracks in worship. Whether you're new to using tracks or looking to level up your setup, this conversation dives into the heart behind it all—how to keep worship spontaneous and structured. Evan breaks down his process for running tracks with flexibility, training your team, setting up gear, and navigating live worship without missing a beat. Plus, get a behind-the-scenes look at his Ableton Live session layout and real-world tips for integrating tracks into your service with confidence.

Evan Fernald

Ableton Session Templates & Touch OSC Files

Transcript

Speaker: 0:01

Welcome to the Worship Keys YouTube channel. My name is Carson Bruce, so glad you're here. We talk all things music theory, gear, industry and ministry for your worship keys playing. If this episode is beneficial for you or you have any questions as you continue to watch, feel free to comment below and I'd love to hear any feedback that you have along the way. If you missed it, definitely check it out. But today's episode, Evan, you're going to intro us a little bit into Tracks world and also get down to some really nitty gritty details. Of how you guys run tracks. What's your philosophy with tracks and give us a little bit of intro. Yeah, so honestly, very much the same heart, like we in our conversation about production, how we can utilize these tools, but we don't want them to ever take precedence or lead the way we want them to be able to follow. You feel that energy suck outta the room. So we've done some very intentional things to allow tracks to remain in the mix. If they're enhancing, and this is a big training point with me and our playback team. I was like, if these are ever getting in the way, get them out of the way. Again, I never want this to be the thing. And now I've got a team of I believe there's about five of us that are building sessions for all the services that need them. Amazing. And you'll probably hit on this too as you get into it, but. You guys have a separate person that runs the tracks? Yeah, so in our in our Nashville location, which is our main broadcast location there is always somebody running playback dedicated position side stage. Yeah, I think existing team is a great place to start without overextending people's serving capacity. Because if you're wanting to approach tracks in the same way with kind of flexibility and spontaneity, having somebody that already knows the culture of the team and knows the flow of the team is really gonna be a huge advantage for that person. They just had a sense of how the team flows together and immediately there was an ease and a fluidity to them moving into that position because they'd been around it. They'd heard all the calls, got to know the tendencies of everybody. So really strong position to, to implement. That's great. It can add some beautiful textures. Sure you can take it to a place where it's leading the charge and then, yeah it's outta balance. And I'm actually personally of the opinion that at the end of the day. As a worship team, in a worship band, we should be able to play music. So if that fails, it shouldn't end the, it shouldn't be like the end all. You can check out last week's episode if you haven't already, and you wanna know his sound design check out last week's episode. But let's jump in to tracks before we do, which by the way, there's. There's like a list of 10 other questions I could ask you, Evan, if we had more time. Time is always of the essence, but just one simple question I've asked to a few of my guests too, but what's your one advice to brand new worship keys players? Absolutely. And how can I extract that same principle. Good stuff, Evan. Good stuff. Thanks for sharing man. Alright, so let's jump into Tracks world. Yeah. Alright, so let's take a look at tracks. This is an interesting world to dig into. I, I actually really love talking about this 'cause I know there's such a wide wide spectrum of opinions and thoughts and approaches and so we'll kinda look at the way that we set it up. Very briefly. I don't want to spend too much time on session layout 'cause this can be a. Bazillion different ways, but just a couple of song identifiers. What song it is, the song sections time code. We run time code for some of our lighting sequences. Our lighting system is also designed though to be able to just go full manual. Most of our programming that we run in tracks is gonna be coming from extra keys and synth parts, pad parts, things like that. We run very minimal guitars. All these are deactivated. We might run in a, an extra rhythm track or something that's a little more ambient, but most of all of our guitar stuff is all coming from the live players. Going out to it's set up that way so that if we ever were in a situation where we had to condense that and just use a stereo left right, I could just quickly come in here and change all of these to output three and four. I don't have to go in and reroute a bunch of individual stems or change a bunch of the out routing. Spontaneity and flexibility. So first, and this is probably commonly used by a lot of people, is having locators at the top of every section of the song. 'cause in Ableton locators are interactive you can actually select an a locator while it's playing and it can end time of the song jump back to that section without skipping a beat. And so we want it to be able to keep the door open for that and rather than coming, getting to the end of the song, losing the click, and then having to try and bring it back. It just automatically keeps the click going. It rolls right into a click loop and we can just keep playing along with that. I don't wanna have to wait for the next downbeat to roll around if we want to pick up the progression and keep playing. So I want to, as the MDE be able to just at any point, count in, all right, let's go back to bridge progression. 2, 3, 4. And I don't have to worry about are, am I on with the accent? Normally if it's like we wanna be able to potentially being bring the tracks back in at some point, it's really important that we're on the same downbeat as Ableton. Otherwise it, it's not gonna be able to match back up with us without a little bit of finagling of how it's counting or we're gonna have to actually physically stop the computer and then restart it on the band's downbeat. So if I have it set to one bar and I tell it. Jump to that chorus. It's gonna hang onto that command and go, great. I'm gonna wait until I get to the next downbeat at the top of the next bar. Before I do that. You can change that setting, but you have to be careful when you're giving it commands. Or you might actually make ableton's count to jump. So, when we get into this click loop, you'll notice up here that we've added a time signature change. So we've gone from four, four. Out here in the song arrangement to one eight. And a little bit of, a little bit of rhythmic music theory. We know time signatures is how many beats are in a measure and which note subdivision gets counted as one beat. What As soon as it hits the playhead hits this click loop, it's gonna start counting. And we can see this up here in the transport window. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. So now the next command I give it. The very next click, the very next count, it's going to see as the next bar. And that's when it's going to execute that command. So now we're on 1, 2, 3, 4. That's where the band is at two. 3, 4, 1, 2, and then we say we wanna go back into that bridge. Okay. So I don't have to worry about where Ableton's count is. I just have to listen to the band and I'm gonna press my button over here. That's gonna jump back to the bridge locator. Here on our output buses, we expand that. We can see there's a couple of filters happening here. So as I close these as I move these faders down these filters are closing and we I actually really like to use filters versus volume. To bring tracks in and out and a filter. If you're a keys player, like I'm sure you you probably are, that you're very familiar with how a filter works, right? If I just faded that up with volume, you would still have all that high-end energy coming in at a lower volume, but the band might not be big enough for that to make sense yet. So you get more of a, so it this is filtering in like that. Let's see what that would look like in conjunction with our click loop, our timing of everything. Okay, so now this kind of brings back up our accented click and the purpose of that, okay. All of my filters are down. All the volumes are closed. So if I skip back into the bridge now, I can't hear the tracks. Like we're in the bridge. You can see the bridge is playing. I can't hear anything, right? Now I know my timing is correct. I've gotten the timing right. I can confidently start to bring tracks back in. I might start with just the keys programming first. Leave the perk out. So now we're back in all the way up except for the. So tracks are back in, we're with the band, and at this point I can continue to do that even. And that's why even on this iPad. I have all of the same notes. I have the chord progressions all the same elements. And so depending on the song and what's happening in the stems, they might even go into a spontaneous free worship moment, singing something completely different, but with the chord structure of the song we just played that'll happen quite often with us. So say we are we're we've rebuilt the bridge and the worship leader turns around and goes, Hey, let's do a drum chorus, points to the drums. So what's cool about this too is we actually have in our, at our net main Nashville location, we have a dedicated playback team. So that's only what they're doing. They're focused completely on this. It's flexible to be able to do either or when it's set up like this. All right, so you may have seen in the last episode we were doing quite a bit with this little fader controller over here. So let's talk about what this is. It's it's made by intech Studios. This particular model is the, pB four. They make multiple different versions of it. But it's gonna be similar to like your core nano control. Just an eight fader MIDI controller. It's got knobs and buttons. I actually used a nano control for a very long time. They're absolutely great. I was after something that maybe was a little bit more robust. And they're modular, so they actually come in sections of four. And they have different models. Some of them only have faders, some of them only have knobs. There's one that's all buttons, a few other varieties. So I have two of these. They snap together, magnetically, I have them secured with just some tape. I have a lot of stuff that just sits on my keyboard. I personally, I don't necessarily like having a lot of extra stands of things. So I like it sitting on the top of the keyboard. The Nord has the mod wheel and the pitch stick over there. There's a small area that's available for devices. Yeah, check these guys out. They're making some really great stuff. Okay, so the last component we wanna look at here is, let's say we go into a song that's completely hasn't been planned. It's not on the list. We don't have a click programmed at the right tempo. So what we did here is at the very end of our session, we have just a bunch of clicks ranging from 66 BPM, all the way up to 90. If I go to 75, there's gonna be no change. It's gonna sound seamless, 'cause Ableton's gonna keep it all in time. Open this up. So it went straight there. No change to the tempo. So what we'll do sometimes is if we want to get down there gradually, then I can just come in here and go 74 7 3 7 2. Page to have and section of the session to have set up with all these different clicks. Guys, I hope y'all enjoy that episode with Evan Fernald from Belonging Co here in Nashville. You probably love the belonging CO's music if you've never heard TB Co Belonging Co. We'll link their music here. We had David Ramirez who's connected with you guys, the Belonging Co, incredible producer, sound designer, Keith's player. Just a great guy and great man of God, but we had him featured three weeks in a row. So if you wanna hear from David Ramirez, you guys can do that all about sound design, especially if you're working in studio environments and working on an album.