Everywhere you look these days it seems like there’s an advertisement for Multi-Tracks. If you don’t already use them, you probably have thought about it. Marketed as a quick, easy, low cost, and professional way to improve the sound of your Sunday worship it can seem like everyone who is someone is already using them. However, what they don’t tell you in the brochure are the serious side effects and, like the end of a TV pharmaceutical commercial, unfortunately there’s a lot of them.
This article isn’t a multi-track bashing session but an attempt at a balanced look at reality by a neutral party. If you choose to use tracks you should know what you’re getting into, what to look out for, be doing it for the right reasons, and/or re-examine whether or not it’s the right thing for your church. So let’s take a look.
Multi-tracks are a lot like steroids; a shot in the arm that produces better results than you were capable of before. In some ways steroids work or at least it feels like they do. However, steroids are bad. They ruin your body, alter your personality, and become a dirty little secret to hide. So why take them? The real answer is to resolve the painful frustration of not being at the level you or others expect. It’s the fear of failure and it’s a powerful force.
This is part of why people get so mad when you challenge their use of tracks. You’re digging into a wound. We’re frustrated that we don’t sound like the CD – with multi-tracks now we do. We can’t seem to find talented people to be on our team – which is not a problem anymore. The people we do have are not dependable – now we can replace them in an instant. We also don’t have all of those instruments or know how to get those sounds – now it’s on the track.
With Multi-tracks it feels like we have resolved our challenges with a few clicks of a mouse to add a computer to the worship team. However, what’s hard to see in all the short term gains are the long-term losses. The biggest one and probably the most painful to hear is that we haven’t actually overcome our challenges. We may feel like we sound like the CD but we don’t actually know how to do it, we only know how to push the play button. We still don’t know how to recruit and train valuable people. We still don’t know how to lead people to be committed and faithful. What’s even worse is that now because it doesn’t seem to matter if we have those skills, we never will.
When we stop developing people, stop learning, and stop working to become in favor of a quick fix, it creates a downward cycle where machines replace the human heart and we become dependent consumers. If we don’t grow in our leadership and in our understanding we will forever be circling the desert with the same problems.
These casualties of development are especially maddening to me as very rarely do multi-tracks really help the sound of a worship team. Most every team is struggling because they have too much sound (even if there are only a few people on the team). Tracks can only add more sound not change what’s being played. This results in either not being able to hear the tracks (making the tracks pointless) or the sound person turning the human people off (making the people pointless).
Definitely the most curious side effect is how people brag that they use multi-tracks to other worship leaders but keep them an elaborate secret to their congregation. This is partly because worship leaders have been lead to believe (if not told directly) that multi-tracks are what the pros use, which is not even half true as many top-level artist won’t have anything to do with them. What it does create is a perverted status symbol. The idea that, “we have achieved a higher level by being able to use tracks.” Which is a weird perception when simultaneously you’d be embarrassed to tell your congregation about it. Which brings us back to the fear of not measuring up and specifically the fear of losing authenticity, an attribute especially important to millennials.
The last thing worth noting in this article is that multi-tracks are pushed upon you not because they are the best solution for your team but because they make the people who sell them money. If you get better as a worship leader these people make nothing.
So I didn’t come to offer criticism without hope. There is more. Levels of musicianship, far above being able to use multi-tracks, that are obtainable by everyone, the multitudes that can be reached, and the disciples we are to raise up that all demand growth in our leadership and musical skill. It isn’t always easy or fun in the short run but long term it produces the kind of amazing fruit that matters – lives changed. We were all once not good enough to participate and all of us at some point didn’t know enough, but someone believed in us and helped us. Are we doing the same for others? Or will a future generation of worship leaders be lost because it was just easier to push some buttons rather than disciple people.