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PrintColumnist Jeff Van Hanken's family band
Years ago, I remember reading about a musician whose childhood was described as something like the Waltons but with instruments. He had brothers and sisters and each family member played banjo, mandolin or guitar; he himself was said to play everything from drums to fiddle.
This image stuck with me because we’re not talking about early Appalachia; this all happens in the suburbs of St. Louis in the ’70s and ’80s and runs counter to anything I experienced growing up. Other than a brief couple of years on saxophone (inspired by a glimpse of a black-and-white photo taken of my grandfather playing alto sax in a Kansas City-area big band), I never took up an instrument.
My brother played piano well but quit early. And even as my wife and I enrolled our children in piano lessons, my expectations for them, rightly or wrongly, have never really been of the musical variety. I was far more engaged by the suggested math skills and self-discipline that are reported to accompany early piano training.
There simply seemed no avenue by which the family band could come again into existence. Why? Time — there simply aren’t enough minutes in the day for people to learn instruments, much less gather to play them. It would take real, determined effort to pull this off, and when it becomes real, determined effort, it begins to sound a lot like work and that sounds a lot like no fun; thus, it defeats the whole purpose in the first place.
And, of course, the other obvious hindrance is technology. We have so much access to so much pre-recorded music that making one’s own seems a little redundant. How many bluegrass hootenannies might never have happened had Cousin Carl had an iPod Nano at his ready disposal?
Consequently, I had long concluded that we, as a family, would simply miss out, doomed to a lifetime of consumption, not production. But then, I am startled to report, technology recently offered up two completely surprising tools that seem to contradict everything I had previously believed.
At Christmas, “The Beatles: Rock Band” arrived. My expectations for it were low, but its appeal is immediate and obvious. As a family, or group of friends, or smattering of both, you can suddenly find yourself earnestly attempting to play along to “Yellow Submarine” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
And let’s face it, there may indeed be some skill involved, but you are working at a half-step above lip synching and yet, somehow, it works. It gathers people together, kids and adults: no aliens to kill, no mutants to outrun, just absurdly infectious music written by a couple of Liverpudlians 40 years ago.
That’s pretty good. But far more engaging was the recent evening I spent with my son and daughter composing a song on Garageband. And again, full confession: I firmly believe that real musicians, real artists must toil years and years, woodshedding endlessly before great work can be drawn out.
But we weren’t after great work. We were after a fun evening spent doing something more than watching movies or playing games, producing rather than consuming. The family band, of a kind.
The program comes with a wide range of pre-recorded guitar and bass loops, drum tracks that range from reggae to raga, and a wide assortment of additional instruments. Further, one can, of course, record original vocal tracks through the computer’s speaker or even, with a few more tools, record original instrumental parts directly into the program.
In short, it can provide everything you need, or some of what you need, or nothing at all. It’s as though you had a full working band capable of every musical stripe ready and available to satisfy your every whim. Click a button: classical trumpet. Another button, here comes the tympani. You want to change the pitch, speed it up or slow it down, there’s all that, too.
For our purposes, my son, daughter and two of their even younger friends provided the vocals while I served as engineer and producer. In other words: I was Brian Epstein and George Martin to their John, Paul, George and Ringo. The result is a completely silly, two-minute track that is at least listenable enough that they downloaded it to my daughter’s iPod Shuffle and spent the recent snowstorm walking around the house listening to it.
Of course, by the end of the weekend, I was personally ready to move on to song No. 2, but that’s the beauty. We can. And personally, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that we could.
