Small said he is well aware that pitch-tuning, which can make singers sound artificial, could backfire if overused.
“A good auto-tune is something you really never notice,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were trying to make someone be more talented than they actually are.”
Travis Ham, worship pastor at Bear Creek Bible Church near Fort Worth, Texas, said he was skeptical about using tuning tools for worship bands, such as an in-ear click-track, which helps musicians keep time during songs.
“It almost felt like cheating,” said Ham, who studied music at the University of North Texas.
Ham said he adopted a click-track after working with a volunteer drummer who had a tendency to speed up whenever the music got loud — a not uncommon occurrence. Using a click-track solved the problem and made the whole group play tighter. That success opened his mind about pitch-tuning.
The tools help “regular people who want to serve God,” he said, as part of the church’s worship team. Not everyone is convinced that using pitch-tuning is a good idea.
Ryan Flanigan, a longtime church musician who is now an artist in residence at Baylor University, worries that pitch-tuning is one more sign that church musicians are trying to aspire to be performers — rather than leading people in worship.
He said he spent years using all the latest tools to conjure one emotional experience after another — always looking for the next big things or trying to emulate popular megachurch worship bands. Then he gave up.
“Where does it end?” he said.
Flanigan, who records what he calls liturgical folk music, said he’s scaled back to a simpler approach. Being authentic, he said, means embracing imperfection.
Adam Perez, assistant professor of worship studies at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, has similar concerns about worship leaders trying to be something they are not. He worries that churches will become “karaoke franchises” of megachurches.
“The more you can do to sound not like yourself and more like a recording has been a long contemporary worship issue,” he said.
In his classes, Perez said that he teaches his students about the latest technology and tries to inspire them to lead their churches to a more authentic style of worship — one that comes naturally from their churches rather than emulating someone else.
He also warns them about romanticizing the past, saying that there were problems even when people sang hymns without pitch correction or the latest technology. People sang too loud or too off-key or too fast—and probably could have used a little help.
“We are constantly trying to do this better,” he said.
This article originally appeared here.
