Embracing The Drummer Gap

Every leader knows the feeling:  Your manager joins a traveling circus and quits your company.  The lead actor in your play bites her tongue off in a Chinese restaurant.  Your quarterback is at home hugging the toilet.

Its called “The Gap“.

Every team gets gaps and every leader has to deal with them.

At The Orchard, right now, our gap is in our drummers (and our sound guys, but that’s another post).  Not that our drummers are incapable… its quite the opposite.  They are some of the best drummers I’ve ever played with.  We’re just in a season where our drummers are busy and scheduling can be quite a challenge.

This past weekend, instead of fighting our gap or pretending it wasn’t there, we embraced it.  We went full on acoustic — banjo, dobro, lap steel, piano… the whole works… with no drummer (I know, heresy, right?).  In many ways, it was more difficult: any out-of-tune strings or sloppy playing were quite a bit more evident without the wash of cymbals flooding the room.   The songs took some intentional reinventing and re-orchestrating with our decisively rural sound palate.  Our team rose to the challenge, though and killed it (the good kind of killing it). The results were simple, yet satisfying — our community’s collective voice was especially audible and beautiful, and at the end of the day, our team of musicians and technicians knew something special had just happened.

Here are a few songs, captured with a single mic at the back of the room.  Take a listen (thanks for the recordings, Todd)…

You Have Redeemed My Soul (written by Don Chaffer / Waterdeep)

All The Poor and Powerless (written by All Sons and Daughters)

Broken (written by Ben Thomas)