by Serguey Shinder
He had flu on the Saturday and told us on the Friday night, so we played as a four piece. We assumed it would sound thinner and otherwise be fine. Three songs came apart in a way none of us could explain while it was happening.
The worst of them was a song we had played perhaps two hundred times. Halfway through the chorus there is a change, and without him nobody could find it. The singer came in early. The guitarist and I arrived at the new chord at slightly different moments, twice, in front of people, on a song we could all have played in our sleep the week before.
We worked it out afterwards in the van, which is where every band works everything out. The guitar part over that section never states the root of the change. It sits on a shape that fits both chords, which is why it sounds good. The bass was the only instrument in the room that said which chord we were in. Every one of us, the singer included, had been navigating by it for two years without ever knowing that was what we were doing.
Nobody could have told you this. If you had asked the four of us what the bass was doing in that song, we would have said it holds down the bottom end, which is a description of a role rather than of a function, and it is the description you fall into when you have never once heard the song without that part in it.
I have stopped being surprised when the same thing turns up at work. The component everybody refers to as infrastructure, or as just a lookup, or as the thing that copies files about, is very often the one carrying the information every other component is quietly steering by. It gets described by its category rather than by what depends on it, and the dependency is invisible precisely because it has never been absent. You do not find these by reading an architecture diagram, because the diagram was drawn by the same people using the same words.
The only way to learn what a part does is to hear the thing without it, and a Saturday night in front of an audience is a terrible place to run that experiment.
So we run it deliberately now. Once every few rehearsals we play a song with one person sitting out, chosen at random, all the way through, and we talk about what went missing. It takes twenty minutes and it has taught us more about our own arrangements than any amount of discussing them. Twice it showed that a part was carrying everything. Once it showed that a part was carrying nothing at all, which was a more awkward conversation and an equally useful finding.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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