i am an offering

• PLAY IN TIME.  Period. The sign of a good drummer is not how many fills he can play in time, it is the fact that he can play in time.  Buy a metronome that you can hear over your playing and practice with it every time you play.  Be able to be as steady as a metronome.  Use your metronome during practice and worship services as well.
• Learn to control your volume, especially if you use an acoustic kit.  If you have a hard time controlling your volume, ask if the church will buy you a drum shield, or buy yourself some brushes or hotrods (rute/tala).
• Vary your fills and play them skillfully.  It’s very difficult for a band to get back on track if a drummer’s fill ends a beat too late or half a beat too early.  Be able to nail your fills every time.  If you can’t, simplify your fills until you can.
• Learn different patterns.  Four on the floor doesn’t work with every song.  The country “train” beat won’t work with every song.  Hint: A waltz beat won’t necessarily work with a driving 6/8 song as much as you might think 6/8 is the same as 3/4.
• Practice.  Practice.  Practice.

Do any of you have any back to basics tips for percussion (bongos, congas, shakers, djembe, etc?)?  While I do play percussion I haven’t had much experience with it in corporate worship settings and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

One of my main goals for this blog was to always provide training for worship leaders and worship teams that is practical and easily usable.  So next week, we’re going to dive back into some training.  We’re going to take a look at some basic, foundational things to know and apply with each instrument in the worship team and then take a look at how to put it all together.  Often times in church worship teams we have a lot of people who are excited to serve but might not even know the basics about playing their instrument within a group.  So, next week will look like this:

• Mon - Back to Basics: Piano & Keyboard
• Tues - Back to Basics: Acoustic & Electric Guitar
• Wed - Back to Basics: Bass Guitar
• Thurs - Back to Basics: Drums & Percussion
• Fri - Back to Basics: Putting it all Together

Remember to always pray.  Pray that God would provide, and pray that you would have the wisdom to rest in Him when He might not.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an occasion of a church with no piano player, but I’m sure it has happened.  Here are some ideas:

• Find great songs that work accapella.  Sometimes there is nothing more glorious than listening to God’s people sing without anything else accompanying them.  A great many hymns work extremely well for this.  There are also several newer songs that work well.
• If you have a guitarist, teach them to play melodically.  Most guitarists are rhythm guitarists, not lead guitarists, so we (myself included) have a hard time playing melodically.  Teach them to finger pick, teach them to be able to play a solo line as an intro or outro.
• Help the bass player be confident.  The piano covers all the octaves, so when there is no piano and perhaps you have a guitar and bass, if the bass isn’t confident on the low end it will stand out and be distracting.  Even if it’s being able to play whole notes with confidence, teach them to play confidently.
• Help your singers be able to hear.  The singers will have to tune themselves to the guitar, since there is no piano, so help them get used to that.  Spend time in practice without the bass and drums.  Make sure that the bass and drums are not overpowering the guitar, so the singers can hear it.
• Enjoy your organ!  Perhaps you don’t have a piano because the church isn’t ready for that transition yet.  Pray that God would give you patience and that He would give you great joy in worshiping in a traditional style.  If we rely on style to be able to worship God, our foundations of what worship is have not been laid properly, and will crack and crumble when styles change.

Continuing with our thoughts on what to do when you’re missing certain instruments, what happens when you have no drummer? Here are some ideas:

• As I mentioned yesterday, the drums and bass carry the groove of the music.  If you have a bass player, teach that person to play very rhthmically and to be able to create a groove without a drummer.  If you have no bass player, teach the instruments you do have to create a groove and play tightly together.  Teach people how to play with steady tempos and practice it all the time!
• Use drum loops.  You can purchase a loop generator at a music store.  While these will not give the personality and creativity as a real drummer (as they are a set pattern that repeats over and over) they can still be very effective in creating a bit of extra rhythm to drive the music.  Be careful, though because in order to play with drum loops your steady tempos have to be very good.
• Use percussion.  Tambourines, shakers, congas, and bongos and djembe can add a lot of color and rhythm and aren’t too difficult to play.  Make sure you do some research on how to play them correctly so you can teach people how to play them and be sure you know how to care for these instruments as well.  Sometimes there can be nothing worse than someone playing the tambourine or congas who doesn’t know how.
• Use percussion.  Yes I just repeated myself.  Perhaps you have a drummer in your congregation, but either your church doesn’t want you to use a full kit or the drummer can’t haul the kit back and forth all the time.  Good drummers are good percussionists as well and will know how to play the more easily-transportable instruments.  Pastor Wade said yesterday, “The djembe is the most important percussion instrument in God’s kingdom.”  He was half-joking, but I think he’s got a great point.  The djembe is probably one of the most versatile, least expensive percussion instruments you can find.  Invest in one.  Don’t just invest money though, invest time in learning how to play it and how to teach it.
• Teach your guitarists to play very rhythmically and drive the rhythm.
• Be okay with not having a drummer.  Use it as an opportunity to use piano-driven, intimate songs and teach people to worship intimately.

A couple weeks ago I promised to talk about how the drums and bass work hand in hand in a modern worship team.

This is one of the most important concepts that every worship team should learn.  The rhythm section (primarily the drummer and bass player, but also piano and guitar) must learn to lock together in what is called a “groove.”  The tighter the groove is locked, the more precise energy the song will have.  Even if the song is a slow ballad, if there is a locked-in groove, energy will be there.

So how does this groove get created?  Primarily, from the foundation of the rhythm section, the drums and bass.  Last time we mentioned that it is essential that a bass player understand different styles of music.  It is even more essential for the drummer. Last time we looked at how important it is for a bass player to know and understand music theory.  While it is not necessarily vital that a drummer understand chords within a key, or key signatures, they must be able to have a basic understanding of notes and rhythms.  The better the understanding of how notes and rhythms work, and the ability to read written-out drum parts, the better the drummer will be at locking in the groove with the bass player.

Now, so many times I have been at seminars where a drummer and a bass player will show people how to create a groove and try to explain it, which is well and good, but sometimes you need to see something.  So with the fact in mind that having the ability to read notes is important, let’s figure this concept out in a few steps.

1. Determine the style of the music.  Is it rock?  If so, is it light rock, hard rock, half-time rock?  Is it blues?  Is it funk?  Is it swing?

2. Determine if the drummer and bass player know how to play the style.  If so, play it together and lock the groove in.  Unfortunately, here is where the majority of today’s worship teams get stuck.  They don’t know or understand style, and the music sounds the same song after song, week after week.  So how do you fix this?

3. Find out how to play the style.  Below is a drum pattern for a simple rock beat:

Let’s look at it logically first of all, before we even worry about how to read the music.  What is the lowest sounding drum on the drum set?  The kick drum.  So match the kick drum with the lowest note written out and you’ll see that the kick drum comes the beginning and middle of the first measure.  The snare sounds higher than the kick drum, so we’ll match the middle note to the snare, which comes opposite the bass drum in every measure.  Finally we have the hi-hat, which is every x at the the top of the music, basically playing all the way through except on the snare drum hits.

As far as the bass guitar goes, one of the easiest ways to remember where to play and how to lock into the groove is to match the bass note to the bass drum.  So, the bass player would play every spot that the lowest note hits.  Even if the bassline stays as simple as this, if it is locked with the bass drum, the groove will have a definite energy and glue that stays together.  If it were written out, it would look like this, with the drums on top and bass on the bottom:

It would sound like this.

If you begin to understand the basics of reading notes and rhythms, begin to understand style, and begin to understand how to match the bass guitar to the bass drum, the groove will lock in and create a wonderful glue and energy to the music.