i am an offering

I’ll give you a little hint behind this one.  This post comes directly out of personal experience.  Keep that in mind as your reading.

There are probably going to be times when something is out of tune.  Badly out of tune.  It could be your own instrument.  It could be the instrument of an inexpereinced player.  Regardless of whose instrument it is, something that’s out of tune is a major disctration that keeps us from focusing on Jesus.  If something is slightly out of tune it will distract any skilled musicians in the congregation because they can pick it out.  It will distract average non-musical people in the congregation as well because they know something is wrong but can’t quite figure out what it is.  If something is badly out of tune, everyone notices and everyone is distracted.  So what do you to when this happens?

Plan Ahead

Like yesterday’s post on screen projection, it is so important to plan ahead.  If you are the guitar player - make sure you have fresh strings and you are in tune.  Get a tuner or ask the church to buy you one (preferably a pedal tuner that you can use during the worship time to always make sure you’re in tune.)  If you are the piano player know how to tell when the piano is out of tune and make sure the church is on top of getting it tuned.

If you are overseeing guitar players always make sure that they tune before rehearsal, before soundcheck, before the worship time and during the worship time.  Ask your church to be able to budget for new strings for the guitar players.  Buy your guitar players tuners if they don’t have them.

A Personal Account

These things seem fairly obvious to most of us, but let my share a story that happened when I was a bit more inexperienced.

We made plans to bring Arlen Salte from Break Forth Ministries to do a worship team workshop at our church.  We had planned well and there were about 300 people from different states coming.  It was an exciting time for us.  Our worship team agreed that we would do a worship set in the afternoon and them let him critique us.  Unfortunately, in my excitement about the workshop, I forgot to plan ahead so that I would have new strings that weekend.  My strings were old.  Ancient.  It was bad.  In my rush to make sure all of the logistics were worked out for the weekend, I completely forgot about the fact that my strings were not going to stay in tune.  We started our set with “Blessed Be Your Name” with a driving acoustic guitar part.  After about two measures I thought, “Uh-oh.  This is bad.  Really bad.”  What did I do?

What To Do If It Happens

I could have kept going and played through the whole song with a badly out-of-tune guitar.  But I knew it was a major disctraction - especially in a room full of musicians.  So, I stopped the band, addressed the problem, admitted that I was out of tune and had the band restart the song without me.  Things went well and Arlen mentioned that it was better that I took a couple minutes to address the distraction and then move on, rather than letting the disctration keep going.  That night, I bought new strings and restringed my guitar as Sunday morning worship was the next morning. (Although, I hate to admit it - I bought strings from Wal-Mart.  They’re the only place open at 10:30pm that sold guitar strings!)  What I probably should have done is just let the band keep going without the guitar.  At the time, they relied heavily on the guitar leading things, so sometimes if I would stop, the whole band would stop.  So, if you’re the one out of tune, drop out in a non-distracting way, tune if you can and then come back in.  If you can’t tune, be able to communicate to other musicians that they need to lead the music.

But, what if it’s not you that’s out of tune?

Work out a signal before hand that might be able to let your guitar players know that they are out of tune and they need to drop out (hint, don’t use the hand cutting through the throat signal!).  Find a subtle gesture that says “sit out” to someone.  If you have an opportunity to lean over and talk to them quickly (during a prayer time or instrumental interlude) tell them that they need to retune and ask for a thumbs up or some sort of signal that lets you know they’re back in tune.

Being in tune is so important in music and is a skill that we should always take care to remember.  Do you have any suggestions for a situation like this or any stories of your own experience?

Acoustic Guitar:

• Keep your guitar in tune. Keep your strings fresh and buy a tuner and regularly tune your guitar during the song set between songs or when you aren’t playing. I learned this the hard way, but that’s another story for another time.
• Learn different strumming patterns. It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting comfortable with what you’re familiar with. Stretch yourself and challenge yourself to learn knew patterns. Hint: A 3/4 waltz pattern doesn’t really work in a driving 6/8 song.
• Know when to simplify your strumming pattern. Especially if you have a drummer, your strumming pattern should become much simpler as the drummer will carry the intricate rhythmic parts.
• Practice. Practice. Practice.

Electric Guitar:

• Keep your guitar in tune. See above.
• Learn scales. Major, minor, blues, pentatonic, five-note, any kind of scale you can. This will help you more easily create lead lines.
• Play in the cracks. Read yesterday’s post for the piano players on this one.
• Be comfortable with playing a lot less. You’d be surprised how little professional electric guitar players play sometimes. Learn how to use your guitar to color the music, not dominate it.
• Moderate your patches. There is a time for super-overdrive-fuzz in the church, but it’s rare. Very rare. Use discretion and discernment in what sounds you use.
• Listen to recordings and learn the original guitar parts. There are literally thousands of rockin’ lead lines that have already been written by great guitar players that go with many of our worship songs. Train your ear to learn them and then practice them so they become a part of your playing.
• Practice. Practice. Practice.

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

We’ve all been there. We’ve known how to sing for a long time and now we’ve just started learning how to play an instrument. We learn how to play that instrument and think, “Hey, I should try to sing and play at the same time.” The first few tries are….interesting. Eventually we get the hang of it. But then we reach another fork in our musical road: talking and playing at the same time.

It sounds easy doesn’t it? But the difference between singing and playing and talking and playing is that when you sing and play, the rhythm of your voice somewhat matches the rhythm your playing (hopefully :-). When you talk and play, however, the rhythm of your voice is completely different.

First of all, why would you even want to do this?

• A simple vamp underneath prayer time gives a great amount of focus. You might want to be able to pray and play at the same time.
• Often it’s good to pause in the middle of a song to remind or encourage people to think about the words. Instead of stopping the song in the middle and then restarting, you can vamp through the chorus or turn while you’re exhorting the people.
• If you’re not an “up-front” worship leader and your “just” (I use that word very lightly, as all team members are super-important) a piano player or drummer or bass player, you might want to learn to pray while you play for your own personal worship times, or to be able to confess a creed or the Lord’s Prayer while you are playing. I remember one piano player telling me that she always lost where she was in the music when she tried to play and say the Lord’s Prayer at the same time!

So, how can you develop this and move past this hurdle in your musical career?

• Practice. I should see if I can count how many times I’ve typed that word on this site! Pick two chords to vamp and pray while you are practicing. Then when you’re comfortable with vamping two chords and talking, add another, then eventually get to a four-chord progression*.
• Watch. Watch others do this. If you can get your hands on some of Paul Baloche’s live videos, he’s particularly good at this.
• Know your music. If you’re planning on talking or praying in the middle of a song, know your music like crazy. Get to the point where you don’t even have to think about the next chord of the song, but that it comes naturally. You do this by…you guessed it…practicing!
• Plan with the band. It’s nice when one instrument is vamping and someone is playing or talking, but it’s even better when the whole band or team is vamping together. A bass player can play nice, non-distracting melodic lines underneath, and once your comfortable, the band can change dynamics with the mood of the prayer, praying along with the person praying on their instruments. Don’t just play, make your playing an extension of prayer.
• Don’t do this publicly until your ready. Make sure to wait until you are completely confident in doing this until you do it during a public worship service. Start privately, then maybe try it out in your small group, then when you feel comfortable, go ahead and do it for the worship service.

If you practice and practice and practice and you just can’t seem to get the hang of talking and playing at the same time, let the band do the playing while you talk. Give the band a chord progression to play and make sure they know it well, then let them do that part while you focus on talking or praying.

*I will be doing some blogging on chord progressions sometime soon. We all know that vamping two chords gets pretty boring after a while!

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.