{"id":100,"date":"2007-07-17T06:00:22","date_gmt":"2007-07-17T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/17\/what-happens-when-you-dont-have-a-bass-player\/"},"modified":"2011-03-10T21:19:41","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T03:19:41","slug":"what-happens-when-you-dont-have-bass-player","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/what-happens-when-you-dont-have-bass-player\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happens When You Don&#8217;t Have a Bass Player?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the FLY Convention, I was privileged to teach an elective on leading worship.  Many people who attended were from churches with no established &#8220;contemporary&#8221; services (I&#8217;m not a huge fan of that word, more on that another time.)<\/p>\n<p>We all want to build up our worship teams to full bands someday, but most of the time that tends to be difficult, especially if you are in a small church or city with limited resources.  I want to spend the rest of the week talking about what to do if you&#8217;re missing an instrument that can help you fill in the hole without worrying about finding someone to play that instrument right away. \u00a0So let&#8217;s start with the bass, or rather, the lack of bass.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Almost everyone has another piano player in the congregation.  <strong>Find a keyboard that can simulate a bass sound and have another pianist playing the bass part on the keyboard<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>If you only have one piano player, and\/or no budget to get a keyboard, teach the piano player how to play the bass notes in the chords<\/strong>.  Often times you will see something like D\/F# on a chord or lead sheet.  This simply means that you play a D chord with your right hand (D-F#-A) and play an F# on the bottom with your left hand.  These subtle changes in the chord will make the music sound much more interesting.<\/li>\n<li>Perhaps you have an overabundance of guitar players.  <strong>Teach one of them how to play the bass<\/strong>.  It usually doesn&#8217;t take them too long.<\/li>\n<li>The bass (and drums) usually carry the groove, or rhythm, of the song.  <strong>Teach the instruments you have to know how to work together to create groove and tight rhythm before the bass player gets there<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>To think completely outside the box&#8230;<strong>perhaps you have a great bass singer &#8211; he could sing the bass part<\/strong>.  Think <a title=\"Tonic Sol Fa Website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tonicsolfa.com\/\">&#8220;Tonic Sol Fa&#8221;<\/a> or <a title=\"Go Fish Website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gofishguys.com\/\">&#8220;Go Fish.&#8221;<\/a> in the early days. (By the way, the original bass singer of Go Fish is in Tonic Sol Fa now)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Have an organ? \u00a0Use the pedals<\/strong>! \u00a0I&#8217;ve been amazed lately at how nicely the low register gets filled out by adding an organ to the mix!<\/li>\n<li><strong>See if there are any other bass players in your area<\/strong> that hold similar beliefs and principles as you do and ask if they would be willing to fill in while you keep looking for your own.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Hopefully these suggestions can help you as you continue to search. <strong>What have you done to help fill in the bass?<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 5px 5px 0;float:left;height:50px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/what-happens-when-you-dont-have-bass-player\/\" send=\"false\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"595\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the FLY Convention, I was privileged to teach an elective on leading worship. Many people who attended were from churches with no established &#8220;contemporary&#8221; services (I&#8217;m not a huge fan of that word, more on that another time.) We all want to build up our worship teams to full bands someday, but most of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-worship-leaders","category-leadership","category-training"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1156,"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/1156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamanoffering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}