|
How to Grow As A Worship Pianist
When it comes to playing the piano for contemporary
worship, skill is less a matter of being able to play many notes quickly and
more a question of choosing the right notes. If you want to improve your skill
in playing the piano for the Lord in church, how can you do it? Other than
practice your scales and try to learn new songs?
There are three ways to increase your skill in
choosing the right notes to play for worship.
1) Learn a complementary style of music.
If you are a classically trained musician, take
lessons in jazz piano. Learn a few jazz standards and how to do jazz
improvisation. You will then learn how to feel what are the more appropriate
notes to use on the piano to get the effect you want.
If you are more of a contemporary/jazz player, learn
music notation and study two-part inventions (from Baroque music). They will
train you to use less notes to imply the chords, instead of banging out
everything and crowding out the congregation's singing, as many other church pianists
do.
2) Sing and play.
Pay special attention to how the songs interact with
the chords and rhythms created. Are the chords and rhythms you're given the
best fit for the song? If you are unable to sing a song comfortably using
certain chords or rhythms, those chords and rhythms may not be the best fit for
the song.
Singing and playing will also allow you to test out
any ideas you may have, to see if they will work for supporting the
congregation's singing of a song.
3) Learn the guitar.
Many church pianists are weak in two areas: their
overall sense of rhythm and their choice of notes. Learning the guitar
strengthens you in these two areas.
Because the sound of a guitar is thinner than that of
a piano, you can strum more actively on a guitar than you can comp on a piano.
This allows you to get a feeling of rhythmic intensity, and you can carry over
the effect to piano playing when you know what you are looking for.
On the piano, you can pile up the notes to create
really thick chords. But these don't usually work well for contemporary church
worship. Guitars give you only six (or often five) notes to work with. You have
to choose your notes really well, because you don't have that many to work
with.
Conclusion: These three tips are simple, but not
easy. They require you to go out of what many pianists have as their comfort
zone, and it's tempting to rationalize away the need for these methods.
But if you are deadly serious about serving the Lord
with the best you can give him, these three methods of increasing your skill as
a worship pianist will give you the greatest growth in the shortest amount of
time. So are you up to the challenge?
If you wish to get permission to reproduce this article, send an email by clicking here
Web site and all contents © Copyright Junjie Huang 2008, All rights reserved.
Free website templates |
