The Church Pianist (How To Re-imagine Music For Your Context)
My dear friend, George Yellak, allowed me to eavesdrop on a conversation with one of his team members, an award-winning composer and pianist who asked how she could be a better church pianist. Isn’t that a beautiful model for us to stay hungry learners? I share with you some of his responses to her.
As you read it, imagine he’s writing it to you, regardless of your instrument, because the concepts apply to all musicians.
I’m fascinated by a dive into the way he thinks and articulates the process of listening and creating music. It’s so much more helpful than the “let’s just play as close to what the recording told us as we can (using tracks to fill what we miss” approach! I hope it stretches your thinking as it does mine.
-Dave
ps. It is longer than the typical Fertilizer but well worth your time!
One of my team members asked me, “How do I improve and become a better church pianist?” It seemed simple enough on the surface, but giving the question even a cursory thought made it apparent that such an endeavor is not so cut and dry. It might be compared to “How do I become a better Christian?” It is not only a deep and long-term process, but the very question is loaded with more questions:
What is a “church pianist?”
What are the highest priority skills necessary?
What are the most important skills and qualities of a church pianist compared to any other pianist?
“How can I practically improve?”
So rather than give a cursory list of arbitrary goals and suggestions, things like
Learn more about chord theory
Practice one hymn a day until you have played through the entire hymnal
Join a funk band to develop your groove
Take more lessons
Attend more seminars and workshops
Listen to every kind of church keyboard music available online
Etc.
It would be more encouraging to talk in a few broader terms and define those terms and why they are important.
I have worked over the years with Ad Lib Music, run by Dave Helmuth, a good friend who takes developing excellence in worship very seriously. In particular, he references what he calls The Five Faders (as in faders on a mixing board.) Here are the definitions of his Five Fader terminology.
Here’s a search of his Fertilizers that reference them: https://www.adlibmusic.com/search?q=Five%20Faders
I include the above to give you a broader starting point. I think they are spot on, and I encourage you to consider which ones are your default mode of operation.
I’ll give you some of my thoughts now.
What is a “church pianist?”
That term brought to mind a lady who plays piano in a traditional service where all there is a piano and the congregation sings to it. But as I’m sure you know, there are various musical cultures in church, different instrumentation, available musicians, and expectations.
Because we are so broad and cover an extensive range of music, developing the skill set to play is quite daunting. Does the pianist need to play the keyboard to emulate the contemporary sounds of Elevation Worship or Hillsong? The answer is a resounding “no.” But because we can adapt the songs of different instrumentations and production to our room, people, and instrumentation, we must have a good perspective on what makes different sounds tick and how to compensate compositionally for our instrumentation. For example, how to play an acoustic piano in a section of music originally conceived and recorded with spacy keyboard pad sounds.
It’s not just about playing the piano. What takes the worship and music to the next level is understanding what all the instruments present can and need to do and adapting quickly to those scenarios. In other words, if I have a bass player and drums today, I play the tune accordingly. If I have piano and cello next week, I won’t play it the same way at all! It’ll be different and hopefully just as enriching or even more so, but it requires the constant process of re-imagining my part and the totality of the instrumentation.
This skill of quickly adapting to the present reality of the sound and re-imagining my role and the total package is ever-present. And even if I were dealing with the same instrumentation every week, it would still be necessary in simple things like tempo and groove. Older, more experienced musicians drilled into me the idea early on that there is no wrong tempo if you simply change how you feel the music. That process is one of the most difficult to explain to less experienced musicians, and even experienced musicians struggle with it. Players and leaders have one tempo and feel in their ear, and if I ask them to change it, play them what I mean, count the tune off at the new tempo and feel, inevitably, they revert to what’s their head. They haven’t re-imagined where the new tempo and feel sit.
Find two drastically different takes on a cover song, one fast with an explosive band and another slow with a couple of acoustic instruments. The versions have been re-imagined. (Dave here. It reminds me of this version of U2’s Beautiful Day)
I know you have that basic skill set. The challenge for a church musician is putting together an entire set of re-imagined songs every week with minimal prep time. We don’t have weeks and months to sit in the studio and develop our new and fresh “cover” of the tune. We have to imagine and play 4 or 5 of those in a two-hour rehearsal.
“What are the highest priority skills necessary?”
As a “church pianist,” one of your most significant abilities will be growing comfortable with re-imagining material on the piano with other instruments that change weekly. Doing it quickly and communicating with other musicians is the ultimate challenge.
So, learning how to create different grooves, feel, tempo, and space on the piano and with other instruments will make you a dangerously effective pianist. Listen to music with various grooves and notice what the piano does and doesn’t do because time and space are as much about what is felt but not played as it is about what is played. Even more so, I would say. Two or three notes per bar played while feeling every sixteenth note of that bar will emote the time, whereas playing every sixteenth note in the bar will kill the groove. If you listen to a funk band, odds are each musician is playing much less than you might expect at first, and they all think like drummers. The band is just one big drum set, each voice part of the overall beat.
It’s all about emoting the feel of the music rather than playing it.
“What are the most important skills and qualities of a church pianist compared to any other pianist?”
When I say what is necessary is to “emote” the music, I’m saying that we all need to be leaders. I think you could tell by having a different vocalist at each service last time we played that having musicians in front who are leaders and musicians is paramount. It makes all the difference, and I am thinking about this in terms of directing, that is, communicating to our musicians that they are all leaders. It’s our job to “lead” the congregation in musical worship expression, meaning we don’t “drive” them, but we cue them so we are unified. How can the piano be most effective in cueing people? By now, you’re aware that when I think about “turnarounds” from verse to verse, refrain to verse, chorus to bridge, I’m not thinking about the most artistic and coolest possible musical passage to get from point to A to point B, I’m most concerned with the most OBVIOUS way to do it, where it feels natural, satisfying, and is easy for people to catch.
In reference to Dave’s Five Faders, you can be sure that taking this approach runs counter to my “Artist” fader, which is a pretty prominent part of my skill set, though it’s not contrary to my “Educator” and “Shepherd” skill set.
Playing piano in the church is leading congregational worship and developing and honing pianistic devices to aid that flow - chord turnarounds, tags, melodic passages, phrasing, and dynamics. I don’t have a method book or list of practice tools to help with that. But just being aware of it and orienting your prep time toward those ends is a good start.
We all bring our unique flavor, and that’s great. There’s no one size fits all way of playing music. Your sense of phrasing, dynamic touch, and harmonic sense are your own. What’s essential is to adapt your experience to the congregation, speak their language to express your ideas, and find ways to adjust your musical sensibilities so that you lead most effectively. Your ‘obvious’ musical turnarounds will probably be much cooler than mine, and that’s what we’re after as long as they lead effectively.
“How can I practically improve?”
This is a difficult question, and one, as a teacher, I struggle to answer for every student. “What should I practice this week?” I can say this: follow your passion but get involved in musical situations that may be a stretch. Take a one-off country & western gig if offered the chance. I look at everything that comes my way as a chance to develop something. If I get offered an electric guitar gig that might not be totally in my wheelhouse, I evaluate whether I can handle the commitment, and if I can, then I look at what I might get out of it in terms of developing a new skill set. This might be my chance to shore up my rock soloing. It might be a little pressure, and I might have to put some work into it, but I’ll have a broader skill set on the other side.
~geo
-Dave Helmuth
(purchase our book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)
The Church Pianist (How To Re-imagine Music For Your Context) (Nº 369)
