I serve as both an Executive Pastor (XP) and Music Pastor at my church in upstate New York. The XP side of me loves practicality, and thus out of that comes this blog series on practical ideas to implement in your bands. I believe the principles offered over these next couple blogs are as relevant for 2 people leading a congregation as a band of 8 – 10 people.
In any thing team oriented there are different people with different roles. In football you have your offensive and defensive players, in baseball in-fielders and out-fielders, in restaurants you have waiters and dish washers, and in a band you have guitarists and drummers; there are different roles that need to come together in order to complete the over all goal. In sports its coming away victorious, in the restaurant business its giving the customer a great experience, and in worship its making the most beautiful and God glorifying music we can. I think you’ve probably guessed that I will focus on the latter.
When I talk about roles I’m not just going to be talking about the fact we play different instruments, that’s quite evident; rather I’m going to talk more the how we play our instruments. I’ve played in a few different worship bands, some with well seasoned musicians, and some with beginners looking to use their newly found skills to glorify God. I think all of us that play instruments know that we’ve come from the latter at some point.
What I have found in the bands with newer musicians, or musicians who never really desired to move past the basics is that they all tend to play the same thing. For guitarists its playing every chord progression on the low end with standard chords, bassists playing everything on E or A string between the open position and the 7th fret, or keyboard/piano players who play mid to low end on each song. None of these things are “bad” per say but put them all into one band playing the same song and a problem arises. The song gets a flat muddy tone where each persons notes don’t compliment one another but rather steps all over one another. That’s the problem I’d like to address in this series.
The ideas I’m going to present are nothing new, nothing innovative, but really just practical reminders for us as some might be new musicians, or might be arranging bands of new musicians. In this series I want to look at spacing out those high, mid, and low-end frequencies through out the entire band. I will take a look at sharing space within the guitar players, whether it be acoustics and electrics or multiple acoustics. Most songs today incorporate instrumentals in order to give pause for reflection in the middle of songs, or offer dynamic changes; I want to look at the different instrument roles during those breaks. Along that same vein I want to look at the difference between lead instrument roles and support instrument roles, both are important and necessary in every song we play. I hope to have video or audio examples for each topic I discuss in order to show you practical examples of each. And hopefully by the end you’ll be able to use these techniques within your bands.
Great article Ricky! This is something our team started to shift in a few years ago. I tell our team to “spread it out”. I almost always play with a Capo for this purpose. Looking forward to this series of posts.