Worship Piano Advice

Have I ever explained why I’m so insistent on playing things exactly like the recording? When I was reviewing How Beatiful for some event I had to play for a while back I went over to Minho’s to practice on his keyboard and I think he thought I was being too extreme in my exactness. He was probably right. But there’s a method to my madness.

There’s a few reasons why I do this, but a primary one is musical growth. You cannot grow as a musician unless you play something different. Sounds obvious; playing better necessarily requires playing differently. But in practice, it’s a really hard thing to do. Once you reach a certain comfortable proficiency level, your natural tendency is to keep playing the same way, especially in worship, where you rarely get written music. You tend to play the way you always play. Which means no growth.

To grow, you need to continually learn to play differently. And you can’t know exactly how to play differently on your own; if you did, you’d already be playing that way. So recordings for me are kind of a guide. When you force yourself to play exactly like a recording, to the minutest detail, it breaks you out of habitual playing and helps you grow as a musician. You pick up on subtle details, like different chord voicings, melodic runs and rhythms. All these things add up and make you better.

If I ever taught like a worship piano class (don’t hold your breath), I’d basically start just by passing out the sheet music to selected songs from the Vineyard worship songbooks volumes 1-3 and telling everyone to learn them all exactly as they’re written. They’re easy to play and help build an intuition as to what worship keyboard feels like in terms of chord structure, melody, and left hand. By playing it over and over, you build a kind of worship sense. Then I’d pass out the sheet music to selected Hosanna songs, which are a bit more complex chordally. That’s basically how I learned, by playing the sheet music over and over. And the only way I continue to learn is by pushing myself to play different things.

So that’s my worship piano advice for all those zero people who wanted it. Buy songbooks and play it exactly, over and over.