I am in the middle of the series of how pianists can adapt to new more contemporary music in church and I want to take a small and very relevant detour today and discuss string reductions. The reason string reductions are relevant is because very very often, today’s church pianists are asked to play them […]
Category Archives: Free Lessons
Read Part 1 here Last week, I gave a foundational principle about playing modern church music (sometimes called praise and worship or CCM). The principle was this: The first thing you need to learn is how to play the right chords at the right time. Let’s say that you have to make a choice. You […]
A few months ago, I published a post where I promised to discuss how pianists can adjust when their church moves from traditional to more contemporary music. Sadly, I promptly forgot about my promise until someone pointed it out last week. Time to remedy that… Let me introduce an idea this week to get you […]
Read Part 1 here In Part 1, I introduced a general rule: the further from root the melody note is, the more sophisticated the sound is going to be. This is a general rule because it requires a lot of nuance and is not always true. For example, there will be occasions where you get a […]
As promised, here is a video I did to demonstrate some tips for how perform We’re Marching to Zion (my new arrangement). I don’t know that I have ever talked here on the blog about a few of these things but then I don’t know I have ever published an arrangement like this before either. […]
I was recently at an event where lots of people were presenting songs and someone presented a song that sort of blew people away. It stood out in certain ways that made people sit up and take notice. In my opinion, there was one huge factor that made it stand out and I want to […]
There is an elusive idea in the performance of music that we all instinctively know: just playing the notes is not enough. In fact, I would go so far as to say that just playing the notes and observing every other marking on the music (such as dynamics and articulations) is not enough to qualify […]
When I look back over the time I have been a piano player, I can easily see how my thinking has changed over time. I started playing when I was eight and within a few years, was playing in church. Somewhere along the way, I started playing offertory arrangements. Back in those days, options were […]
I laughed when I just wrote the title of this blog post because it reminds me of a few axioms that I live by. You have heard me say them before but indulge me: Those that know the least know it the loudest. Those that know all the answers don’t know all the questions. And […]
If you have played a lot of my arrangements such as last month’s “I Need Thee Every Hour,” you have seen me do this kind of thing quite a bit: Note what happens in bar 31. You guys know by now that I automatically change almost every V-I progression in music to a ii-V-I. However, […]
I am a big fan of cross rhythms which I would define as playing patterns that intentionally do not align uniformly with the beat divisions they are played on. I know that sounds complicated but here is an example. Let’s say that you repeat a four note pattern on top of a triplet rhythm. Because the […]