Now playing in a band well, like anything else, will take plenty of time and effort. If you are like me, you like the idea that no matter what you may already know there is considerably more to learn, that the journey is long, and that you need to set goals, apply yourself, be ready to learn and experiment, and keep going even when discouraged.

On the other hand, Church is something that doesn’t encourage patience. Sunday comes every week, ready or not, and the congregation expects its leaders to magically know everything, it seems, without giving much time to training them, particularly in music. I imagine they want to leave that to the schools.

My questioner was having trouble finding useful information for keyboard players about what to do in a praise band elsewhere on the internet and thought maybe I could answer the question. The internet is a big place; probably somebody else has taken up this question in depth, but I sympathize with her not being able to find it. Anyhow, I like being able to share what I know, and being who I am, my first reaction is to plan a series of articles that will gradually get one up to a fairly high level of proficiency.

This will probably take me some time, and, like I said before, in church, there isn’t any. Besides, we have to start somewhere. So before we take up the larger questions of how to read a lead sheet or how to improvise, let me simply address her most basic question: what exactly does a keyboard player do in a praise band, anyway?

The first thing I would do is to take a look at the other players (this is good for social and spiritual reasons as well!). Our band has a bass player, a drummer, and an acoustic and electric guitarist in addition to the keyboard player.

So what are they there for?

Drums are obviously a rhythmic instrument. They basically drive the band. Our drummer usually sets the tempo for each piece by counting and clicking (with his sticks) at the start of each piece (1! 2! 3! 4!) and, because he is a good drummer, you can tell when a new section of the piece is about to begin by the relative fanciness of his drum fill. The end of the piece is usually obvious, too, because of the way he fills in the measure with a little drum virtuousity. Even the breaks (moments where we are all silent for a few measures while the singers go on without us) are obvious because of the way he accents them with his drums. This gives us all a feeling of security. I’m glad we’ve got a drummer like him—I’ve been in bands where every measure sounded like every other measure because all the drummer could do was keep time and it contributed to the sense of confusion (“where are we?”), especially because we kept changing the orders of the verses and choruses around every week and weren’t always good at keeping track!

The bass player’s role is also obvious. He is there to play the bottom note of each chord, the bass. Most bands read from sheets of lyrics with chord symbols above (‘lead sheets’), which is usually just the name of the chord in capital letters. If the chord says “F” then F is the root of the chord, or the foundation note. The bass player’s job is simply to play an F. He can add fills if he likes, or jazz up his role a bit, but he is basically there to, literally, play the bass. If the F on the page has a slash after it, say F/A, then the person who wrote the piece, or at least the lead sheet, still wants an F chord, but with an A in the bass. Technically, the bass player is the only person in the band who needs to worry about what is written after the slash, although more advanced keyboard and guitar players will notice it as well.

Speaking of advanced guitar players, our band has one, although at its most basic, the guitar is a chordal instrument. It can pick, too, and do sparse broken chord patterns, but usually guitarists strum full chords. Ours adds fills and does solos between verses and things. Our acoustic player fulfills mainly the same role, but without the solos.

So why raise the question of what the keyboard does and then start by discussing everybody else? Well, for one thing, you learn what you don’t have to do in a band. If you have been playing piano by yourself for a lot of years and suddenly join a band, you may find it disorienting to realize that many of your traditional roles are taken by other people. On the other hand, if you have just been thrown into this situation, with little experience, it may be liberating to realize you don’t have to do everything by yourself.

Since the drums are handling the rhythm, a keyboard player doesn’t have to. If you are playing a keyboard, as opposed to a piano, this means that you can simply sustain chords. I was being a bit facetious in my first keyboard lesson, but it only takes a bit more sophistication to play chords in a stylistically pleasing manner on a keyboard with a band. And sometimes even I do exactly that and no more.

Therefore, if you see a full measure of music (or several words) with the chord C overtop, you can simply play a C chord and hold it down until it is time for the next chord. It is not necessary to repeat it, or try to be rhythmically inventive with it; the drummer is making clear where the beats fall. If you were playing by yourself, that would be your job, now it isn’t. You CAN be rhythmically assertive, but you don’t have to be.

Since the bass player is playing the bass, you don’t have to do that, either. You don’t necessarily have to be IN the bass, either! A pianist who has been playing for years with both hands may find it astonishing that suddenly they can get by with only one. But if you are learning to play from a lead sheet or improvise for the first time, simplifying your approach will help to learn the new methods. You CAN play the same notes as the bass player, but I usually try not to ‘double’ what other people are playing because it sounds better not to.

You may be starting to wonder what there is left (besides sustaining chords) for the keyboardist to do. If the bass player handles the bass, and the guitarist handles the chords, and the drummer gets the rhythmic action, what’s left? Well, the melody of the song is, of course, but that’s what the singers are for. If you’ve been playing sheet music of your favorite popular songs, chances are the melody is included with the piano part. I leave that out when I’m playing with a singer, on the theory that they can hold their own without having the piano plunking out their notes. If it turns out they can’t, I’m always there to strategically play a few notes, or several, or all of them as the situation requires. But I don’t think it sounds good when instruments double the singers. They have their own function.

If you have other instrumentalists, (say, a flute player) they, too, will be playing melodies of one sort or other. Ours usually plays with us on introductions and interludes, but not during the times when the singers are singing.

So what do you have to do? It may be a bit humbling to realize: practically nothing. Although from a spiritual standpoint it may be healthy to know that your church will not fall apart if you are not there, THE church will go on without you as well, and, well, the Divine order won’t be too seriously mangled because you didn’t say the right thing at the right time to the right person (although events may be altered a bit). Similarly, if you get lost during a song or get your fingers twisted up, the band can probably keep going, and you can take a breath and find your place again.

It is often important for us to realize what all we do not have to do (or even should do), and it is also important to take into account the roles, duties, and characters or everyone else. But before I send you away thinking you have nothing to do, I should state that actually there are many roles that a keyboard can fill within the context of a praise band, roles that I’ll have to save for my next post. They range from the extremely simple to the very complicated, as the ability of the player and the situation of the song dictates.

But in the meantime, we've found a place to start. Sustaining chords is actually something which is unique to a keyboard. The other instruments can't do it. And it often fills out the sound rather nicely. And although I personally get bored doing only this, it is a good place to begin, particularly as we begin to discuss reading a leadsheet and improvising, two things that I am presuming are fairly new to you.

These articles will be posted on the Godmusic page throughout the summer. I may edit them a bit by then, too, as they are basically first drafts. But for those who don't want to wait that long, read on:

Improvisation 101
posted June 7, 2010

I have a strange way of doing things sometimes: someone asked me what a keyboard has to do in a praise band, and in my last post I basically said, well, nothing really. This is not the kind of answer you want to give if you are trying to stand up for the importance of something. Remind yourself not to invite me to speak at your next rally for funding of the arts!

But the method behind this insanity was this: many people who are trained as musicians come at praise bands from the standpoint of one who has been playing written music all their lives. The way we relate to music is to play all the notes on the page. Except that in the world of praise bands, there usually aren't any. Hence the problem. And in order to solve it it seems to me that the best way to do it is to pull down the old building and put up a new one. Hence in the first article we basically stripped away all the old orders of notes, and now we are going to replace it with some new ones.

The email I received from the person asking me the question suggested she was trying to work from solo piano sheet music versions of the praise band songs and somehow get them to work in a praise band situation. Basically, though, what you end up doing is having to create your own arrangement on the spot, using some of the notes provided and discarding others, adding some new ones, etc.  I do that occasionally, but it is a pretty advanced activity, and it already assumes you have a more complex relationship with notes on a page than 'I see, I play.' So rather than approach things that way, I think it would be much easier to get rid of the written solo versions altogether and learn to use the same music (or lack thereof) the rest of the band is using. What I mean is that you might as well learn to improvise from a lead sheet.

The thought of doing this scares the socks off some people, so I hasten to add that what follows will, from a technical standpoint, be mind numbingly simple. In other words, if you have several years of piano training, you'll be able to play these notes in your sleep in the dark backwards. This is to compensate for the fact that I'm asking you to try a completely new way of musical thinking. Try to exercise the same amount of patience with yourself, and ask the rest of the band to extend the same courtesy. It may take a few months before you even begin to sound like your old self with all the technical bells and whistles, only then you will be pulling them out of your head on your own initiative rather than doing exactly what a page of music told you to, no more, no less.

Think about it for a minute: we relate to the English language in three ways. We read it, we write it, we speak it. If we could only read what other people had written we would be pretty limited in our ability to communicate. Yet that is actually what is happening to people who don't engage music creatively. They can only give speeches written by others. Improvising is like speaking music. When you have a conversation you are creating verbal communication on the spot, pulling out words you know and putting them in orders that you know work in order to convey what you want to say. And you do it every day without thinking it is a huge deal. You are improvising.

Let's get started. The first thing you want to get used to doing is playing chords on demand when the lead sheet says to play them. Borrow some lead sheets from your band, or you can get them online from several places []. If you have an electronic keyboard you can set it to some kind of organ sound, and you will have something nobody else in the band has--a sustaining instrument. Guitars, basses, drums: all their sound starts to decay as soon as they make it (piano, too). But not a sustained synthesizer sound. It has its own unique contribution to make to a band's sound. Often you'll hear such a sound in the background of a song, playing what are effectively whole notes and half note chords. If you've never done this before or are just not used to it, this is a good place to start.

   C                             G                 F              G
This is basically what a line of lyrics looks like

        C                            G                                F          G
And most of the time the chords aren't really that hard

what you'll be doing is this: if you see a C, play one of these:

For a G, play one of these:

and so on. What follows is a chart of all the major and minor chords (in their most basic presentation) in the known universe, for reference:

major chords:

minor chords:

That may seem like a lot of chords, and, frankly, you probably won't use them all. Depending on the ability of the other members of your band (and whether they can play in 'hard' keys) you might never use the chords I've placed on the bottom line of each section, which is why I put them there.

The other thing to remember, if you are not able to play all of these chords just off the top of your head, is that it would be more useful to get to know these chords by playing an actual praise song. Find something simple, with a grand total of about four different chords in it (which shouldn't be too hard), and learn to play it, a line at a time, by playing the chords as printed above whenever you see its symbol above the words on the lead sheet. Eventually that won't seem like a big deal at all, but if you are not used to doing it, be patient.

Technically, of course, it's pretty rudimentary. But the fun/trouble begins when you have to be able to get to the next chord on demand and on time. Here, though, the music itself will help us enormously. Many praise pieces consist of patterns of three or four chords which repeat in the same order throughout a section or for the entire piece ("Invitation Fountain" only has two, a G and a C, and goes on for 6 minutes!). Since repetition greatly aids learning, practicing a pattern of repeated chords will help you to soon be able to get through an entire piece this way. When you can do this (with a metronome, perhaps?) try practicing along with a recording. Then, when you are ready, sit in with the band. Realize you are limiting yourself to simple, basic triads for the first week until you get used to the idea. Then you can start trying variations on this idea:

1-play the chords in different octaves (for instance, a string of chords in a lower register, and then one in a higher register). This is a pretty simple transition to make, but it takes you one step farther from playing notes you see; first you are playing without music, then you are playing those 'unseen' chords in different octaves.

2-try leaving out a note from a chord. If it's a C-chord, just play E and G, or E and C. Or just E. Or just G. See how many variations you can come up with.

3-try inverting the chord. If you've never done this before, it will take some time. Instead of playing, from bottom to top, C-E-G, trying putting the C on top. Play E-G-C:

or G-C-E:

This step is actually very important in creating smoother patterns from chord to chord (and there's less jumping around). In a later post we'll discuss this in more detail.

Keep in mind that gaining fluency in these skills will probably take a couple of months of sustained effort. So far we've limited ourselves to simple chords, which will not make your playing sound all that exciting. And there are hundreds more things we could do. But in the meantime, you will already be a valuable member of your band, getting used to the songs they play and the way they play them. And you'll be building a foundation for more exciting (and difficult) things to come.

I started this series of posts with the overwhelming thought that the concept of playing without notes in front of a person is just too crazy for many people to seriously consider. There are the ones who do this all the time, for whom it just seems natural, but between those who play this way and those who don’t there seems to be a huge chasm, a barrier that many people are unwilling to even try to cross; maybe they are just afraid they can’t possibly do it.

So I thought the way to begin would be to make things as simple as possible. How many situations in life allow a person, after many five minutes of learning, to go out and do something? And yet, if you’ve chosen a simple song with about three chords (say it’s just G C and D over and over) you can learn to play them the way I showed you in Improvisation 101, above, and, without learning a thing more, sit in with the band, and contribute to the sound. What’s more, by telling you what notes to play when you see a G above the lyrics, I’ve eliminated the huge number of choices you face when the lead sheet tells you what chord to play but doesn’t tell you how to play it. That kind of decision making is at the root of a lot of fear of improvisation. What do I do? Says the beginner. Do this, I say back. No decisions involved.

But at some point you are probably going to get bored just playing this basic, root position chords (that’s the technical name for them) over and over, which is why we started experimenting with alternate ways to play them. Ironically, just when you thought things were going to get more complex, they got simpler. You’ve got three notes to play in this chord, I said, now let’s only play two. Or one. Try different combinations. Learn by doing it.

These things may still seem pretty simple, but they are really pretty far-reaching ideas; everything builds from there.

You may have noticed, though, when you played chords like that that, as simple as it was to think about them, there was a bit of jumping involved, which made the transition from one chord to the next not sound so smooth. Today, we are going to eliminate that. (Next time, we’ll see about world peace.)

Let’s take probably the simplest chord progression in the book. G-C-D:

[]

Notice a jump between the G and C chords? The way to get rid of that jump is to play an inversion of one of the chords. Now it will obviously help to know what an inversion is (a chord whose notes are positioned in a different order, bottom to top) and to be able to play them quickly and easily. If you don’t know this, it is worth taking the time and trouble to learn. Here is a chart of all those chords from Improvisation 101 (including the hard ones) showing the two other possible ways notes can be positioned and still be three-note chords in closed position (all three notes are as close together as possible, not spread out over a couple of octaves, for instance, or skipping one of the notes and placing it higher or lower):

[chart]

If you can play through the contents of the top line of this chart without looking at it, you are ready to do the sort of thing described below:

Play the G chord. Instead of moving to the C chord in ‘root position’ as you did before, play it in second inversion:

[]

Now, continue on to the D chord, also in second inversion:

[]

Notice that between the first two chords, the bottom note stayed the same, and the top two only moved up one. This makes for a very smooth progression. Once you get used to doing it, you will also realize that, far from having to make deep mental calculations on the run every time you want to do this, your hands will start searching out these inversions for you. Some hints:

--One or two of the notes won’t change from one chord to the next; the other(s) will only move by step.

--If you know the key of the piece,

You can also learn the above example as a memorized formula. You’ll be using it often enough! But there are a few other ways to get from chord to chord using inversions. One is to start on a first-inversion G chord and move to C in root position. Then you can go to the D chord in root position, or you can go down to the D chord in 2^nd inversion:

[]

You can start with the G in root position, move the outside notes down to a 1^st inversion C major chord, and then continue down to a root position D chord, or go up to the D chord in 1^st inversion.

[]

If you can’t get to all of those notes on the fly, remember the trick from Improvisation 102 and leave out a note or two from one of the chords. When you are playing with other instrumentalists you don’t need to play all of the notes of a chord.

There are quite a few things one can do with sustaining sounds. They can range from the ridiculously simple single note drone, to two or three note chords (in various octaves), as in improvisation 101, or they can encompass full, rich sounds. There are hundreds of ways to play a chord. Taking the notes C, E, and G, and arranging them throughout the keyboard, we can arrive at these combinations (and there are many, many more):

keep in mind that any of these could also be arpeggiated (i.e.., broken up, and the notes played one at a time, from the bottom (usually)); if you are using a piano sound (or an actual piano) rather than an electronic keyboard, you would probably be better served to keep more rhythmic activity in your playing generally, since the sounds do not last very long, and they begin to decay immediately. If you are both an organist and a pianist, you may have noted the differences between the way composers write for the two very different instruments.

Of course, any of these patterns also give you more to learn. If you want to play every chord of a given song using any of the above examples, you have some applying to do. Rather than make charts for every one of them, I'm going to let you find them on your own (which ought to make them stick better since you have to earn it!). Keep in mind that the difficulty of doing this will go down exponentially after you have played through the chord changes a few hundred times, and most praise songs are perfect for doing just that. For instance, you could try the first example above using this chord pattern:   C   G   F   G   and, after your band has rehearsed the song that keeps to these same four chords repeated again and again for four minutes a few times, you'll be quite good at it. But for starters, you have to figure out how to translate any example I give you in one harmony to any other. The way to do that is to note the relationship between the two chords. G is five notes up from C (counting the first note). The remaining notes in any layout will be, too. So, if you wanted to take the first measure in the example I just have you, which is a variety of C chord, and do the same thing on a G chord, you would have to move every note up a fifth. Probably by keeping your hands in the same basic shape you can even 'guess' at it without having to think too hard. But the way to do it in your head would be to take every note up a fifth from where it was before (ie., up 5 notes if the first note counts as one; up four more notes. If you're wondering why I do it this way it is because music theorists do it the same way, with what they call 'intervals'--the distance between two notes). The result of this little computation (or guess!) should be:

There, I just let you cheat. Getting from G to F should be really easy, since you are only going down one note, and heading back to G is simply doing it in reverse. Its important to remember, if you are trying something new, that you are trying to acquire facility with a pattern of chords, which usually means three or four in a row, and about one line of lyrics. Once they repeat (ad naseum) the job of adapting something new is basically over. In other words, divide and conquer. Don't let that entire page of words and chord symbols taunt you with the idea that this is going to be impossible.  Learn to work on one line at a time !

This is probably a good time to get our ears involved in all of this. If you are still unnerved at the idea of improvising, you are probably glad to take a formulaic approach. I give you an idea, and, with a little homework, you can apply it to an entire song without having to really think up something new on the spot. But it is time to stress the role of the ear in all of this. When you arrive at the point where you are not spending all of your time worrying about getting your fingers to their assignments on time (which may be pretty soon if you are playing fairly simple arrangements of chords or drones) you can begin listening to the results and reacting to them accordingly. Does what you are playing sound pleasing? So pleasing that you bliss out for a moment and forget to change to the next chord when its time to do it? Does it still sound ok? Then stay there! Do you know why? No? Fair enough. Play it anyway. Sometimes mistakes can teach you a lot if you let them. If you are too busy trying to be correct all the time you won't listen to the results of your experiment and you won't learn anything I haven't explicitly written. And that's too bad because I can't possibly cover everything. (I wish St. Paul had written that somewhere.)

I know quite a bit about music theory. I've taught it at the college level (I have a doctorate in music) and I use this knowledge constructive to analyze and discuss many things I find in some pretty complex music. (I even threw a brief 'theory-based' explanation for why an apparent wrong note actually works with a chord in that first keyboard lesson above) But as an improviser I think it helps sometimes to let go of that and let your fingers do a little running. Knowing why things work is fascinating and helpful, but often we can't figure those things out on the fly, and it just slows us down to try, particularly if music theory is not second nature to us. I'm the last person to knock music theory, but I don't want to use it to handcuff you. If you don't know why it sounds good, but it sounds good, go for it.

Now some of us are not used to using our ears or our minds when it comes to music, having been fed all the notes and not encouraged to wonder why they were on the page, nor did we develop the ability to both play and listen to what we were playing. In which case, it will help to make what you do as simple as possible so that you can spend your time listening to it. The band will keep going.

Last week I spent a certain amount of time just playing single notes on a sustained sound. Rather than finding the roots of the chords (though you can do that) or one of the other two members of the chords (though that would work too) I wandered by step up and down the scale. Since chords are based on every other note of the scale, many chord changes work by using the notes that did not belong to the previous chord (not always, but often). So if the first chord of the progression was a D chord, and you start with a D, you can often get through a four chord progression by doing something like this (both examples assume we're in the key of D major):

or this:

It's surprising how often this works. Thinking melodically is good way to get your improvisation to stop sounding jerky; nothing could be smoother than an ascending or descending pattern. The catch is that you need to know what key the piece is in, and you need to know your scales (key of D=use of D major scale). Any chord-by-chord explanation I could offer for why it words would seem complicated to one not well-versed in theory (and would also require me to furnish a specific chord progression, which the above does not!). Meanwhile, if you are listening to what you are playing, you will be able to detect quickly whether what you are playing fits the chord or not. If it doesn't, move up a note or down a note until it does. You will have just created a small moment of tension in the music. This is not something to worry about; it is quite good, in fact. More about that later. Meanwhile, I'll just leave you with what I said to someone who once asked me why I never missed notes when I made things up. It isn't that, I assured her. It is simply that, whenever I do hit a note that doesn't fit with its surroundings, I make it become something that does, which makes it sound like I meant it all along. Musicians who improvise frequently often find that when they give themselves permission to think in music, they occasionally think themselves into a corner. And then they have to employ a 'nice save.' I read recently that pianist Keith Jarrett said something very similar to someone who asked that same question of him. So I figure I'm in good company.