How to Grow As A Worship Pianist
- By Junjie Huang
- Published 09/11/2008
- Worship Leaders
- Unrated
There are three ways to increase your skill in choosing the right notes to play for worship.
1) Learn a complementary style of music.
If you are a classically trained musician, take lessons in jazz piano. Learn a few jazz standards and how to do jazz improvisation. You will then learn how to feel what are the more appropriate notes to use on the piano to get the effect you want.
If you are more of a contemporary/jazz player, learn music notation and study two-part inventions (from Baroque music). They will train you to use less notes to imply the chords, instead of banging out everything and crowding out the congregation's singing, as many other church pianists do.
2) Sing and play.
Pay special attention to how the songs interact with the chords and rhythms created. Are the chords and rhythms you're given the best fit for the song? If you are unable to sing a song comfortably using certain chords or rhythms, those chords
Singing and playing will also allow you to test out any ideas you may have, to see if they will work for supporting the congregation's singing of a song.
3) Learn the guitar.
Many church pianists are weak in two areas: their overall sense of rhythm and their choice of notes. Learning the guitar strengthens you in these two areas.
Because the sound of a guitar is thinner than that of a piano, you can strum more actively on a guitar than you can comp on a piano. This allows you to get a feeling of rhythmic intensity, and you can carry over the effect to piano playing when you know what you are looking for.
On the piano, you can pile up the notes to create really thick chords. But these don't usually work well for contemporary church worship. Guitars give you only six (or often five) notes to work with. You have to choose your notes really well, because you don't have that many to work with.
Conclusion: These three tips are simple, but not easy. They require you to go out of what many pianists have as their comfort zone, and it's tempting to rationalize away the need for these methods.
But if you are deadly serious about serving the Lord with the best you can give him, these three methods of increasing your skill as a worship pianist will give you the greatest growth in the shortest amount of time. So are you up to the challenge?
Junjie Huang
What do you get when you put together the mind of a philosophy major, the heart of a Bible teacher, the hands of a musician and more than 14 years in the worship ministry?
You get the kind of person who teaches what others don’t.
Junjie Huang is a graduate from National University of Singapore, (B.A.), a multi-instrument musician and, in his own words, a “die-hard nonconformist”. He has served and ministered in a wide range of settings, from small groups to prayer meetings to church services both in small churches and mega-churches. He also enjoys imparting his understanding and skills in worship to those who have the desire to serve God in the worship ministry.
He has both a love for the Scriptures and a penchant for asking uncomfortable questions and can frequently be found pondering Bible questions that other people don’t really think much about.
In his free time (“free time? What’s that? Sounds like an interesting concept…”) Junjie enjoys learning new things, training in ancient methods of Japanese conflict resolution and imparting his wisdom and insights to his two sons, Jessiah and Jacques.
To learn more about the craft of leading worship and other aspects of
worship ministry, go to http://www.