. . . how can I develop myself as a musician in preparation for this trip? I’m so glad you asked. In the next few days (weeks, months, decades) I’ll be talking about developing yourself as a musician. For the sake of time and space, I’ll be talking mainly with an emphasis on guitar. However, if you play the piano, zither, lyre, or something else, most of these principles apply and I’ll be more specific towards you if you ask.
So is it okay to use the guitar in worsship? I know some of you think this is a silly question, but some people are strictly hymn folks, with piano and organ, others say no instruments at all. So I just wanted to give you pickers something to back yourselves up with.
”
The LORD will surely save me; So we will play my songs on stringed instruments All the days of our life at the house of the LORD.” Isaiah 38:20
So now we have that cleared up, let’s go on to developing yourelf as a musician. Everything I’m gonna be talking about in the next few days works together.
Your ear. Now I’m not saying you need to have a good ear to lead worship, but, well, yeah, you need to have a good ear to lead worship. Let me share an example from my past. Every year we have at my church what we call the Galilean picnic, where the church meets at a farm and we have a covered dish dinner, and everybody fellowships and fishes and play volleyball and whatnot. Well one year our music minister asked me to help him lead the worship on guitar. I said sure. So he gave me a list of the songs we would sing and what key to play them in and I practiced them and was ready. So it got to be our time and we sang our song and I played to them. Then, our wonderful music minister turns to the congregation and says “Do we have any requests?” Not exactly on the schedule. So somebody calls something out. It’s a pretty simple one, and I got it figured out and we played it. Then we did another. Then we had a request and our music minister sang the first note before I could even establish a key (for those of you who play, you can imagine how daunting that was). Fortunately it was a key I could play in and we made it through.
So . . . how would you fair in that situation? What are questions you might be thinking of right now? James, how did you know what key to play in? James, how did you know what the next chord was? James, hymns have some crazy chords thrown in, how did you know what those were? All of this came from having a developed ear. I am in no way saying I have the best ear in the world, but it’s pretty decent, and you should work on yours for this trip because, well, you never know. And, what if you do buy a new little instrument like I mentioned yesterday, and two days later you are asked to lead worship on it? Scream? No no, you can do it. Getting to that point isn’t always the most fun, but we’ll go through it together.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about keys, scales, chords, chord progressions, numbers, solfege, etc (or at least one of these). Peace.
