KEYS
LAYUP DRILLS & WORSHIP KEYS | David Pfaltzgraff photo by Puk Khantho on Unsplash
Did you play sports as a kid? I cut my teeth on tee-ball and then moved to basketball in fifth grade. As a homeschooled kid, I did not have a school team to join, so instead I signed on with a roughshod“ traveling team” made up exclusively of homeschooled boys like me. We were not the most socially adept bunch. Our coach was a kind-hearted but passionate gentleman whose full-time occupation was preaching fire and brimstone at one of the local churches. We heard often about how the game of basketball was not what you saw on the latest NBA highlight reels. It was not the flashy dunks, the behind-the-back dribbles, or the cool sneakers we were all caught up in. It was the fundamentals. worship set has its fundamentals too. And the most overlooked one is exactly the kind of thing my coach used to harp on: all of the small, easy to miss moments of transition between the flashy ones.
But often we pour our prep into the songs themselves and treat the spaces between them as an afterthought. Most often it is the keys player who can do the most to turn these moments into something intentional.
So let’ s talk about how to handle those transitions well, because in my experience, a set lives or dies in the spaces between the songs just as much as in the songs themselves.
make the conscious decision to not drop out like the rest of your team. When a song ends consider whether you can serve the moment by continuing to sustain that final chord or even repeating the progression once more.
FROM HERE TO THERE
Key, tempo, and feel changes are where keys players can truly fill the void. Not only can you use a pad to bridge a gap between tempos or feels, but you can often seamlessly fade into the next key by allowing common tones from the previous key to sustain or using software or hardware that can fade the old pad out while you fade a new one in.
I cannot tell you how many hours of our twiceweekly practices were spent running basic layup drills. I can tell you it was a mind-numbing amount. But our coach knew something: it is the moments of a game that seem simplest, the ones most likely to be taken for granted or treated as an afterthought, that are the most worth a team’ s focus. The unglamorous work of moving the ball from one end of the court to the other. Passing rhythms, dribbling exercises, and yes, layup drills.
I traded basketball for music a long time ago, but that lesson stuck with me, because a
DEAD AIR
Let’ s start with silence. Not the intentional, holy kind of silence a worship leader might call for on the fly, but the accidental kind. A song ends with a big, decisive‘ one’ chord and then the guitarist is stomping pedals, the worship leader is adjusting their capo, and the drummer is waiting for the count-in.
This is the keys player’ s home turf. You can fill these moments of necessary transition with a subtle ambient pad to give your team time to get where they need to be if you just
If you’ re unsure where to start, consider looking at a diagram of the circle of fifths the next time you’ re confronted with a key change and map out a journey around or through it. You can often use adjacent steps to act as transitional chords themselves, or when you’ re on opposite sides of the circle a simple and subtle shift straight to the new key may be all that’ s required.
It’ s important to not just practice these moments, but to even recognize there is something there to be practiced in the first place. These kinds of opportunities are the sneaky ones that may not be evident, may not
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