Worship Musician Magazine September 2020 | Page 132

KEYS
FIXING YOUR WORSHIP KEYS MINDSET | David Pfaltzgraff
Do you have a favorite self-help book? I’m the
kind of person who will accumulate a dusty
stack of ‘inspiring’ books in various places
around my house if I’m not careful. Sometimes
they get more use as a coaster for my morning
coffee than as a way to improve my thinking,
habits, or actions.
The goal of today’s article is to avoid being
relegated to coaster level inspiration. I want
to highlight some mindsets I’ve seen in myself
during my experience as a worship keys player
and leader and lay out a course for shifting
towards more productive thinking over time.
It’s important to state from the get-go that
growing as a musician and as a worshipper
is a marathon, not a sprint. At least, that is,
if you want to avoid burnout and enjoy the
journey along the way. Let’s dig into three ways
to shift your thinking that will help you grow in
excellence while steering clear of burnout.
EXPECTING 2020 RESULTS FROM 1995
GEAR
Let’s start out with a base level of practicality. If
you want modern results at some point you’re
going to need to figure out a way to work with at
least some modern gear. Let me paint a picture
of how this mindset of ‘make it work with only
the gear I already have’ can end up slowing you
down on the path to growth.
Several years back I was a brand-new full-time
worship staff member tasked with oversight of
the youth ministry worship team at my church.
We had a yearly expense budget roughly
equivalent to the amount of cash you would
accumulate if you took a 30-minute walk and
picked up spare change along the way. We
were blessed with what we had don’t get
me wrong, but I think every worship leader
can relate to the desire (and let’s be honest,
pressure) to continue to innovate and ‘keep up’
with worship music trends at speed.
The only keyboard we had was a mid ‘90s
workstation from a well-respected company
that was cutting-edge when released, but by
the time it landed in our laps it had lost a bit of
that edge.
Nevertheless, I was committed to helping
my worship team sound like the bands that
everyone was listening to, no matter how many
futuristic synth sounds it required. Unfortunately,
what that looked like most of the time was me
spending hours each week cycling through the
five hundred patches available in the keyboard
and writing dozens of program change notes
in pencil on my keys player’s chord charts.
Sometimes they’d need to change patches up
to fifteen or twenty times a song!
It wasn’t good. I didn’t enjoy it, my keys players
didn’t enjoy it, and to be honest most of the
time all that hard work didn’t translate anyway.
Then I started to learn that there were affordable
options like MainStage that could drastically
improve both our sounds and workflow without
breaking the bank. Once I gave up on relying
on our existing, outdated gear alone to meet
those impossible expectations the quality of our
worship immediately improved.
Here’s the first mindset shift in a single
statement: Instead of expecting your old gear
to perform like the cutting edge, be realistic
about what its limitations are and find creative
ways to work within them while you plan for the
future.
TREATING 2020 GEAR LIKE 1995 GEAR
To continue with the story of ‘little David the
new worship leader who couldn’t because
he had no budget’, let’s get into the second
mindset shift.
Once I figured out that I could use my existing
MacBook as the brain of a MainStage keys rig I
was off to the races designing complex sounds
and workflows for my team. The problem was
that for a good while I was acting like it was ‘our
old rig only better’.
I found myself still spending hours and hours
each week designing patches, but now instead
of ‘only’ 500 I had thousands and thousands
of presets, patches, and plugins to obsessively
tweak. This was not good, folks. I’m the type
who loves to explore what’s possible but back
then I was just making worship planning harder
132 September 2020
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