Leading alone!

A friend of mine, Chris Kuti wrote this blog for worship leaders on the importance of leading worship by yourself. Chris explains it well, so read his thoughts for some more inspiration.

The art of being flexible and the ability to think quickly and adapt to your surroundings is an ability that any musician should strive for. Playing in a live band setting requires the ears to hear what's going on around you so you can lock in and add your voice and instrument, not distract from the overall sound and product. It takes practice to train our ears to hear the patterns and chord progressions that we play, but in our practice we must train ourselves to think quickly and continue to be flexible.

I know many musicians who practice hours and hours a day yet can't change or adapt to someone else's playing. As do most things I believe that being a team musician starts in the heart. Growing up as a young player with older musicians I had a huge ego and whether or not I admitted it, what I played I wanted to be heard. This is hard for many musicians, in order to play music publicly there needs to be an audience to hear it. It is often counter-intuitive and a struggle for musicians to want others around them to be heard more than themselves, and to grasp the idea that they are contributing to a collective sound, not simply playing the same group of notes at the same time as the people around them.

Similarly, audiences often have a tough time grasping this is as well and I often have to bite my tongue when people approach me with a concern that they couldn't hear an individual on stage. Most of the time that is probably a good thing and is the actual goal. Unless a team member has a clearly defined solo, or a part that really stands out (drums/lead vocal) the point is to not hear the individual, but hear the final product - the band playing together. Untrained, non-musical individuals typically don't have the ability to pick out individual instruments anyway, especially if the band is doing their job!

As a musician and worship leader I take developing my craft very seriously and look for opportunities to make myself adapt, listen and think quickly. Even though it stretches our band sometimes to think out of the box, or approach a song very differently for the sake of learning how, we do it so that we can get better and practice listening to each other. I also watch and listen to the videos of every set that we play. Even when it's embarrassing and sometimes excruciating hearing myself, and noticing our mistakes, it's one of the best ways to slowly get better.

I had an opportunity to practice being flexible and think differently than normal on New Years. Our band had the holiday off and I lead worship by myself at the keyboard. I notice several things when I lead by myself. There is an element of feeling exposed and alone without the support of fellow musicians on stage, but I actually feel a little freer and less distracted without the responsibility to think about cuing the band and remembering all the correct transitions. It's easier to cover for myself than recover from a train wreck I could potentially lead the whole band into!

I'll be doing this several more times in January which is good because I always need the practice!