keyboard skills for worship

8 Skills That Set You Apart as a Church Musician

8 Skills That Set You Apart as a Church Musician

A career in church music and ministry requires a variety of skills:

  • Performance skills: playing for worship and accompanying choirs, instrumentalists, and congregational singing. It sometimes includes harmonizing melodies, improvising, transposing, and even composing some of your own service music from time to time.

  • Leadership skills: choosing music that ties in with the rest of the service, perhaps selecting hymns each week, and leading the congregation in song.

  • Educational skills: introducing a variety of musical styles into worship, teaching new hymns or songs to the congregation, and if you’re directing an ensemble, teaching music-reading, rhythm, technique, musical expression, and aural skills.

5 Creative Ways to Spruce Up Your Hymn-Playing

5 Creative Ways to Spruce Up Your Hymn-Playing

As a church musician, you know the struggle:

You have numerous opportunities to use hymn arrangements and creative hymn-playing techniques in worship (like, multiple times in every service!), but access to hymn harmonizations and published resources is limited, and in some cases, they aren’t available at all.

The good news is, you don’t need to rely solely on published resources to add creative hymn arrangements and harmonizations into your service-playing.

You can learn to do some of this yourself!

With a few easy-to-use strategies and a quick refresher on those 8 a.m. college theory classes, you’ll be creating your own artful hymn arrangements in no time.

Ready to get started? Mix up your approach to hymn-playing this month with these 5 creative strategies:

13 Ways to Continue Developing Your Keyboard Skills This Year

13 Ways to Continue Developing Your Keyboard Skills This Year

I wasn’t really familiar with the term keyboard skills until I was in grad school, flipping through the course catalog one semester. The course description piqued my interest:

"Practical experience in score reading, figured bass realization, transposition, melody harmonization, and pop symbols.”

Needless to say, I signed up.

Follow along with my creative work and daily adventures: @ashleydanyew

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