Why Less is More when Playing Church Organ

Video Transcript

"TOM SMITH: Hi. My name is Tom, and this is for ExpertVillage.com. This is how to play keyboards in a worship team at a church. And one of the things with the traditional keyboard players is they play way too many notes. The first lesson, and if you don't take anything else from these lessons, take this back and that is "less is more." Less is more. And what I mean by that keyboard players tend to want to use all their hands 'cause they got like 88 notes, some of us only have 66, but they got all these notes. And sometimes, what you want to do is play less notes, like a lot of times when I'm playing choruses or when I'm playing in a band, I'm only playing two notes, maybe three rather than using my hands. Sometimes I'm playing just one note, a counter melody or something like that, we'll talk about it. But the whole idea is to play less notes and listen to the people around you. You've got a bass player that's covering the bottom ends. You want to stay out of his range. You've got a guitarist that you're competing with, so you want to figure out what you're playing and how does it match with him. You've got drums. You could have other guitarists or keyboard players. So, the whole idea is to listen and then play less notes that fit in with music rather than overpowering with both hands and lot of notes."