Holding Patterns on Keyboard for a Church Band: Part 3

Video Transcript

"TOM SMITH: Hi. My name is Tom. This is for ExpertVillage.com. We're talking about how to play keyboards in a worship team at a church. Some of the other holding patterns or phrases you can put into when somebody's speaking and they want a little of background music is you can go like a root to a minor sixth, back to the root, up to the fourth, up to the fifth. So, really what you're doing is you're walking your left hand up and if you want, you could play say, arpeggios just to give it a little bit of feeling. Or maybe what you can do is work in an approach that we talked about earlier. Maybe it's a counter melody. The whole idea is to just use, as we said, those five basic chords; the I, the IV, the V, the minor third, the minor sixth and work this out at home. Work out a couple of patterns that you know by memory that you could add in and improvise on and then work on some counter melodies to some of the songs. Usually, you know the choruses before you're playing on Sunday, right? So, what you can do is take them home and even if you don't use them that Sunday, you can work out some counter melodies or work out some holding patterns for each of those songs so that you're well prepared and you can use them for next time."