Dear [[{First name}]],

We’ve fewer but longer articles this month and they are all written in response to requests from our subscribers.

In this edition:

Ask The Expert –Using Chord Based Lead Sheets as a Keyboard Player

Esther Morford, a keyboard player from Colorado, sent us this question:

Many times I am handed a sheet that has words and chords; that's all. No lead line, no time signature, no key signature, and I don't know the song.  How do I handle that situation?  I feel like someone handed me a pic and told me to play my guitar

Musicademy is the best thing that has happened for worship songs since the change to contemporary worship music.  Thank you.

Hi Esther
Thanks for your question. Being able to help people in situations like yours is exactly the reason we created the Intermediate Worship Keyboard DVDs. We reckon there are thousands of piano players out there who took classical lessons as children so are great at Fur Elise and Moonlight Sonata but feel rather out of their depth when faced with Here I am to Worship which is ironic when you consider how easy it is to play so many of today’s contemporary worship songs.

The role of the keyboard has evolved pretty rapidly over recent years. Traditionally the organist or piano player was the only musician. They played all the bass, tenor, alto and soprano notes and most of them were adept at reading a musical score. Since the 1960s, however, the guitar has come to dominate so much of our worship music and many more contemporary instruments have also come to the fore. With lead vocalists and the congregation taking the soprano line, backing vocalists the harmonies and bass players picking up the men’s parts, its easy to see why the organ/piano might have fallen out of favour. With so many other people and instruments doing the job that the pianist used to do, its just overkill to have the piano doing it all. So what should we piano players do in response? Learn to play guitar? Not at all – the keyboard still has a vital role to play and the good news is that we don’t have to be as skilled as previously to sound good.

So what’s the secret? Well please bear in mind that we’ve developed seven worship keyboard DVDs explaining this, so this article is merely an overview, but the essence is this. If you are handed a chord sheet without the musical score you simply use your knowledge of scales to work out what to play. If you see the chord of C, you play a C triad – C, E and G. We’d suggest you play this with your right hand and a C in the bass with your left (you can play two Cs as an octave in the bass if you’re feeling confident).

In the example above, the C is your root note, the E is a third above that and the G is a fifth above that. You follow the same pattern for any major scale so if you see a D, you play a D, F# and A). With minor scales (for instance if you see Cm) all you do is lower the third by a semitone so Cm is C, Eb and G. Dm is D, F and A. There are a few other common chords – like sus or 7th chords but using a basic triad instead is fine for getting started.

The first job of a good keyboard player is to learn all their major and minor chords so that they are natural and easy to play. Once you’ve learnt these you can start using different “voicings” to make your playing a lot smoother. To play a different voicing with your right hand you may play the third note with your thumb, the fifth with finger three and the third with your little finger – they can be in any order. Your aim here is to minimise movement across the keyboard as you move from one chord to another.

If your knowledge of scales isn’t so great that so for some trickier keys you can’t remember exactly which notes form the root, third and fifth here is a little cheat to help you. Let’s take G major. Put your thumb on the G note and count in semitones up the keyboard. G# is 2, A is 2, Bb is 3 and B is 4. The fourth semitone up from the root is your third in the chord. Now let’s find the fifth. Count up from the B. C is 1, C# is 2 and D is 3. Your fifth note in the chord is D. This simple pattern of counting semitones up from the root works for any major scale. With minor scales you count three semitones from the root to find the third and four semitones from that to find the fifth.

Here’s how they work for C major and C minor – try counting up the semitones.

So for now what you are able to do is find the right notes to play. While you gain in confidence just play along with some worship CDs simply holding down the chord at the beginning of each bar or whenever it changes – it will probably sound better with a string or soft pad sound and remember to use a sustain pedal – in fact with many songs you could play like this in a live band situation and not disgrace yourself at all!

Next is to add some rhythm – that’s a whole new lesson and not one we have room for today. But our DVDs cover it all really well so feel free to have a look at them.

One word of caution – if you see a chord with a slash sign in it you need to play a different note in the bass with your left hand. B/F# literally means B triad over F#. So with your right you play a B triad which is B, D# and F#, and with your left hand you play an F#.

Now you may have noticed that with chord-based playing we minimise any keyboard playing of the melody line – its not normally needed with singers and congregation covering it and often instruments like flutes and violins covering that too. Sometimes it can be helpful – that’s where your ability to go back to the musical score and play a melody line on top of these chords will come in. There are plenty of other interesting things you can do – such as using what we call auxiliary and passing notes. Again, this is another lesson and most of our online keyboard downloads incorporate some interesting aspects of playing beyond the chords themselves – take a look and try them out.

It takes a bit of practice to get used to playing with chords but believe me, if you persevere you will never want to go back – and your worship band will be really pleased to have a more contemporary feel to the keyboard.

Strumming patterns for acoustic guitar

When a lot of people first learn to play guitar, they spend a good deal of time working on the hand that changes chords but very little time on the hand that strums. Generally the result is quick chord changes but only one or two strumming patterns which the player tries to fit into every song.

Developing strumming patterns that fit with the groove is really understanding about three things – musical listening skills, eight and sixteenth notes and finally when your hand should go up and down.

Firstly – eight and sixteenth notes. Most songs that you play along to will have a groove that follows either an 8th or 16th note pattern. What that means is within a bar of music, or typically a count of four your hand will move up and down a maximum of either eight or sixteen times depending on the feel for the song. Most mid tempo songs use 16th note patterns. 8ths  are used for either slow songs with gentle grooves or really fast songs where its simply not possible to strum 16 times in a bar.

To understand this let’s take a song like How Great is Our God and examine how to get the right pattern. We start choosing the pattern by listening predominantly to what the drummer is doing. Listen to the main kick drum and snare drum pattern and try and count along to the beats in the bar.

Next try to get your strumming arm moving at a 16th note pattern to see if it fits that groove. So, for every beat your arm needs to go down, up, down, up. In a four beat bar your hand will move a total of 16 times hence 16th notes. Now its difficult to count that way so the way we do this in music is say “1 e & a, 2 e & a, 3 e & a, 4 e & a” (The e sounds like the e in tree and the a sounds as in abba). This rolls off the tongue pretty easily helps us to define which of those 16th we want to strum on and which we leave out.

So, although your arm will move 16 times, you won’t actually strum the strings 16 times. Below is the strumming pattern for How Great is Our God. The kick drum is on the 1, the 3 and the 3& with the snare played on the 2 and 4 – these are where you play your down strums but if you just strum that your pattern will sound a little bit empty. The extra upstrums just provide a sense of momentum and are normally found by listening to the extra accents in the groove found by the rhythm of the hi hats or the accents or ‘pushes’ in the rhythm of the vocal line.

Two key things. One - ALWAYS keep your hand moving so that the downs and ups naturally fall into place. If you stop moving it will mess your downs and ups around. Two - once you’ve found a strumming pattern that fits, don’t go changing it randomly, as it forms part of the rhythm section and if you are playing with anyone else they need to fit what they are doing with your rhythm to form a tight groove.

So the beauty of a pattern is determined as much by the spaces you create as well as the actual strumming. If you played all the down and upstrums it would be all noise.

Notice: You will naturally start with a downstrum and so every number you play will be a down strum, e has to be an up strum as you hand returns, & is always down and a is up. For 8th notes you could 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & - down up down up down up down up and you fit your strumming pattern with what you can hear in the groove.

If this is all a bit confusing on paper, you can download the online video songlearner lesson for How Great is our God from our website which make things much clearer.

In fact, Our worship guitar Song Learner DVDs and online lessons are a really good example of all of this – Each song contains a unique strumming pattern and many people will need to see it practically demonstrated rather than understand simply by reading an article. Try starting with the lessons I could sing of your love forever, Beautiful One, Let Everything That Has Breath. We’ve created some free handouts to go with each lesson which show the strumming pattern as well as the chords.

New online rock & pop guitar lessons

We’ve just uploaded eight more online guitar lessons to our webstore. As you may know, Musicademy runs a music college in the UK and we’ve taken all our rock & pop guitar lessons and made them available as online downloads.

The latest set are from stage six which we would normally use to teach guitarists who have been playing for around two years. This is where guitar playing really starts to get exciting as we take you through some exact guitar parts of well known rock & pop songs.

You can learn:
Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day
Learn all the parts for this song including the solo which will teach you about using octaves for lead guitar. 
You’re Beautiful - James Blunt
By learning this track you will also understand how to play any song on guitar in any major key using a capo and one finger chord changes based around the key of G.
Back in Black – AC/DC
Learn the intro, verse, chorus parts and riffs note for note on guitar. An essential track for all rock players!
5 Positions of Pentatonic Scale
Learn to play the right notes over the whole guitar neck as you solo over any song using the full 5 positions of pentatonic scale. Essential for all aspiring blues and rock lead guitar players!
Good Times - Chic
A great lesson for learning funk and disco guitar parts, developing right hand playing technique and your knowledge of extended chords.
Bohemian – Dandy Warhols
By learning this song you will also learn how to use E and A shaped bar chords all over the neck on guitar.
Fade Out (Street Spirit) - Radiohead
Develop your guitar finger picking technique as we break down the exact parts for this song bar by bar and build it up in sections.
Suck My Kiss – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Learn this classic Red Hot Chili Pepper's track as we break down each section on guitar step by step. Great for combining lead, rhythm and funk styles.

Save money by downloading all eight lessons. When you get to the checkout simply insert the coupon code FULL STAGE 6 to receive two of your eight lessons for free.

Competition result

Daniel Tuck from Yorkshire (pictured) won last month’s download competition. As a traditional piano player he decided to have a go with our contemporary keyboard downloads and as our keyboard Song Learner lessons do rather assume that you are already playing with chords, we sent him a sneak preview of this month’s “Ask the Expert” article. If you need more help on the basics of chords playing then all our Beginners keyboard DVDs as well as Intermediate keyboards volume 1 cover it in detail.

Here is what Daniel thought of two of the online lessons:

"I have now had a chance to have a look athe the 'Blessed Be Your Name' and 'majesty' songlearner downloads and I have to say they are excellent. Although I currently only play piano based on the written music (improvising bits here and there where I think it might be appropriate), the videos have been put together in such a way to make it easy for someone with no chord-playing experience like myself to pick up. While the tutorials are based around individual songs. they teach you in such a way that the techniques can easily be put to use on any song, and I'm sure that I will be able to make good use of the methods demonstrated in my playing in the near future. They have certainly encouraged me to continue learning chord-based keyboard using as another method for leading a congregation.

Thank you again for a very useful and enjoyable prize!"

Win Five Free Song Learner Downloads

We really like to know what you think of our newsletter and the Musicademy products so please take a couple of minutes to answer these questions and e-mail them to us. One respondent will win five free song learner downloads and we’ll let you know what they think of them in the next issue.

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  3. Any questions for our “Ask the Expert” feature?
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