keyboard skills for church musicians

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:

How to Read Lead Sheets and Chord Charts

How to Read Lead Sheets and Chord Charts

You want me to play that? Where is the left hand part? Where is the time signature? Why aren't there any barlines?

If you haven't guessed it by now, I'm talking about lead sheets and chord charts.

Last year, I put together a free online workshop on this topic (watch it here). Today, I want to share the transcript, for those of you that may prefer to read it. I’ll talk about chord types, chord symbols, lead sheets and chord charts, accompaniment styles, and variation techniques you can start using right away.

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

Halloween 2024… …The Lion King 🦁 Swipe to see the outtakes, including lion-wrangling and the 20th photo we took before we realized Rafiki had his mask on upside-down. 😂
The October Musician & Co. Book Club pick is… 📘 Hidden Genius: The Secret Ways of Thinking That Power the World’s Most Successful People This book is a collection of stories, insights, and lessons learned from top performers, entr
Meet Jessie Ning - pianist, graphic designer, and founder of @opushaus, a lifestyle brand for musicians. A former Creative Director at TikTok, Jessie combines her extensive background in graphic design and scenic design with her musical talents. I
Starting next week… 👀 Join me for a small-group, 2-hour virtual work retreat for musicians & teachers this Fall! 🍁 If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the start of the new school year (and the length of your to-do list 😩), a work