Have you ever been there? You know, you’re playing a song during worship that you haven’t played in like 3 years…
You start out pretty well…
Make it through those verses and choruses okay…
Then, the bridge happens.
And everything goes haywire.
(Some songs are not even courteous enough to wait until the bridge to start messing with us 🙂 #amiright?)
What happens then?
This totally happened to us last night.
We were playing “Who Am I” by Casting Crowns. And lest you think we have it all together…well, that bridge really did a number on us.
None of us actually played it right (though yours truly might have been the closest…jus’ sayin).
Yet, we made it through just fine. I doubt anyone besides us knew any different.
How to react? What to do? Do we panic? Get nervous? Sweaty? Run off stage crying like a baby…….?
Nope.
We have a plan, and we stick to it. See, the tricky thing about music is that it’s just not as complicated as you are making it.
There’s nothing more stressful than worrying about that next part coming up that you didn’t have time to practice, forgot to practice, neglected to practice, etc.
You know what it’s supposed to sound like, but you have no clue how to make it happen.
That’s what happened last night for us. So, what did we do? I’ll speak for myself: I resorted back to my training.
I have not played “Who Am I” in…gosh, I have no clue how long. Conservatively, five years. Probably more like 10.
Regardless, it was never in regular rotation. I could count on one hand the number of the times EVER I’ve played the song…
But, as you know music is infectious, so I remembered what each part of the song sounded like. How did I play pretty-darn-close-to-right?
Numbers.
Yep, I used Worship By Numbers™ as we were playing the song.
You see, when you use Worship By Numbers™, you eliminate the panic that comes from not knowing how to play a song—this is because you know how music works.
If you know the major scale and can count to 7, you can learn how to play any song on the fly…even if you haven’t heard it in umpteen years. (Sometimes, even if you’ve NEVER heard it before.)
Want to learn how for yourself?
Here’s the link: www.WorshipByNumbers.com
Steve Schramm