• Vocals seminar online
• Pre-order the Musicademy Worship Drum DVDs
• Ask the Expert – guitar effects in worship
• New series – introduction to worship keyboard
• Song Select – transposing songs online
• Setting up a Musicademy course in your town
• Competition

Live Musicademy Vocals Seminars Online

We recently filmed a day of vocals training that we did on the South Coast of England for the Bournemouth Vineyard. These seminars are now available as online downloads. Taught by Gayle Bamberger, these seminars will provide an introduction to breathing and good vocal technique as well as lots of practise in difference singing styles.

Seminar 1 - Vocal anatomy, posture, stretches, breathing and warm-up exercises

Seminar 2 - Singing ballads with passion - using vocal technique to express meaning, diction, phrasing, dynamics, harmony and more using the song Breathe

Seminar 3 - Singing upbeat songs with energy using syncopation, speech-like rhythms, harmony, phrasing and more using the song Forever

Seminar 4 – Question & Answer session (you can have this seminar free of charge when you buy the other three – just put the code Q&A into the coupon box)

If you’ve not yet purchased our vocals DVDs these live seminars will give you a taster

Pre-order the Musicademy Worship Drum DVDs

We’ll be launching the new Musicademy Worship Drum DVDs in the next newsletter (they are currently being manufactured) but if you’d like to be amongst the first to receive your copy you can pre-order now. Just go to our music store’s drum instruction DVDs page for more information and to buy. There is a set for Beginners (also available as individual volumes) and a set for Intermediate players.

As well as the usual top quality Musicademy teaching, the DVDs feature hints and tips from some of the world’s leading worship drummers including Aaron Sterling (who plays for Brenton Brown, Natasha Bedingfield and Fiona Apple), Martin Neil (Kevin Prosch’s drummer), Andrew Small (playing on the latest Stuart Townend album as well as for Massive Attack and Kylie Minogue), Doug Matthews (who plays for David Ruis) and Dennis Holt, one of Nashville’s top session players, previously with Kansas and now playing for worship leaders such as Twila Paris.

The DVDs are presented by Colin Brookes. Colin was the “original” Soul Survivor drummer (British twenty somethings may well remember his blond dreadlocks from festivals in the 1990s). He’s now a full time vicar and as such is a fantastic communicator and teacher. The DVDs are taught in a step-by-step manner allowing you to learn all the chops in bite sized chunks. There are plenty of playalongs with the Musicademy band and of course, loads of on screen graphics to help you learn.

We are also delighted to feature a number of guest lessons from the new Delirious drummer Paul Evans. Paul has loads of helpful advice as well as some practical warm up routines and some interesting fills and breaks to add to your repertoire.

We’ll have an online trailer available for you to preview soon. Do email us if you would like us to let you know when it’s available.

Ask the Expert - Using guitar effects in worship

Jess Champers from Washington asks “Are there any ‘standard’ choices and settings for electric guitar pedals in worship?“

There are so many pedals out there that it can be seen as either a mine-field or the ultimate guitarists ‘sweetshop’. Most serious guitarists have been through the huge pedalboard stage at some point in their playing. One of our tutor’s standard set up has 37 pedals. He tells me that he actually does use them all too. Honest Guv! However to get a good basic range of sounds you don’t really need that many pedals to get going. However, you do get what you pay for so lots of cheap pedals aren’t necessarily any better than a few good ones. For church settings my effects chain goes guitar, tuner, compressor, two overdrives, some kind of modulator, delay, amp. This is the classic order for pedals but you do get surprising results by experimenting with switching the order around.

For the tuner its useful to have a pedal based one like the boss TU2 which allows you to kill the sound whilst tuning. Compressors can be used in a variety of ways. Firstly they can add some articulation and sparkle to strumming and dial out some of the muddiness if you’re strumming a darker sounding guitar like a Les Paul. They can ‘squash’ your guitar sound which is particularly useful for disco or pop rhythmic styles. Compressor can also boost your volume and sustain long lead notes in solos. Generally for jangly worship sounds I’ll set it up quite subtly to add some sparkle and help my sound cut through the rest of the band. Very useful in big, echoey, church buildings.

For my two overdrives I go first for a big crunchy sounding drive like a RAT or Tubescreamer then into a mild overdrive. Be careful that you don’t add too much distortion to the first drive and set the volume slightly than the mild overdrive. The mild drive is what I consider to be the most important pedal in my rig. I set the drive volume up just above the clean un-effected amp volume because if you set both volumes at unity with the band playing the drive volume may actually appear lower than the clean volume. My mild drive is called a Tim pedal but there are plenty of good alternatives such as the Barber LTD, Xotic AC booster and many others. Next set the volume on your guitar to full and if you back it off to 8 or 9 the sound cleans up rather pleasingly so you can use the guitar volume pot itself as a way of controlling the amount of drive in your sound. With this set up it gives three usable drive sounds. Dirty, mild and then both together for the bigger moments. Modulation pedals have sounds like chorus, phaser, vibrato, tremolo. Watch some demo of these types of pedal on Youtube and see what you like best. Modulations are a bit like the icing on the cake. For instance a well set up tremolo can add some real sonic interest to an otherwise dull set of familiar chords but as with cake icing, too much can be a good thing so use it sparingly to make a statement on a particular part of a song like the third verse for instance.

Lastly a good delay is worth its weight in gold. Whatever you do make sure you set the repeats to synch up with the song tempo. If the drummer changes tempo (which he really shouldn’t) you’ll have to re-synch your pedal so it’s worth considering one with a tap tempo. Loads of companies make good delay pedals so again on YouTube look up the Line 6 DL4 and Echo Park Models, Visual Sound H20, Boss DD6, DD7, DD20, Re20, Carl Martin Delayla and many others. The list is endless! For setting synching to the quarter notes with 2 or 4 repeats is a good place to start. 8th notes (two repeats per beat) give some interesting sounds and for full U2 trying crochet triplets or putting 6 equal repeats into a four beat bar. Be careful though not to add too many repeats all the time as it will become fatiguing on the ear. Lastly if you’re playing overdriven rock any delay or reverb could add some unwanted and unpleasant high tones to the sound so try to keep your distortions dry and effect free. It is tempting to use delay and reverb to cover up sloppy chord changes but ultimately won’t help you to progress as a player.

New series – introduction to worship keyboard

We’ve written plenty of articles before in the newsletter about playing keyboards in worship. This is the start of a new mini series for people that have played keyboard using the traditional music score but want to move into more contemporary chords-based playing. To help you on your way, we’re making available online three lessons from the start of our Intermediate Worship Keyboards DVDs which explain the concept of chords-based playing and then go onto demonstrate it using the song How Great is Our God.

Click through to buy and download the lessons

Worship Keyboards 1 - An introduction to playing using chords

Worship Keyboards 2 - Using chords to play How Great is Our God

Worship Keyboards 3 - Play through How Great is Our God with the Musicademy Band

Once you have been through these three lessons more proficient players can progress to the rest of the Intermediate course. If you are less experienced and would like to consolidate your new learning with relatively simple songs go to the Beginners course (volumes 3 and 4 would be ideal) or our online video Keyboard Song Learner lessons.

The first part of our new newsletter series will look at which chords can be expected to show up in a given key (this information will be useful for guitarists as well), how to construct those chords and how to play them in different positions (known as voicings or inversions).

Understanding chords and their voicings

Before we can understand chords we need to understand something about scales. Most (though not all) worship songs are in major keys so for this basic introduction we’ll avoid minor scales. If you know your scales you’re already well ahead. However, if you don’t you can always work them out. Each major scale is made up of the same combination of tones (T) and semitones (S). A semitone is the smallest interval in music and can be found by playing notes immediately next to each other on a keyboard (including black notes). One tone equals two semitones. In a C major scale you don’t play any black notes so it’s easy to work out whether there’s a tone or a semitone between each note:

You can work out a major scale starting on any note using this pattern of tones and semitones.

The most important and strongest chords in any piece will be based on notes from the scale. Also once we get onto using passing notes and auxiliary notes (explained on the Intermediate DVDs) we need to stick to the notes in the major scale if they’re going to work well.

Basic chords are made up of three notes. They have a root, a third and a fifth. The root is the note that they start on, the third would be the third note in a scale starting on the root note and the fifth would be the fifth note in a scale starting on the root note. There are two main types of chords, major and minor. The only difference between these is the third. Here’s how you can work out any major or minor chord by counting semitones (the root note here is C):

You can play a chord on any note in a scale. If you only use notes that are in the major scale you will always get major chords on some notes and minor chords on others. To make this easier to understand we sometimes refer to notes of the scale using numbers or roman numerals. For example the first note of a major scale would be called 1 (or I) and would always have a major chord associated with it. Here’s a diagram so that you can see which notes in a scale have major and minor chords associated with them (again, this pattern applies to every major scale):

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. You may just see a chord symbol (e.g. G or Em) above the stave and you have to interpret this properly. Not only that, but there are different positions in which you can play every chord. If we assume that we’ll always play the root (1st) note of a chord in the bass (left hand) we can then play all three notes in the right hand in any order. We can therefore play each chord in three positions or voicings:

These three voicings can also be played at different octaves on the keyboard. The reason that we use different voicings is that if we only used root position chords our hands would be jumping around all over the keyboard and it would sound quite disjointed. Once we use different chord voicings it is possible to restrict our movement and in turn make sequences of chords easier to play as in the example below:

You should try to get to know all chords in as many voicings and octaves as possible so that they become natural and you can use them easily. Also try to play pieces finding the closest possible voicing of the next song so that your playing can become really smooth.

SongSelect – transposing songs online

There are quite a few websites nowadays that publish chord charts of worship songs, however the one that we’ve found most useful and flexible is SongSelect from CCLI. Not only is downloading from SongSelect totally legal (CCLI are the church licensing and copyright people) but SongSelect lets you change the key by transposing up to a full octave above or below the original and then lets you hear the result before you print out the lead sheet.

SongSelect will get your band access to over 6,500 lead sheets with chords, more than 12,000 30-second sound samples and over 30,000 song lyrics.

To get started you need a standard Church Copyright Licence and then pay an extra £30 for access to the lyrics/sound samples or £85 per year for the leadsheets too. You can find out more from www.ccli.co.uk/songselect If you are based elsewhere in the world got to your national CCLI site for further information. The US version even includes Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass lines

Setting up a Musicademy course in your town

We get requests all the time from people who have bought our DVDs and want to use them to help teach others. So far we’ve had individuals and churches running mini Musicademy courses in the UK, the US and South Africa. One American church is planning a whole summer school program using our DVD resources.

The beauty of using our DVDs as the basis for your lessons is that the facilitator does not need to be a highly technically competent player, or even a very experienced teacher themselves. We’ve done all the planning for you and crucially, have paced the DVDs to work at the pace that beginners need to learn. You sit your students in a small group around the DVD player and together work through the lessons. To make this even easier we have produced workbooks for the Beginner Guitar DVDs which reduce each DVD into 10 lessons with lots of additional practice material as well as points for group discussion.

We do ask that when the DVDs are used in a group you purchase from us a license for each student taking part. If the student then wants to buy a copy of the DVDs themselves we will credit them back the cost of the licence.

And don’t forget, if you are buying multiple copies of the DVDs, do take a look at our church bundle packs for savings of over 20%. We’re always very willing to do some bulk purchase discounts on any of our products so if, for example, all your worship group would like the vocals warm-up CD do get in touch and we’ll do you a deal!

At some point we may well franchise the Musicademy Music School concept but for the moment we’re keen to have as many churches use the material as possible, giving us their feedback and helping us develop supporting materials that will help others. Do email us if you would like any more information.

Competition result

John Wesley from India last month’s competition. He said “Though I’ve been playing the keyboard for around 10 years now, and I myself being trained in music notation and other musical styles, your downloads are quite different. Its like a whole new different world of making music. I’m planning to buy the whole set of intermediate DVDs to make this style my second nature.”

Chris Pegman from New Zealand won May’s competition. He’s already come back to us with some feedback

“I’m popping with excitement (ya, I should know better at 43 shouldn’t i!) I’m spending heaps of time learning right now so the timing of your gift is awesome! Sure, I’d love to give you some feedback – first one I’ll look at will be Facedown, I’m very expectant as to what I’m going to pick up…. I’m plugging away with original chords capo 6th fret which are tricky but so effective to the song, think from the sneaky preview that it’s however done in open chords, however, can’t wait! Oh! I also wanted to tell you I think the intermediate worship guitar DVDs are fantastic – I skipped a few easy chapters to a fabulous easy to understand demolition of the ‘CAGED’ shapes – particularly loved the front end to back end explanation. I am convinced this breakthrough in a log-jam in my brain over the ‘CAGED’ mechanism was due to seeing it on DVD; but even then it was very clearly explained. After 18 months out of worship leading I have been inspired to come off the sound desk & played acoustic with the worship team of new church for first time. So thanks heaps yet again.”

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.

1. What did you think of this newsletter?
2. Which articles did you particularly enjoy?
3. Any questions for our “Ask the Expert” feature?
4. Any suggestions for content that you would like to read in the future?
5. Any suggestions for websites we could recommend people?
6. Have you bought a Musicademy product or downloaded a lesson and what did you think of it?

Please e-mail your responses to enter the draw!

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