5 practical ideas for working with your youth band

By Andy@Musicademy | September 12, 2012

How to work with a youth praise band Even if you aren’t a musician yourself there are numerous ways to help your youth band play better together. Here are five practical tips to try. 1. Keep it simple Any band can vastly improve purely by playing the simple things well and avoiding songs or styles […]

Learning to Play by Ear Part 2

By Andy@Musicademy | July 31, 2012

Previously we looked at how to work out all the chords available in the key of G and then use them to write a song.  I suggested you took an existing song and worked out which chords came where by listening to see which ones sounded major, which ones sounded minor and by the process […]

Worship Band Function Band

By Andy@Musicademy |

Sometimes I encourage musicians who have only ever played on worship teams to go and join a function or covers band and play venues outside the church. This kind of approach invariably pushes them out of their comfort zones and can be quite challenging on all sorts of levels but can be highly beneficial. They […]

How to Offer Artists Criticism Without Being a Jerk

By Guest Blogger | May 29, 2012

Artists (“Artists” applies to musicians, singers, painters, graphic designers, actors, dancers, etc) in the church receive a tremendous amount of criticism. Musicians especially seem to have a never-ending stream of complainers. I’ve heard everything from “the music was too loud,” “don’t use that song again – I didn’t like it,” and, one of my personal […]

How to run a worship jam session

By Guest Blogger | June 17, 2011

Jason Chollar wrote us a great post last week on the idea of jam sessions for worship teams. The photo shows one at his church (the drummers are out of sight in the biggest drum booth ever). One of the questions that came in as a result of this is “Sounds great – but what […]

Jammin’ your way to a better worship band

By Guest Blogger | June 10, 2011

Jammin’ your way to a better worship band – Open Jam Sessions are the best recruiting, training, auditioning tool for small/medium size churches.  At least that’s what I think. Big churches have a completely different set of problems when it comes to worship musicians than your average small/medium sized church.  In a church of thousands, […]

I’m a little bit country – Nick Langley on Nashville Numbering

By Guest Blogger | March 10, 2011

I’ve seen posts on various websites, including this venerable one, discussing innumerable cunning ways of writing charts. Why, I ask? What’s wrong with the existing systems? Music notation has been painstakingly refined over centuries and does the job perfectly well. People have been recording music since long before Edison invented the phonograph, Bill Lear and […]