better church pianist. Over the next sixty minutes or so, probably

more than sixty minutes to be honest, I am going to give you some concrete things that

you can do to improve your music. By the way, if you bought this course somewhere,

go ask for your money back. This is a free course. I don't know what will happen once

I get it out there on the internet but it should always be free.

Now, some of you are worried because some of you know what I do. You know that I play

the piano professionally, you know that I have a lot of instructional DVDs available

on the internet for purchase and some of you are concerned that I am going to take the

next sixty minutes and waste your time with a big infomercial trying to sell my other

products. Let me assure you that is not what I am going

to do. Now I am going to mention products from time to time; I have to because there

is only so much I can get into in an hour and sometimes I am going to give you part

of what you need to know and say to learn the rest or to go further with that, you may

have to go on to something else. That will happen a few times, but for the most part,

I'm going to give you little things that you can use immediately in your music. I'm not

going to waste your time. I promise you of that. This is not one of those bait and switches,

it's not one of those free seminars that you hear about and you go to and you listen to

somebody try to sell you something for ninety minutes. This is not what that's about. You're

going to get something very concrete and actionable out of this next hour.

But on the other hand, let me be upfront with you. My goal is not only to help you but also

help myself. I want to introduce you to what I do and give you some, a little bit of insight

into my DVDs, give you an idea of the way I teach. And perhaps, down the road, it might

be a fit to sell you something.

We are going to be talking about a particular style of music today. And I want to play if

for you really quick. This is a song called "Just as I Am." We're going to be working

with this song.

Now some of you know that song but all of you know the style. It's a style of music

that is called reflective. Sometimes it's called mood music. Or we can just call it

soft music. And it's a style of music that church pianists need to know. We use that

style a lot in church playing under prayers perhaps. Sometimes we're playing while the

congregational worship leader is talking. Sometimes you might play through an invitation

if ya'll do those at your church. Sometimes you might have a communion that you play soft

music under. Its a style that church pianists are called upon to do. And sadly, it's a style

that most church pianists have never been taught. Here's what we've been taught.

I bet your in that position. You know that style of music. Many of you have learned that,

sometimes formally, sometimes in college, sometimes from somebody else, maybe just from

listening. But you may not have been taught another style, the more quiet style. So when

you get to points in the service where you're asked to play softer music, you end up doing

something like this.

Basically you play the same thing; you just try to play it quieter. And it doesn't work

so well, does it? Well today, I want to talk to you about how you can adapt and move toward

that soft, gentler style. Now, we're going to be working through the song Just as I am

but it doesn't matter what song we work through. If you don't use that song in your church,

you can certainly pick a song that you do use. The principles we talk about, we're going

to apply to any song. And I hope you will by the way. I don't necesarily want you to

be tied down to an arrangement even though I am giving you a free arrangement with this

class. But I want you to have some concrete principles that you can use with any style

that you play.

A couple of little housekeeping things before we start. First of all, make sure that you

do download the two PDF files, the two printed music files that are available with this DVD

at GregHowlett.com. Look at the bottom of the screen and you can see where to do that.

Those files are important, those pieces of music are important because we are going to

be talking about them through this class. The first one is just the basic harmony, the

four part harmony of the song. This is Just as I am as you would see it in the hymnal.

Four parts. The second is an arrangement that I wrote; now I didn't spend a lot of time

on it. For those of you that like to critique music, you will probably find much to critique

in there. I spent maybe twenty minutes writing out that little arrangement and I wrote it

out for the specific purpose of illustrating some of the things I am talking about today.

So, it's not designed to win awards. It's basically designed to serve as a big example

for the concepts we're talking about today. But make sure you print those off. I'm going

to be referring to those pieces of music often over the course of the next hour.

Now, let me tell you sort of how we are going to go through this process. I'm going to give

it, in my mind at least, I am dividing it into three different sections. The first section,

I'm going to talk about some overriding principles for playing this style of music. There's three

of them and these are principles that apply not only to this style but in general to the

music that you play. So we'll talk about some overriding principles. Then we're going to

do some beginner, concrete things that you can use in your music. About four things that

will immediately be part of your music and help you sound really really good with this

style. And then, for those of you that like more challenge, we're going to get into some

advanced things, some advanced concepts. And we'll do that at the end of the class and

that's where I may in some cases tell you that you need to go check out other courses

because I can't cram all that into the twenty or so minutes that we'll have to allocate

to that.

Now, I hope you don't mind; I brought my coffee with me today. And I don't have all the fancy

cameras that I normally do. We're using one camera instead of three and we're not using,

I didn't bring in the production company and all those kinds of things but the quality

that I use today is going to be just like the quality that you see in my DVDs where

I have all the cameras and all the lights that I'm not using today. All you're going

to miss is a few camera angles and who wants to spend too much time looking at me anyway.

So, let's get started. We're going to start with some overriding principles and there's

three of them as I said. We'll spend a little bit of time on this. Number one, number one

overriding principle, something that you definitely, definitely need to remember is you have to

focus on harmony. Harmony is the critical component of pretty much all music that you

play; in this style or most styles that you would play in church for that matter. You

have to know, essentially, what chords that you're playing and you have to know which

notes belong to each chord. Now if you'll pull out the sheet with the original four

parts for Just as I am, you'll see the four parts but you'll also see above the four parts

where I've written in the chords. And the way it works is if you see a chord, for example,

the song starts with a C chord or for those of you that know, that is also a one chord.

We're in the key of C, so the C chord we call the one chord. The chords are numbered based

on their position within the scale. So a C would be the one chord, D would be a two chord,

E would be three, F would be four and so on.

But the song starts with a one chord and it stays on that one chord for two bars or measures.

And then it switches to a G chord or a five chord. And then it goes back to a one chord.

The song is very very simple harmonically. As a matter of fact, it goes C, G, C, G, C,

F, C, G, C. That's it. That's the entire song. Or if you said it with numbers, it would be

one, five, one, five, one, four, one, five one. I want you to note of course that there's

only three chords in this song which is very very typical in church music, at least in

its basic form. You have a one chord, a four chord and a five chord; C, F and G. That is

not at all abnormal for this kind of music. It's pretty simple stuff. Most of you know

what I am talking about. Now there's a few of you that don't. Now for those of you that

don't, let me encourage you to take some time and learn it. Now this is something that I'm

not going to teach in this class. I'm going to assume that you know it. If you want to,

there is a course on my website called How To Chart a Song. It costs a whopping $9.95

if you get the download version. And its an hour long, it will give you examples, principles

you can use to identify harmony in a song. You have to be able to look at a song and

write in the chords just like I did in this arrangement. And you have to know, not in

this arrangement, but this four part harmony, and you have to know what notes belong to

each chord. For example, you have to know that a C chord has a C, and E and a G in it.

F has F, A, and C. G has G, B and a D. Have to know that stuff. Most of you do. For those

of you that don't, go learn it somewhere. How to Chart a Song is the course that I mentioned.

By the way, if you stay around to the end, I'll tell you how you can get that course

for free, at least the download version. I'll talk about that at the end. But, make sure

you understand the harmony. We think in terms of harmony because harmony tells you what

pools of notes are available to you to play. For example, if you have a C chord, we know

that we can play in either hand, C's, E's, G's and other notes as well. We'll talk about

that later. But it tells us, it's like it tells us the restraints, what is our limit

on what notes we can play, what notes are available to us to play at any time and then

you'll see that when we play the style, we're focused on playing those notes in various

ways. If I tell you to play a C chord, you could play this, play that, that. You could

play that. Those are all C chords. Why? Because they use the same notes: C, E, and G.

All right, principle number two. Now this is where we get a little more specific. This

is where we are going to talk about some things that most of you have probably never heard

of. And this one sounds simple, as a matter of fact I tried very very hard to make all

this sound simple but its not necessarily simple to apply to your music. It takes a

little bit of work. Here's the principle. You have to spread out the notes. Spread out

the notes that you play. That's the layman's way of saying it. If you were going to say

it from a more professional way or technical way, you would that you want to use open voicing.

Voicing is a term that refers to how far apart the notes are on the piano when you play them.

Now, let me give you a quick example of that. If I told you to play a C chord, you could

do this. Most of us would do this immediately. We would play C, E and G; we would play them

close together. Ok, not bad but it can be better. What if we did this instead.

Here's the first way. Here's the second way. Which way sounds better? The second way by

an infinite margin. It sounds way way better. The notes are spread out. We have a fifth

and a sixth between the two notes. OK, this is where I want you to go in your music. I

want you to go in that direction rather than using closed voicing. Now you might say Greg,

that's hard to do. I know it can be hard to do. I remember when I was told that I had

to do it. I was studying I don't know, six or eight years ago with a great pianist, John

Innes, and John told me, he said Greg, he was listening to my music and he said, Greg,

you cram too many notes together, especially in your left hand. I was playing a lot of

very tight chords. And he said you need to spread it out. And I thought wow that's not

going to be easy to do. But the reality is, I did it because I focused on it. I worked

at getting better at the process of spreading out notes or making my voicing open. And you

can do it too as you work through it. I'm going to give you a lot of ways to make that

happen. Now, let's talk about it. When you spread out the notes, what you want to do

is sort of distribute the notes between your two pinkies. Remember, your pinkies are your

limits. The left pinkie is going to play the bass note, the root of the chord normally,

but that's going to be the low end of what you are playing. The right pinkie is going

to be the high end. Ok, so if you're playing this chord right here, let's say you have

a C chord and you play a C in the left pinkie and the melody note is also C. OK, you have

to put an E and a G in that chord if its a C chord, right? Most of us do this. OK, we

end up with an E and an G and we play a three note chord in our right hand and play either

a C by itself in the left hand or we play a C octave. OK, very very typical. A lot of

us were taught to play a lot of octaves. Here's what I want you to do instead. Take the G

and move it down here. OK, notice how the notes are spread out. They're spread out,

distributed between the two pinkies. That's where you're going to get your best sound.

You don't want the notes all congregated toward the top of the piano, you don't want them

down here toward the bottom of the piano in the base. You want to sort of spread them

out. That's open voicing. It will greatly, greatly improve your sound. Now, does that

mean you have to get a ruler and get it exact. Absolutely not, and by the way, sometimes,