Back

September 29, 2019

Mistakes and all, it was good to be back on the worship team playing bass. I definitely need more practice. For the past two years while I’ve been preaching, the music has had to take a back seat; I haven’t really touched the electric bass much in all that time. You’d think playing the upright would transfer to the electric, and to some extent it does, since the scale patterns are identical. It’s just that on the upright, there are no frets to tell me where I am, and everything is spaced farther apart, so the placement of the fingers is different. Right hand technique is not the same, either, and to top it off, I’ve been playing from sheet music—actual notes and scales—instead of chord sheets. 

Making up the runs from the chord sheets might be a breeze for someone who’s had some music theory, but I couldn’t tell you the notes in an F# minor if my life depended on it. If written in standard music notation however, playing those notes in an arpeggio would be a snap. If I didn’t have to play them too fast. So...when playing for the worship team, if I don’t want to mess everything up, I’ll need to figure out the runs and write them in. 

Life is often like that. There is a formal and traditional way of doing things, but there are also colloquial methods that work just fine. Years ago, when the exhaust pipe on my car began sounding a bit throaty due to the hole rusted through it, an old soup can and a couple of hose clamps did a pretty fair job of quieting things down. Today when my throat starts feeling a bit scratchy or my chest starts getting congested, I rub down with some of the DoTerra oils my daughter sells. Some people may scoff, but I used to come down with a cold that would lay me out for days, but in the three years since I began using these oils, that stuff never gets the chance to dig in.

I am thankful to be able to do my small part making music, whether in the concert or jazz band, or on Sunday mornings in worship. The latter however, is particularly satisfying, as the music lifts us to eternal realities in a way that other music cannot. I listen to all sorts of music, play what I am able, but tonight I am thankful to be back in the band.