Our First Time Leading Worship | What We Should Have Known Back Then | Podcast 18

[@RylandRussell]

Great convo fellas. That balance of creativity and accessibility in our worship music is always interesting to wrestle with.

[@lordnketia2348]

Wow, am great with this topic. Am gonna follow those steps this decade ahead of me and even more. Thank you, thank you very much.

[@allendunning272]

CCM seems frequently to be wrongly perceived as "simple". I don't know for certain, but I suspect that is because many of the people who play it in church on any given Sunday don't have the "musical ear" to hear precisely what is being played in any particular production/recording of current CCM songs. Or if they do have a good musical ear, they don't think it's important to execute or reproduce the music to a similar level for their church? As an example, last week our worship team did 'Jireh" for the first time. I've heard several streamed covers of the song where the piano/keyboard plays the first chords on the first verse as Cm, Bb, Ab, Eb. The original harmonization on the piano is more dissonant - an open voiced Cm-add 17 [C,Eb,C,Eb,F], Bb-add4 [Bb,D,F,Bb,D,Eb,F], Ab, Eb. Without playing those "cluster" type chord dissonances, the musical sophistication is lost or unappreciated. Davin likes to reharmonized CCM songs, add gospel inspired passing chords etc., so they are more to his musical taste, which is fine. But if one would but listen more closely/deeply to the original productions there is plenty of musical complexity or sophistication in CCM that worship musicians could strive for if they so desired.

[@WorshipLeaderHangout]

Maverick City is an exception. Their music isn’t hard but I wouldn’t say it’s simple, however, generally speaking, CCM is simple. Most musicians aren’t turning to CCM to learn creative ideas. Frankly the music now is highly dependent on stems, most of the songs use the same basic progressions. I do agree that there are more Sus2 and sus4 chords that are being used, rather than some of the major chords people play. However it will never be seen as a genre for people to study creative ideas, because there isn’t much to learn.

[@allthingskeys2223]

@@WorshipLeaderHangout Thank you for your reply. I enjoy and appreciate your podcasts and respect your point of view, but your last sentence sounds like a self-fulfilling prediction, i.e. if right up front you don't think there is much/anything creative to learn indeed you won't. As another example you mention teaching your band that unison "riff" just before the bridge on "Endless Praise", but did you/they note or play that diminished passing chord played only by the organ on the second chorus? I haven't looked it up on Praise Charts or CCLI, but I doubt it's noted. I would agree if you're using stems/tracks/loops to fill in the details for your band, it may not be important if they're playing simple four chord patterns.