Effective Personal Practice Leads to Great Rehearsals
Updated 2023
Estimated time to read: 6 minutes
Do your worship team rehearsals drag on? Does it feel like everyone is helping one musician learn a song for the first time? These may be signs that your rehearsal time is being hijacked into a personal practice time. This post will outline a proven method and ideas to accelerate your personal practice in preparation for a great rehearsal.
Sections:
Practice vs Rehearsal
Clarify Expectations
Start Rehearsal Prepared
An Effective Personal Practice Method
Wrapping it up
Practice vs Rehearsal
Sometimes practice and rehearsal are used interchangeably, but in this post practice has to do with your personal preparation time for playing with a worship team and rehearsal has to do with the group preparation time for a Sunday service (for example). Showing up to rehearsal prepared and ready to play through the set list is the responsibility of each musician individually.
Clarify Expectations
If you know what’s expected of you during a worship team rehearsal, you will be able to practice accordingly and come prepared. Your team may not have specific expectations, standards, or require musicians to show up knowing their parts, but hopefully your worship leader or director understands the importance of setting a standard for the whole team. In this case it may be a good idea to talk to them outside of practice and see if you can get some clarification or more specifics.
Start Rehearsal Prepared
Showing up prepared means that you not only have listened to the recordings, looked at the sheet music, practiced your parts to the point of being able to play them without messing up, but also you have an idea of how the overall songs are going to go.
There’s a lot here and you may not be at this stage in your musicianship yet, but as long as you are working toward developing these skills, your worship team may still want you to serve.
Don’t be discouraged if you think you aren’t good enough to serve. There are still ways to serve while you are still learning the basics of playing with a band. The following practice methods will help you level up to meet the challenge.
An Effective Personal Practice Method
Working backward from the goal of starting rehearsal prepared, we need to know what to practice and how. WGA musicians don’t just show up to rehearsal and “wing it”. They spend time preparing for the group rehearsal time.
Everyone’s time is valuable so don’t skip your personal practice and make everyone else stay later than they need to.
Previously, we mentioned the main things we need to practice and they are:
Listen to the recordings
Play along with the sheet music
Practice your parts to the point of being able to play without messing up
Have a general sense of how each song goes
Let’s go over these in a little more depth.
Listen to the recordings
First things first, we need to know what the song sounds like. There are a few questions we can ask ourselves as we listen to the song. By no means are these exhaustive so feel free to add your own.
What is the mood? Is it loud and joyful? Somber and contemplative?
What is the time signature? A song in 4/4 will sound different from a song in 6/8.
How fast is it? Are the chords exaggerated and purposeful or are there quick chord changes?
What is the order of the song? Knowing the order of song sections will help you understand what happens throughout the song. To learn more about sections in a song, read this post: [link]
What instruments do you hear? You will want to listen for your instrument first, but also take notes of when other instruments come in or fade out. This is called dynamics.
What are the dynamics throughout the song? Simplified, dynamics describe the change in volume throughout the song, but there’s a whole lot more to dynamics than just volume. You can read a little more about dynamics in this post: [Basic terms every worship guitarist needs to know]
This is a lot of questions to ask while you listen to a song for the first time, which is why most musicians listen to a new song at least 5-10 times. The point is to absorb what you are hearing when it applies to these questions and more.
Let’s move on to the next item on the personal practice agenda.
Play along with the sheet music
Once you have listened to the song a few times and have a good idea of how the rhythm guitar fits in, it’s time to get your guitar out and start to play along.
This might seem like a trivial step, especially if you consider yourself to be more advanced, but it’s very beneficial and keeps you from rushing from listening to the song one time to showing up to practice and winging it.
By now you know the tempo, the key signature and chords used in the song (by looking at the sheet music), and you know the feel of how your instrument fits into the song. While you continue to listen, go ahead and play the chord changes following the sheet music. Get a feel for the strum patterns that fit with the groove of the song.
As a rhythm guitarist, your job is to provide harmony in the form of chords and add another layer on top of the drum and bass rhythms.
Practice your parts
As you listen and play along, you are really spending time practicing. Sometimes practice can seem boring, but it doesn’t have to be. As long as you are playing along with the recordings, reading the sheet music, and learning what sounds good when you play along, that’s practice.
In a perfect world, you will want to practice your parts to the point of being able to play through the whole song without messing up at all. This will come with time, but the more seasoned guitarists out there should have no problems and aim for this goal with every song in the setlist.
Your worship leader or band leader may not require perfection (and that’s just fine), but being a WGA guitarist means that you strive for excellence and show up prepared to play as if the set was being recorded live.
Have a general sense of how each song goes
Each worship team will have different ways of running their rehearsals. The most effective teams that I have been on outline the order of sections for each song and send it out to their teams the week before (at the latest). This allows everyone on the team to not only learn the songs and their parts, but if there are changes to the order of the song compared to the recording, then they can practice the transitions between sections. All of this makes for a shorter and smoother practice.
Your sheet music may have the order written across the top of the sheet music for each song already. If not, you can always write it in and remove any confusion or uncertainty about which section comes next.
Wrapping it up
Now that you have a good method to effectively practice and prepare for your worship team rehearsal, use these steps every week you’re on the schedule to play and start leveling up your rehearsals.
How do you practice in preparation for worship team rehearsal? Leave a comment below and let me know.