The Little Details That Make a Difference

As a worship leader, I find myself walking a ‘tightrope’, attempting to find a balance between pursuing excellence without obsessing about the small things and driving my worship team nuts. Admittedly, when I err, I probably err more towards the perfectionist side. Maybe this is why I’ve recently heard musicians on my worship team make the “we aren’t professionals” excuse. However, I can’t help but wonder if often such an excuse is bandied about because we mistakenly magnify the little things.

You see, I often find that the difference between giving our best to God as worship musicians, and slacking our offering as Cain did, is not found in the big things but rather in the small. Sure, if a worship leader is asking a worship team full of volunteers and amateurs to play with the virtuosity of Lincoln Brewster, sing with the descants of an American Idol finalist, exhibit the dedication of a classical pianist, or unravel the complexity of Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, then I can understand such objections. But I almost always find that the lines between excellence and excelling at mediocrity are based upon simply paying attention to the small details.

 The lines between excellence and excelling at mediocrity are based upon simply paying attention to the small details.

After all, worship music is relatively easy compared to many other styles of music. The fundamentals are things like, knowing the difference between a C major chord and a D minor chord, being able to tune an instrument, reading a chart, being relatively tight and knowing a fairly small vocabulary of rhythmic grooves. These are things that we filter for when auditioning worship team members. They are relatively simple things to understand but can take years to develop for beginners.

As a worship leader, I’m usually the one leading rehearsals, so it is refreshing to sometimes just sit in with a worship band under another worship leader. Recently I sat in with a worship band that, like so many other worship bands, had the fundamentals down. They just needed to nail down the little details. Unfortunately, when it came time to play the service, the band missed a lot of small details that made a big difference.

For example, we had an intro that consisted of repeating a chord progression twice before the band kicked up the dynamics into a second chord progression also in pairs. Instead, the drummer boosted the dynamics prematurely. Just knowing this small thing, “most everything in music is in even numbers, usually 2’s and 4’s”, is a simple factoid that could have made a significant difference. 

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