I learnt my piano playing in the trenches, son.

Advice for budding musicians who want to get good at playing with a group: JOIN A CHURCH BAND.

No, seriously. I have so much experience at different varieties of music-playing – but the kind of experience you get out of being in a church band is a whole other level.

You see… half the people there will kind of suck at music.

By playing piano in a church band, I have learnt:
- how to play with guitar and drums accompanying
- how to play without the drums, because the drummer failed to show up
- how to get the drummer into a different tempo by thumping the piano keys loudly, because he started the song at completely the wrong speed
- how to play in a way that supports the singers rather than overpowering them
- how to deal with the singers accidentally skipping two bars
- how to notice that the singers are unexpectedly repeating the chorus rather than moving on to the next verse
- how to loudly start playing the tune when the singers completely lose track of what they should be doing
- how to play beautiful tinkly music while people go up for communion
- how to extend the beautiful tinkly music for far longer than you were planning because communion is taking forever
- how to change the entire song to a different key halfway through rehearsal, because the singers complain it's too high
- how to realise a few bars in that the guitarist is playing in a different key to you, and transpose the song on the fly to match what he's doing
- how to be ready to unexpectedly launch into the "Happy Birthday" song when the pastor gets overexcited about us being part of a community