The change from worship to any other, structured music is like going from the game “Operation” to actual brain surgery. For me, worship has been largely unstructured and improvised – a single sheet of lyrics are attached to general chords and that’s it. No grand staff. No notation. No symbols. The system (rather, lack of) provides a great amount of adaptability during the song and everyone can jump in and just do “whatever”. For worship, it works.
When you’ve got a specific vision for a song that you need to communicate, it doesn’t.
Music theory has been on my mind for the last couple of months. I knew that this transition from worship to “other” music (strange, ambiguous term that I’m still struggling to define) meant that I would need to refresh my music theory. I had taken a lot in junior high, high school, and even some in college many, many years ago. But I procrastinated.
A few weeks ago, I happened upon some sheet music. Shockingly, I realized I couldn’t remember what any of it meant. I couldn’t remember what the note names were, could barely remember what the numerical values were – it took me nearly five minutes of brain-wracking before I could finally remember what the lines and spaces were!
And that was when I realized I had a problem.
Meanwhile, a couple of people at church had asked me to teach them piano or give voice lessons and I turned them all down. All except one. He sang with me a couple of times on the worship team for the evening worship services. I had always felt that I was supposed to take him under my wing, in a sense. Until he came up to sing with me one night, I had no idea he even had any desire for music. Turns out he’s been “composing” in his spare time. He can’t play any instrument and he has no idea what any musical notation means, so he just opens up a program on his computer and clicks randomly to write a piece, then subtracts notes, one at a time, until something sounds “right”. Then he repeats the process.
Hell, if he’s that passionate about writing music, I’ll teach him. Plus, when you teach someone, it forces you to learn/refresh, too. I agreed to do it — but covertly, because I don’t want anyone knowing that I’ve turned down other people but not him. I don’t know how much he can learn from me, since I’m trying to refresh myself as well, so we agreed to do this for a month and then decide if it’s worth it for him to continue with me or go to someone else. I bought him a theory book and play book, and I also bought a theory book for myself. Tomorrow night he’ll take his first theory quiz and start theory lab. If I can figure out how to do it correctly, I’ll make the quizzes and lab assignments that I create available for download/viewing as pdf’s. Just for fun! 
Over the weekend, I ended up having a lot of time to myself in the house, so I did get a chance to sit down and write music. I feel really good and excited about it. At this point I can’t even tell if it’s any good or not, and I don’t care – just sitting down and doing it feels good, almost like the novel-writing process. Music, like any other art, is about making choices. Creativity doesn’t just possess you like a demon, making your art pour out of you. Making art is about deciding where you’re going to take it.
For now, it feels good. Still waiting for the sound room to get done. Walls, door and insulation is up. Electric is getting done this week. Not sure what else. Tom’s in charge of that. 
Whatever your artistic goals are for the year, I hope you are well under way with them! I hope eventually you’ll feel good enough to share…