The Importance Of Keyboard Pads For Worship Music

You've probably heard fellow worship leaders talk about using pads in their worship music.  

While it may sound like a novel idea on the surface, you might still be asking yourself, "Are pads really that important?"

The answer, I believe, is yes.

And here's why.

 

PRACTICAL

A great practical reason that pads are important for your worship music is that you don't need an additional team member to add pads to your sound.  It is super easy to run pads yourself, to have a team member do it in addition to what they're already doing, or even to automate pads (through an app like OnSong, through your presentation software like ProPresenter, etc).

Another great practical reason is because, although I love what multi-tracks can do for your sound, pads are much easier to use than multi-tracks.  For the worship leaders who aren't tech-savvy or who worry about adding another layer of complexity to their worship service setup, pads are an awesome option for you.

 

MUSICAL

Musically, the pads should speak for themselves.  Three reasons I believe Coresound Pads are important for your worship sound:

1. We built pads that support your lead instrument in the mix, not muddy your mix.  you don’t want a pad that’s going to swallow up the same frequencies as your guitar or piano or keyboard or whatever. You want a pad that supports it in the mix.
2. We built pads that add to your worship team’s sound, and not drawing attention to itself.  There are a lot of nice musical things going on in each pad, but you don’t want the pad to have nuances that draw a lot of attention to themselves. 
3. Also, we built pads that aren’t boring.  I’ve literally seen someone play a note on a keyboard, put a brick on a sustain pedal, and use that as a pad sound.  A drone is an OK thing but when not treated properly, can actually be distracting because the sound isn’t going anywhere!

So musically, pads add an awesome layer of musical support to your worship team's sound.

 

SPIRITUAL

I hope this doesn’t sound like a stretch, but I think there’s also spiritual importance in using pads.

As you know, pads do a great job of creating smooth transitions in between songs, providing atmosphere for moments of prayer, Scripture reading, etc., and they kill that awkward dead space.

Now I’m not saying that pads are the only solution for this, but I do know that, as a worship leader myself, a big part of my heart & responsibility is to curate an environment of “un-distracting excellence”... which means that if I want to encourage people to stay connected to the heart of what God is doing in the course of a worship service, one of my jobs is to do my best to remove distractions from that.

And, let’s be real. It’s fairly easy to get distracted when awkward dead-space happens or when a transition from one song to the next doesn’t go quite as smoothly as you liked.  

Again, I’m not saying poor transitions are a sin and pads are some sort of savior, but I see it as a stewardship issue.  

If I can easily do something that fills out our atmosphere and eliminates the potential for distraction to happen along the way, that’s a good thing!  That’s a good thing for the congregation, and that’s also a great thing for me as the worship leader.  

I then see my focus not being consumed by trying to “keep the worship moving”, but instead use the pads as a musical safety net and get to enjoy worship. Not just lead it, but participate in it.  It frees me to worship the Lord.

 

I can't understate how important I think pads are for your worship music. Try them and see for yourself!

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