Selecting the right keyboard rig for your worship band can be a daunting task. In this
video, I’m going to walk you through the setup we use at our church plant. Rather than
spending thousands of dollars on a Nord, Roland, or Yamaha keyboard, we are able to produce
amazing sounds with an inexpensive MIDI keyboard and Mainstage running on a Macbook Air. Keep
watching this video and you’ll know exactly what to buy and how to set this up at
your church.
My name is Jake Gosselin with Churchfront.com, an online resource for innovative and creative
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Question of the day: What keyboard rig do you use at your church? I love learning from
you guys so let me know below in the comments.
In this video, I’m going to walk you through the keyboard setup we use at the small church
plant where I lead worship. I am not a professional keyboardist. I’m a worship leader and guitarist.
But as the worship leader, it’s my responsibility to make sure my volunteers who play keyboard
have the best tools to produce the best sounds possible.
I wanted to build a rig that can reproduce the sounds we hear today on most modern worship
albums. That means the rig must have amazing piano, pad, synth, organ, and bass sounds
to play the wide variety of sounds that are popular today.
There are two key pieces to any keyboard rig. The first piece is the hardware which is the
physical keyboard itself. The second piece is the software which produces the sounds.
There are a couple of options for how you can go about combining hardware and software
for a keyboard rig.
First, you could buy a keyboard that combines the hardware and software into one. While
this setup is portable and convenient, there are a couple issues. In order to have a keyboard
with high quality sounds built it, you need to spend a lot of money on a high-end Nord,
Roland, or Yamaha. Most church’s cannot afford that. Instead they buy a cheap keyboard
for a few hundred dollars which ends up not sound good and cannot produce the pad and
synth sounds required in modern worship bands.
The second way to build a worship keyboard rig is to purchase the hardware and software
separately. That’s what I did to setup the keyboard rig for my worship band. There are
several advantages to this. First, you can buy an inexpensive MIDI keyboard controller
from M-Audio or Akai. In our setup, we use the M-Audio Hammer 88. It has 88 weighted
keys and feels great for only being $400. Since that keyboard is packed away where we
store our church gear, in this example I’m going to show you how I have it setup with
the M-Audio Keystation 49. It’s cheap and tiny but it gets the job done. Remember, MIDI
keyboard controllers do not produce actual sound. You will plug the keyboard into a laptop
with USB cable and the laptop will be producing the actual sound.
We have a Macbook Air with Mainstage installed on it to run our keyboard sounds, also known
as patches. Mainstage is available for $30 in the Mac app store. Sorry PC user, Mainstage
is not available on Windows. You do not need a super powerful Mac to run Mainstage. The
MacBook Air we have is a 2014 model with 8GB of RAM. We have never had performance issues.
Once you have Mainstage installed on your computer, you can start using the piano and
pad sounds built into the software. That is what we did for a few months at our church
plant. Recently, I purchased Worship Essentials 2 by thatworshipsound.com. Worship Essentials
2 is a template of premade Mainstage patches that are designed specifically for worship.
I’ve included a link below to another video where the creator of these patches demos all
the sounds. The bundle of 20 patches costs only $40 which is an incredible value. Once
you purchase and download the bundle, you simply open up the mainstage concert file
and bam, you have amazing worship keyboard patches ready to go.
Let’s talk about cost. Assuming you already have a Mac computer available,it only costs
$30 for Mainstage, $40 for Worship Essentials 2, and let’s say you purchase a MIDI Keyboard
like the one we use at my church for $400. For less than $500, your church has a phenomenal
worship keyboard rig for. If you went and spent $500 on a typical keyboard with sounds
built in, you’d have a very mediocre rig. To me it’s a no brainer. Even if you need
to buy an additional laptop to run Mainstage, you can find a used MacBook Air for less than
$1000. In the end, this setup is still a fraction of the price for a flagship Nord, Roland,
or Yamaha keyboard.
But I’m not done showing you how cool this setup is. At my church, we use Ableton Live
to run a click, tracks, and automate lighting and lyrics in worship. If you’ve been following
my channel for any amount of time you probably know I’m a huge Ableton Live geek. Ableton
Live can also control different features within Mainstage. It can cue up the right Mainstage
patches at the right time so my keyboardist doesn’t have to worry about selecting the
right sound. Ableton can also tell Mainstage what tempo a song is in so that delays and
arpeggiators align with the timing of the song. Ableton Live’s.
Here is an example of what this looks like. In last week’s worship set, we opened with
You Are Life by Hillsong Worship. At the beginning of the song, I cue up the right patch in Worship
Essentials 2. It’s a high energy arpeggiator and notice that the tempo in Mainstage matches
the tempo in Ableton Live. At the end of the song, I cue up the ambient piano patch because
I’m going to lead the congregation in a call to worship before we transition into
10,000 reasons. Once again the tempo in Mainstage changes to match Ableton Live.
The final thing I want to touch on is how to get audio from your Mac to your sound system.
You will need a 3.5mm to dual ¼” cable, a stereo DI Box, and two XLR cables to plug
into your stage snake or sound console. With this setup you will have a left and right
channel from your computer. It’s not totally necessary but it can be nice if you have patches
with panning features in them. I hope you now see that a phenomenal keyboard
sound is achievable with a simple MIDI controller, Mainstage, and Worship Essentials 2 by thatworshipsound.com.
They did not pay me to promote their product. I just like it that much. As a worship leader
who just wants to easily implement the latest and greatest in worship tools for my team,
this one was a no brainer from the second I heard Abel demo these patches on his channel.
Thanks for watching. If you want to learn the #1 worship leading software, enroll in
my free training, Lead Worship with Ableton linked below. You can also download my Worship
Ministry toolkit which contains links to everything covered in this video. If you found this video
helpful, hit the thumbs up button, and share it with your friends. You can check out some
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