By Robert Wright — Minister of Music, New Light Baptist Church
Hammond or Piano? How the Musician Decides
I play both. Some Sundays the organ carries the whole service and the piano barely speaks; other Sundays I sit at the piano and never reach for the organ. People assume the choice comes down to preference, or to which instrument you play best. It doesn’t. The choice is discernment — reading the moment and answering it with the right voice.
Start with what the moment is asking for. High praise belongs to the organ, if the church has one. There is a lift the Hammond gives a shouting church that a piano simply cannot reach. But a solo — especially in a church with no drummer — is often better served by the piano alone. The piano leaves room. It lets a singer breathe without being crowded.
Chants and soft meditations usually belong to the piano too. Unless — and this is the exception worth naming — the organist is gifted enough to bring out that Billy Preston kind of touch, where the organ turns tender instead of thunderous. That gift is rare. When you don’t have it, let the piano do the quiet work.
“Sometimes the most ministering thing a musician can do is take his hands off the keys and let silence sit in the room.”
Then comes the hardest discipline: knowing when not to play at all. Our Dr. Watts hymns were built to be lined out, call-and-response, with no accompaniment — yet how often do we lay music underneath them anyway and cover the very thing that makes them holy? And “talk music,” that soft playing we run under the announcements and everything else — sometimes the most ministering thing a musician can do is take his hands off the keys and let silence sit in the room. None of this can be scripted ahead of time. The musician has to be in the service — awake, watching, listening for the cue of the moment. Hammond or piano was never really the question. The question is whether you are present enough to hear which one the moment is asking for.
