Worship Keys Rig with Andrew Sharp of Church of the Highlands

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Welcome back to the Worship Keys Podcast! In this episode, we dive deep into the world of worship keys with Andrew Sharp from Church of the Highlands. While co-host Tyler Wester is not present, Andrew gives an extensive rundown of his full keys rig, including his go-to sounds on Keyscape and Omnisphere, and practical tips for managing and manipulating your sounds for worship settings. Andrew walks us through his setup, which includes an OB-6 synthesizer, Ableton integration, and key sound design techniques. Whether you're new to worship keys or looking to refine your setup, this episode is loaded with insights and practical advice. Don't forget to leave your questions and comments below, and enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at Andrew's dynamic keys rig!

Andrew Sharp

Transcript

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Guys, welcome back to the Worship Keys Podcast three part series with Andrew Sharp and Tyler Wester here at Church of the Highlands. Um, Tyler's actually not with us right now. Today is a solo episode for. Andrew Sharp. His full keys rig, we say it's, it's actually not for Andrew Sharp. It's really for you guys to get to know. Behind the scenes we see videos of you on Instagram playing, um, these huge arenas. BJCC, whatever. Uh, I don't know, are y'all off the bat? Are y'all the bat? Well, or BJCC? What do y'all do? Motion and stuff. BJCC. Yeah. One, one time a year. One time a year. There you go and love your keys rig. The double decker. You got keys to the left and right of you, and you got. Different gear. But today we're gonna give a full rundown of your go-to sounds. Um, someone did ask on Instagram, so I wanna make sure to ask it 'cause I don't know if we'll get to it. I don't know if you'll get to it naturally. Um, your absolute go-to sound on Keyscape your absolute go-to sound on Omnisphere. Omnisphere three is out now too. Okay. But, go-to sound on Keyscape has to be the, the. The C seven piano. Yeah. C seven. The, the mellow preset. Okay. Okay. Mellow and I'll tweak it from there. But C seven, piano, mellow, preset, that's like, I mean that's gotta be Yeah. So many people's go-to, so, totally, totally. And, um, Omnisphere Okay. Lemme give you a, a practical one and a fun one. So I have a pad, which you'll see, that is always ready to go. Always ready to be turned up at any moment of any set ever. And it's just this go-to Omnisphere pad. Um, so that's my boring one. But there are somewhere deep in that Omnisphere library. There's agape sheen and agape warmth. Glory agape. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Those are, those are really fun. It's sounds like it's like pad thing. It's got some like string samples going on in there, so if you could just like ride the filter on it, it's amazing. It's pretty cool. Yeah. One thing too, and I, and I know we're not into your keys rig right now, but the filter knob, like controlling your eq, low pass filter, whatever, is one of the. Just most important things you can do as a keys player is like, get a hold of that. The amount of people that say that on this podcast, like, we had a, a episode about Ox Keys on here and Mika was talking about his, his EQ filter. I'm a DJ and I use that all the time too. Yeah. Like get the lows and, and highs out and washing out and doing a back spin. The, the Fre understanding frequencies guys is gonna change your life for sound design and yeah. Thank you for taking us through this whole journey. Um, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to stop talking 'cause I want you to take it away. But guys, if y'all enjoy this episode, let us know in the comments. If you have any questions, let him know too. Um, Andrew's just gonna take it away. All right. I'm really excited to run through my keys rig for you guys today. So, as I, as I go through kind of what's going on, uh, with the keyboards, with the controllers, uh, with the computer, if you have any questions. Please leave a comment. Uh, I'll try to personally get in there and, and respond to whatever questions you have that I might be able to answer. Um, and let's just, let's just dive in. So before I run through all the technical of it, uh, I'll just explain kind of what I'm trying to achieve here. So this is my. Everything, keys rig. So if I'm doing main keys, like piano stuff, if I'm doing ox keys, like synth stuff, or if I'm doing a little bit of both, I've kind of got it all in one big session. And that's just because I, I like to change stuff up a lot. I'm, I'm always tweaking, throwing new stuff in there, taking it out, seeing what I like and don't like, and managing that over multiple sessions became kind of difficult. So just a broad overview. I have this top board, which I don't always have with me sometimes. Uh, I have the opportunity to use this. It's a sequential OB six, it's an analog synthesizer, and I am running, uh, lines out of this into an SSL interface. It's a SSL two plus, and then that is feeding the audio into Ableton. So you can see in my session that I have, um, an OB six. Channel here in Ableton. Really what that is, is it's just a through lane for the OB six to go into my session and, uh, receive some processing, which is just, uh, reverb compression, uh, and eq. I do have this, uh, this bit crusher on here that I have the option of mixing in, and I'll, I'll get into that a little bit more. Later. So the B six is running into Ableton and it's meeting up with all of my software sounds, which I'm controlling with the bottom keyboard, which today is a innovation launch key 88. Sometimes it's a Nord, sometimes it's uh, whatever there is back line. Uh, Corg, Arturia. It could be anything. I appreciate it if there's a mod wheel. Sometimes there's not. Um, but this could be anything. When I'm doing ox stuff, I like it to be, uh, simulated or not fully weighted keys. If I'm doing main stuff, piano stuff, I prefer for weighted keys, but it's all the same. It's all the same. You just use the tools that you have. And then a little bit more on kind of the theory and the approach of it. So when I'm designing sounds, uh, synth stuff, a stuff, main keys. I'm thinking about dynamics and how flexible I can be in the moment to manipulate my dynamics in a variety of ways. So the main three things I'm thinking about is, uh, the tone of it, mainly like dark or bright, um, bringing in higher frequencies, taming down the higher frequencies using, uh, filters, low pass filters. Which is filter out the, uh, the high frequencies. That's what a low pass filter does, and generally you can control that. So I'll show you where I have my, my low pass filters mapped for all my different sounds. The second thing, um, is velocity. Just how hard I hit. So that's the, the second factor of my dynamics. And then, um, how many notes I'm playing at a time. So some sounds can sound really, really huge with one sustained note, other sounds. Uh, maybe they don't sound good with just one note, you have to play a lot of notes. I'll kind of explain my, my theory behind those three things and the tools that I'm using to do that across the board, uh, are, uh, lowpass filters, uh, and, and reverb mainly, and some compression. So I'll show you how I use. Just one reverb slider on my, my midi controller right here, actually to control the whole reverb of, of everything even. There's lots, lots of channels. I try to keep it simple to where I can do stuff on the fly. I, I don't program, um, my sounds to change with sections of songs I, I kinda like and need to be able to adapt in the context that I'm in. So all of this is just designed so that I can change my dynamics as much as I can on the fly. And. Although I'm using a lot of stuff, uh, I started not using a lot of stuff, and you can really achieve this, uh, with, with a minimal setup as well. And I think you'll see how even though I've got a lot of presets for songs here from different set lists that I've been a part of in the past. Most of them are kind of the same few sounds with a, with a few things mixed in. Also on the OB six, I just have, you know, 10 presets that I use ever. I'm not, it's got, you know, hundreds of banks. I like to keep it simple. Um, if you're trying to get into it, I would say truly just find the, the most that you can find in whatever you do have. If your church has a, a keyboard with built-in sounds. Scroll through all the sounds, learn all the tools, figure out how to use it. Um, and then, and then if you have the opportunity to maybe pick up another sound library or a keyboard or uh, something like able tin or main stage where you can start to accumulate stuff. Um, do that, but learn everything you possibly can about every single tool you have before just going to grab new things, new presets, uh, because then you, you won't actually learn how to use those things in, in the fullest anyway, so some free resources off the top of my head, Spitfire Labs has a lot of great stuff. I'm using some of their stuff in my session today. I've been using the same free soft Spitfire Labs piano since I started. Uh, my keys rig. Um, they also have free pads in there. That's a great start and it has built-in effects and reverb and stuff. So try that out. If you're new and you're wanting to expand on a rig and let's dive into it. So I've already talked about the B six. If you look at my controller here, it's a Korg Nano Kontrol 2 Um, it's one of the. Lesser expensive options for this type of thing. I've used other ones. I've used the, the, it's, I think it's called a MIDI fighter. It's got like LED lights, use that for a while. This just feel feels like home base for me, so you can see that each one of these main faders corresponds to a channel in my Ableton rig. So as I move this piano one up. It's labeled p and o. I apologize for the messy tape. It's moving my piano channel up and let's turn the re reverb off. You can start to hear the piano. Got a pad synth, another pad. I'll explain that. Ambient pad, a drone, it's all pads. Uh, different types of pads. And then these yellow ones are for controlling effects. So this one that just has effects is actually nothing right now. It's kind of like my experiment zone. If I wanna try something out, I'll map it on there. Uh, this one is a delay, so I'll turn on my piano so you can hear that. And then reverb and, uh, how these. The lay and reverb work are if there is a reverb on anything in the session, and I want to be able to control it. It's mapped to this, so that's not to say that the piano is running to the same reverb and as the synth, as the pad, maybe multiple pads or have different reverbs, but if I wanna be able to control the mix, it's mapped to this. So all I need to do on the fly, no matter what I'm playing, I don't. Have to have a ton of knobs or presets. It's just more verb, more delay. And, um, the color coding, I'll kinda explain to you how that works. The blue tape is for, if I'm playing main keys, so just piano. And I have this as just one pad preset that stays the same, never changes. For just, just a go-to piano, pat sound. The green tape is for OX related stuff. Uh, synths pads, drones, and the yellow tape, uh, works for both. So that's gonna be a parameter that affects both. Up here, MV is Master Volume. RD stands for Redux, which is a, a, like a bit crusher distortion effect that's built into Ableton. Uh, VF stands for Vulf Compressor. It's just the name of the compressor, but it's just. Uh, and compressor. Both of these effects are, uh, they're green, so they're for ox, but they're actually only control, um, effects on the OB six. So these are specifically on my OB six hardware synth channel, and then all these buttons are patches that I can call up at any moment. So. Obviously this controller wasn't designed to be used in this way, but I've mapped all these blue tape buttons, which is the S'S two different piano presets, and then the green ones are a different synth pad presets that I just use frequently because I wanna be able to call it anything on the fly, even if it's not what I have in my preset, uh, for that song. So allows me to be really flexible. Um, I also have some very faint black tape that you may see here. And these are just like entire patch call up that I can do. Kind of four go to. Actually, when I made these, they were just for aox, so you can actually see 'em in my session. Go to Pulse, go to bed, go to blowout, go to pluck. Just different go-to setups that if I need to change my setup on the fly, uh, I can do that. So. It's created for maximum flexibility. And then lastly, for these channel faders. So this is everything excluding the effects faders. Each of these knobs controls the low pass filter that I was talking about. So. If I were to pull down the filter on this synth, you can hear that working pad and that's just something that I wanted to be able to control independently so I can kind of bring in sounds organically when I, when I want to with the filter. So maybe I can just give you an example of. Some sounds channel by channel and then, uh, work it all together and give you some playing examples of how I go about controlling those dynamics. So just to run through a few of the piano sounds to cover my bases. Um, you can see there's kind of a lot, again, a lot of these are experimental that I don't leave in my session all the time, so. Going from top to bottom, I'll just cover the most important. You've got the wing upright. This is Keyscape kinda like a I thank God, Maverick City type of. Then I've got the cinematic preset, which I believe is the Keyscape C7 Let me dig in here, mixed with that Free Labs soft piano that I was talking about and in in Ableton. I'm using a method to switch between patches that, uh, a lot of other people use, in session view. I, I, I learned it. I didn't come up with this, but essentially, without getting into the nitty gritty details of it, each one of these clips is triggering a sound to change and, um, that happens, you know, vertically through the session. So, as I set up my. Uh, horizontal set list. So basically this patch for who else? All the channels run vertical and the presets run vertical, but it's controlling the whole row. When I click my song over here in the scenes, so on the right these are called scenes on the left. These are called clips. My clips control, my individual sounds. My scenes will change the entire preset. So if I'm on a preset, like I am right here for praise, and I hit one of those buttons that I showed you on my controller. So let's change, the synth sound. That's all these green tapes on these buttons. It's gonna change the clip of these sounds. You can see because the green arrow that was on these clips is moving. So I've selected. I preset for, praise it. Armed all these clips. Right now I've got C 70 on the synth channel and string machine on the pads. But if I change the synth by hitting the button, that's gonna change while keeping my pad the same. So this is how, let's say, I want to get to a sound, um, that's on the synth, but I, I don't wanna completely drop out. I can be playing my pad, but I want to get to this plex sound. I just have the channel down. I change the sound, I bring it in. Okay, so now I'll show you an example of how I can build the dynamics with these layers. Kind of starting from the lowest dynamic to getting really big and then bringing it back down again. So. We're gonna be in the key of D and I'm just gonna bring up a drone here, and I've got the filter on it about halfway. So there's room to grow. And since I'm coming out of nothing, I'm not just gonna come out the gate with the piano, kind of fade in with my pad and this pad here. It's say my go-to. Ministry time pad sound, it's very soft. Not a lot of high frequencies. I am gonna start on my soft piano. Play a little melody. Now that the piano's in. I'll bring back the pad a little bit. Now I am gonna start bringing in a bit of a synth lead, but as I fade it in, the filter's gonna be down so you can really barely perceive it. And then once it's in, we'll bring up the filter, bringing it up. Let's lift up the filter. Bring out the reverb. Can hear the reverb. Really start to fill up that space. For this, I'm gonna choose this string pad, which is gonna change the pad that's on this channel. Again, starting with the filter quite low. Pads starting to fill it up more pad Let's open it up and use a compressed piano. I start to ease it back down. Back to the soft piano. Start bringing these filters down one by one. We're back to basically just piano. So that's a really long example of how to do that. You know, if you wanna make a quick change, obviously you can do it faster. Um, but that's how I kind of gradually do it. Another example, say I'm playing ox keys and, um, I want, um, I wanna play a lead. I want it to be open. Uh, but then I wanna kind of take it to another level. The way I do that a lot of times is by using my reverb send, which is, this is important. So the reverb is not on the, um, the source sound itself. It's an additional channel of reverb at 100% mix, which means you got all dry sound and you got all reverb, and instead of going half and half with it, which kind of takes down your dry sound while you're adding your reverb, it's running in parallel. So all I'm doing is I've got my dry sound at 100%, and then I've got my reverb sound at zero and I'm bringing it all the way up to a hundred and beyond. You know, I'm kind of cranking it. The way I do it above the dry signal, and that way it adds energy without losing the definition of what you're doing. So here's an example. I'll just call up a patch here. Um, let's say key of c as if we're playing, uh, holy forever. Give it a little drone. So, uh, I like to play the chorus. We will start with the reverb off. That's a big lead, but when I cranked this reverb. You can really hear it open up. Another thing I like to do is add a lower octave to the sound and then play higher, so you're effectively adding more harmonics So I've got three voices here. Here's the lower one. And then I'll add back the other two voices. So when I went to play higher, I added in a sub oscillator. So that I didn't lose the body of it, but I could still jump high and get those higher harmonics and then bring down the filter. So something to note with my OB six. Um, I don't have the filter mapped. On the nano control, I have it mapped right here to the mod wheel for pretty much every sound. So, When I'm designing sound, I like to make it really flexible so that I can play, like leads with it, pads with it, uh, and it can cover a lot of ground. So what I like to do is. Have a, a pad sound like this, that can be played like a lead. It could also play like a pad, um, because it's, it is polyphonic and you can play multiple notes at once with it, but then it has a short enough release. Uh, which basically means how long the sound continues after you let go of the keyboard. So this is what the release sounds like now, well, without the reverb. And then a longer release would sound like this. And then a shorter release. Allows me to go from playing something like this just by changing the way I am playing, not by actually changing any parameters to play something like this, to kinda get that arpeggiator sequencer. So a lot of times. Um, if I can sense that the dynamic of the drummer is changing, I'll think in my mind, okay, what can I change, um, to add to that? And that doesn't necessarily mean, um, I'm, every time he goes to, you know, a, the Toms I'm gonna do this thing every time he goes to. Uh, like the cymbals Only thing I'm gonna do this thing, but I am thinking if, if I can sense he's about to make a change, I'm gonna make a change too, to help keep the dynamic going. This is especially important if you're like up and all out for a long time. You know, you don't wanna just be doing the same thing over and over and over, even if you have three different, um. Options to kind of rotate through it can really help it not to be stale. And just one more time, if you're just getting started and, uh, you don't have access to, uh, a lot of gear or, uh, maybe even a computer drawing your sounds off of, uh, I didn't start with any of this. You know, it, it started for me with. Just, just a piano at my church. And then it was a, a cheap mini keyboard that I got as a gift in college that I still have at my house and use, um, at home. So it's not about this, it's about making the most and really learning the ins and outs of, of what you have. If you, um, if your church has a piano or a keyboard, see if you can get time with it and really dive in and learn all the tools if you're able, um, to get. Some affordable software or some affordable hardware to play with. Um, maybe like a, you know, there's like small digital synthesizers, anything at all. Um, there's some affordable options as well. If you search like the, um, there's a, a Juno software, which a Juno is a synthesizer called the Tal, TALU, the letter UNO Tal Uno. It, it has, you know, a lot of the same basic parameters. Like I was talking about on the synthesizer, uh, very affordable. There's a lot of great ways to get in and learn and start making quality sounds even if you don't have access to a large amount of gear. And always remember, uh, the three things I was talking about, the tone, um, the velocity you're playing with and the rhythm. That applies to any instrument, any budget, any sound, um, and you can create dynamics, uh, with what, with what you have. So if you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I'd love to answer them if I can. Guys, thank y'all so much for sticking around to the very end. Um, glad y'all did. Thank you for being on the podcast, Andrew Sharp. Oh, of course, my honor. It's been incredible to hear you play and produce and shout out to Tyler Wester for getting us connected, um, for being on the podcast as well. By the way, the, the question we asked earlier about favorite sound, you know, favorite, uh, go-tos on each one. He said his was the wing. There you go on, on Escape. Right? It's in my template too. You saw it, so yeah, you saw it. Second favorite, his second favorite is The Wing. Um, let us know what your favorite is in, in any comments and, um, but anyway, we didn't have, we didn't have Tyler on this podcast episode. Um, although he is the ultimate talker, so I will never. I will never forget about this, but,