Selecting the right keyboard rig for your worship band can be a daunting task. In this article, 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 reading to the end and you’ll know exactly what to buy and how to set this up at your church.
The 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.
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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 piano, pad, synth, organ, and bass patches to play the wide variety of sounds that are popular today.
There are two 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 of issues. 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 churches cannot afford that. Instead, they buy a cheap keyboard for a few hundred dollars which ends up not sounding 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 set up 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. 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 creating the 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 Sunday Keys. Sunday Keys is a template of premade Mainstage patches that are designed specifically for worship. Here's a link to a video where the creator of these patches demos all the sounds. The template costs only $50 which is an incredible value. Once you purchase and download the bundle, you open up the MainStage concert file and bam; you have amazing worship keyboard patches ready to go.
Sunday Keys Ableton Free Download
Let’s talk about cost. Assuming you already have a Mac computer available, it only costs $30 for Mainstage, $50 for Sunday Keys, 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. 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 blog 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 tempo of the song.
Want to master Ableton Live for your worship ministry? Click here to enroll in my free video training.
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. Stereo is 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 Sunday Keys. As a worship leader who wants to quickly implement the latest and greatest in worship tools for my team, this one was a no-brainer from the second I heard David demo these patches on his channel.
Thanks for reading. 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 article helpful, hit the heart button and share it with your friends. Leave your love, opinions, and details of your keyboard rig below in the comments.
In this article, I’m going to show you a worship keyboard setup that runs on Ableton Live. This setup works on Mac and PC, and I'll walk through everything you'll need including hardware, software, and Ableton templates. You'll also learn some advanced tips for automating patch changes in Ableton Live.
Ableton Live is an advanced and versatile digital audio workstation. I use it every week to run a click, tracks, and automate lyrics and lighting in worship. Did you know you can also use Ableton Live for your worship keyboard rig?
Whether you have Ableton Live Intro, Standard, or Suite, all three versions come with built-in instruments to play piano, pads, and synth. I’m a huge advocate that worship teams use software to generate keyboard sounds rather than buying an expensive workstation like a Nord.
The tools you need for the setup
Whether you are looking to build a new keyboard rig or you want to learn how to use Ableton, here is what you will need.
1. Laptop - Ableton can run on both a Mac or PC. You can check out the system requirements at Ableton.com. One of the advantages of Ableton is it is a CPU efficient software, so you do not need the most powerful computer on the market.
2. MIDI keyboard you can plug into the laptop via USB. Here I have an M-Audio Keystation 49es. It’s really up to you how many keys you have and whether or not they are weighted.
3. Gear for routing the laptop to your sound console. You have a couple of options for getting the sound from the computer to your sound system. You can use a 3.5mm to dual 1/4 inch cable into DI box, or you can use an audio interface. Audio interfaces are ideal because they help relieve the audio processing load from your computer running Ableton.
That’s a brief overview of the hardware, now let’s focus on optimizing Ableton Live for a worship keyboard rig.
The Sunday Keys for Ableton template
I am not a keyboard rig enthusiast or expert. I’m a worship leader who knows what sounds appropriate for a worship context, but I don’t want to spend all day building patches in Ableton.
That’s why I’m using Sunday Keys for Ableton by sundaysounds.com. My friend David and his team at Sunday Sounds continue to impress me with their products for the worship keyboardist.
The Sunday Keys for Ableton template is available for Ableton Live 9 and10 in all three versions, Intro, Standard, and Suite.
Here I have two computers. The one on my left is running Ableton Live 10 Standard with the Sunday Keys project opened up. Here’s a brief overview of how the template works.
The template is in Session view, so you will trigger different piano, pad, and synth sounds by launching the various clips. At first, this looks a little intimidating, but here is the simple logic to the layout.
You have ten tracks total. The template organizes the patches across these ten tracks, and you can easily layer them.
The core of this template is the section containing the 13 piano patches, 13, pad patches, 13 synth patches, 13 auxiliary patches, and the tonic pad patches.
You can mix and match these patches however you would like to produce your desired sound.
Another way to organize your patches is to create a new scene and drop in different combinations of patches. The creators of this template already made some for you. You trigger them by launching the master scene for the preset.
If you want, you can easily customize the sounds of these patches. The Sunday Sounds team has a ton of tutorial videos that come with this template that will show you how.
I love how this template is done for you but has tremendous flexibility to design patches. While you don’t necessarily need a template to produce these sounds in Ableton Live, the team at Sunday Sounds has saved us a bunch of time by creating these patches and organizing them.
If you have the Korg NanoControl 2 and Sunday Keys Skin, you can make controlling this template easy, even if you don’t have a MIDI keyboard with a ton knobs and faders.
Now I want to unpack how I will be using this Sunday Keys template in my worship ministry.
While in theory, you can run tracks and these keyboard patches from one computer, it doesn’t work for my Ableton Workflow. Plus I like diversifying my computing power across these different pieces of software.
One this computer I have last Sunday’s setlist in Arrangement view. Ableton Live makes it easy to link two computers running the software so you can sync tempo and automate patch changes. Here’s how it works.
To link the computers, make sure they are on the same wifi network. In Ableton’s preferences, makes sure you have the view link toggle button enabled.
Now whichever computer has a tempo change in Ableton, will trigger that same tempo change on the other computer. In arrangement view, I use tempo clips to set the master tempo for different songs. I always use Ableton Live’s built-in click rather than using an audio click or midi click.
Another thing I like to do is automate patch changes with Ableton Live. I went and created a template of MIDI cues that match up with the Sunday Keys Template.
In the MIDI network settings on my Macs, I created a new session called, Ableton Keys Automation. Within that session, I connect the two laptops over wifi so now I can send midi commands from the Ableton laptop running my click, tracks, and automation cues over wife to my computer running my keyboard patches.
Automation is a game-changer when you want your keyboardist to be able to play the song without having to fiddle with the computer or a hardware midi control.
Sunday Keys Ableton Free Version
I covered a lot in this article, but it only scratches the surface of what you can do with these tools. Make sure you watch the video linked above on this page where you can see this all in action.
Let me know if you have any questions about this setup below.
You can learn more about the Sunday Keys for Ableton template here. Use the discount code Churchfront10 to receive 10% off!
Sunday Keys Ableton Free Download
If you are new to Ableton Live and you want to get started with implementing this powerful software in your worship ministry, sign up for my free Ableton Live training here.
If you have any questions about this keyboard setup or the template, let me know below in the comments!