What About Comping?

Comping is accompanying, i.e. playing behind a lead instrument or vocalist.  The key is listening.  If you can’t hear the lead instrument clearly, you’re playing too much or too loudly.  Turn down and play less.  Stepping on the lead is the cardinal sin of comping.

Comps can be simple whole note chords, especially if you’re playing an organ.  For the most part, organ pads need to be at a very low volume.  Too loud and it turns everything into a dull drone.  Experiment with dynamics, turning the Leslie on and off, pulling out some drawbars occasionally for emphasis.  But keep in mind an organ pad is more like glue that holds the other parts together than something that demands attention to itself.  A little goes a long way.

For more rhythmic comps, try to stay tight with the band and get a groove going.  The whole band together still has to be behind the lead instrument.  If you can’t hear the lead you’re playing too loud.  It’s no excuse that that those other guys in the band are playing too loud too.  Stop playing and shame the rest of them until they stop making the singer yell or the lead guitar turn up to painful levels.

I was going to go into a long thing about how you can use the pentatonic and add2 chords to spice up the chords in your comp, but I’ll let you figure that out for yourself.  In general, the comps you come up with at first will be too busy, and you’ll want to pare them down so as not to detract from the lead. The best advice I can give you is that in situations where there are two guitarists and a bass and drums in addition to your keyboards under the vocals, you don’t really need to play much if anything at all for much of the accompaniment.  If the band sounds good without you in the verse, why risk messing that up?  Even the worst player in the band can be the best at not playing, which is just as important.

In a situation when there are many players, you need to find a place to fit in.  If you just bang over everything, things will get muddy and loud.  With vocals, especially in verses, I try to limit myself to certain bars or certain beats of certain bars.  I try not to play when the vocals are going, and when other players are making little lead parts between the vocal lines.  I  put in my own lead parts between vocal lines, usually based on pentatonics naturally, when I find my space.  The bass player in my band calls these diddles, and one of his highest complements for a musician is, "he does good diddles."

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