Recording Your Music

Worship| Music| Church Piano Playing| Practical Matters| Congregational Worship

February 12, 2026•4 min read

"...if you feel you can play to a good level, and have started to compose your own arrangements of hymns and worship songs, you may want to consider recording your music."

Why would you consider recording your music?

In this blog post, I want to talk about some reasons why you might consider doing this and how you would do it.

Firstly, then, why would you consider it?

Well, if you can play to a level that allows you to effectively support congregational singing, there are a number of reasons why that skill could be put to use in the form of a recording.

Firstly, if you are the only church piano player who is completely depended upon each week, it may be worth having one set of worship song accompaniment recorded. That way, if you are sick or prevented from being at church one Sunday, they at least have an option other than just resorting to accapella (which may work fine but they may also love to still have the piano music).

Secondly, there may be some very small, underresourced churches in your area that have no pianist and would love the opportunity to have some custom-made backing tracks. Not just ones they can find online, but rather, tracks that are recorded in a way that fits best with their church and style of singing.

Thirdly, your church may want to have piano music during the time that communion is served, but they want to give you a break as the pianist. In that situation, you could pre-record some tracks played in a reflective style and suitable as incidental music, that could be used during communion. That way, it also frees you up to take communion with your church family. I did that for a season in a church I was in, and it worked quite well.

And fourthly, if you feel you can play to a good level, and have started to compose your own arrangements of hymns and worship songs, you may want to consider recording your music. The reason being, is that you can actually now record music from your home, and with the touch of a few buttons, your music can be streaming to countries all over the world through various distributors and streaming services.

I’ve seen a number of young people who have been church pianists start to record and distribute their arrangements, and it’s a great way to get good quality music out there. In addition, it can also provide a little bit of income too!

So that’s a few pointers on why you might consider recording your music. We'll now look at how you would actually do that.

If you play an acoustic piano, this is a lot more tricky to get the mics in the right position, and to capture a good sound from the piano. If this is the only option you have, it may not be a possibilty unless you already have knowledge about how to do this. You can consider going to a recording studio, but that will be at a cost obviously.

However, if you have an electronic keyboard or piano, you will find that most of these have a record function, which you can often put straight onto a USB stick.

You have to get more technical if you want to edit your recordings, and take out mistakes and glitches, but that's beyond the scope of this post. There are many helpful videos and tutorials that you can find to give you more information on how to do this.

However, in it’s simplest form, recording onto your keyboard, in the format of a digital file, is definitely an option to be able to make recordings for the uses I mention above.

You will need to do a lot more if you plan on releasing those recordings, and I do hope to do a future course that will walk piano players through how to do this, but I haven’t got there yet so you will need to research yourself.

I hope that gives you a few reasons why you might consider recording your music, and also a few ideas on how you can actually do that.

[Return to The Church Piano Player Website]

This blog post was written by pastor and pianist Kris Baines, from The Church Piano Player. Kris lives in the UK with his family, having recently moved back from New Zealand where he worked as a pastor for the past 26 years (also leading worship/worship teams). Kris has also spent over 35 years writing, recording, and performing music and is now bringing all that combined experience together to help equip church piano/keyboard players.

Check out the church piano player website for more information on online courses by Kris Baines.