Avoiding the "wall of sound"

I'm fixing to get with the guitar players in my worship band and have a little heart-to-heart about playing less. The deal is that, in every song, from beat one until the end, both the electric player and the acoustic player play full chords in a steady strumming pattern. They're never not playing, and what they play is pretty much always full volume. (We also have a keyboard player who does the same, but that's another story.) Their philosophy is, basically, the more notes you can cram into the song, the better. I know playing too much is a temptation for everyone, because I used play in Denton with some professional players who had that tendency as well. But I think things are magnified for these guys because of their background in Mexican folk guitar styles (like rondalla, where several guitars all play the same thing all the time), as well as because they simply haven't been exposed to alot of music that makes successful use of dynamics.

My plan is to listen to a bunch of good music with them (the easy part), and also try to get them to buy into the idea that, when playing with a group, the goal is to play as a group. I was impressed several months back by a post on Andy Osenga's blog in which he was talking about his old band, the Normals:

One day we were talking about symphonies, and how they’re a group of musicians who make this amazing sound, but everybody only plays one note at a time, whereas we had two guitars and a piano banging out big, six-note chords while the bass player played the bottom note right along with us. Somehow our sound was much less stirring and beautiful.

We started experimenting with what we played. Instead of playing chords, we tried to each play a melody, like a symphonic instrument, that would all add up to voice the chords. Eventually we got to the point where we didn’t feel a song was done until we could sit aroud and each sing our parts individually and know that the song still made sense. This gave our sound a real depth and complexity that it had never had before, and we were all doing less. It’s usually easier to just play chords, but this really set our band apart AND we all became much better musicians in the process. Not that we became the best band in the world or anything, but this philosophy really transformed the band, at least to us.

Obviously, in a worship band, where we have a limited amount of rehearsal time, we're not going to realistically be able to create individual parts for every instrument on every song. But I like this kind of thinking. Plus I dug the Normals' last album alot.