Orlando Gibbons was known as one of the best keyboard players in all of King James' England. Gibbons' fame was strong enough that the "elder statesmen" of English keyboard music—William Byrd and John Bull—included his music in a 1613 collection of keyboard pieces to celebrate a royal wedding. Though no evidence survives of Gibbons being paid for keyboard work before his thirties, by his death he was serving no fewer than four of the top keyboard jobs in the country. He was an organist of the Chapel Royal from 1615 (and senior organist by his death in 1625), an organist in the private chapel of the Prince of Wales, a virginalist (player of a more intimate keyboard instrument) for the royal Privy Chamber, and finally, an organist of Westminster Abbey. His keyboard music lies profusely scattered among numerous manuscripts and printed collections of the time and testifies not only to his virtuosic skill but also to his temperate sense of musical innovation.

A piece such as his Ground on the 3rd Tone, a set of variations on a "ground" bass (a bass that repeats), demonstrates his fluency in English keyboard traditions as well as his individuality. His predecessors frequently composed such variations upon repeating bass progressions and often rigorously applied certain flashy rhythmic figures in each successive variation. Some of Gibbons' variations here certainly fit that mold: the fifth involves relentless running passages in the right hand and the sixth is built entirely upon repetitions of a single rhythmic motive. At other times, however, Gibbons takes the freedom his rather simple harmonic structure affords and crafts more subtle accompaniments to it. The second variation, for instance, uses its rhythmic motive somewhat more sporadically, and the melody of the third is almost rhapsodic. In the seventh and final variation, the composer develops a dotted-note rhythm (which has been present in many iterations of the "ground" bass) in a richly polyphonic texture in all four "voices."

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