i am an offering

We’ve looked at the role and importance of a producer in the music industry.  Now let’s apply this to us as worship leaders in the local church.

Every week we choose songs to use during our worship services at our churches.  These songs could range from popular songs that are heard on the radio every day to more obscure songs that no one knows about to classic hymns from whatever hymnal our church might be using.  What we choose to do with those songs is how we make ourselves producers.  We’re now the ones who will be taking something decent (volunteers who love music and love God, but might not necessarily know exactly what to play or how to play it.)  So what are our choices?

In General

One of the most common mistakes many worship teams make is that when the music starts everyone plays.  A worship leader as a producer takes the each part of the worship team and helps them to know when to play or when to sit out.  The worship leader helps the piano player to play in a higher register when the guitar is playing in the middle.  The worship leader helps the drummer know when to ‘kick it up a notch’ or tone it down.  The worship leader helps take a potentially muddy, chaotic sound and polishes it.

Popular Music

When we choose music that is currently popular on the radio we fall into a great temptation - do the song exactly like it’s done on the radio or on the CD it came from.  We think we have to do every repeat, duplicate the exact guitar or piano part, feel it’s required to sing the bridge (that in most cases always goes too high for the average congregation) and possibly even copy the exact vocal fills that are on the original recording.  This might seem like a good thing to do so that your band sounds professional but a couple of problems occur when copying the original:

• Originality - a skill that producers really need to have - is gone.
• Flexibility - a process that is so important if we desire to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s leading - is gone.
• Expectations - depending on the skill level of your musicians - might be too high.

Work with what you have to create an original arrangement, be flexible to change the order or length of a song, and communicate expectations well and make sure your musicians are comfortable with them.  You can’t expect a high school guitarist with not much experience to pull off a Lincoln Brewster solo!

Hymns

Most classic hymns were written in times where a keyboard instrument (either an organ or piano) was the dominant instrument.  In today’s culture, that’s not always the case.  Learn to simplify the chord structure of hymns so that a guitarist can easily play with them.  Perhaps rewrite your own piano part to a hymn so that the piano player is not playing every single note and the melody.  There are countless possibilities.

Be Deliberate

This next week as you plan your music, be deliberate in planning who will play what and when.  Make decisions to be creative instead of just copying what’s on the CD and take joy in the fact that you get to help produce a polished sound week after week!

Have you ever wondered when you read in your CD jacket, “Produced by so-and-so” what that actually means?  When I was first getting really into music I never understood what that meant and who the “producer” was.  These next few posts aim to educate a little bit on what a producer does and how important it is for worship leaders to know.

What is a Producer?

A producer is someone who does just that - produces.  A music producer produces the overall sound of the music that is on any given album.  The producer works closely with the album artist and songwriters to decide what the best sound will be for any given song.  The producer has the final say in whether or not guitar or piano will be used on a certain song, how long a song is, if there should be backing vocals or just a solo voice.  Honestly, the producer does a lot more than he gets credit for!  Sure, he gets his name in the CD jacket - but beyond that, did you know that most artists wouldn’t be where they are today without having a producer?

The Importance of a Producer

Sure, the artist and/or songwriter on any album has some say in what the music will sound like.  But, what most of the listening public doesn’t realize is that the process of making an album goes something like this:

• Songwriter writes song.  It could be amazing the right out of the gate but most of the time only parts of it are amazing.
• Songwriter submits song to producer.
• Producer listens to song and says, “You need to change that line, move that note somewhere else, shorten the verse, lengthen the chorus…” or any number of different things.
• Songwriter wisely agrees to do what producer says and also tries to explain any type of sound or feel he wants in the song.
• Producer works with songwriter to figure out what instruments should be in the song and what and when each instrument should play.
• All parts are recorded (under producer’s supervision).
• Songwriter’s song hits the radio and is now amazing.

Of course, the song needs to be decent in the first place to even make it to a producer, but the producer is the one who makes it polished.

Recent Example

For those of you who watch American Idol© and for those of you who listen to KLOVE radio, you’ve probably witnessed this process take place without even knowing it.  Chris Sligh, a contestant on American Idol from two years ago made the top ten.  He didn’t end up winning and has now gone on to have his own album.  A while back on the KLOVE morning show with John and Sherry Rivers Chris Sligh sang one of his songs he wrote.  It was just him and a piano.

While it was quite nice to listen to, something just wasn’t quite “right” with the song.  Fast-forward about a year.  Chris is able to have his album produced by an award-winning producer, Brown Bannister.  The new version of his song is now played on KLOVE and it’s a completely different song.  A few notes were changed here and there, different instrumentation was added and the song was arranged in such a way that now it is stellar.  It is amazing what a good producer can do.

Brown Bannister took something that was decent and made it excellent.  As worship leaders, we act as producers every week as well.  How do we do it?  We’ll look at that in the next post.

I might be behind on this one, but recently I was looking for a tool to collaborate for worship planning that would get rid of messy mass emails.  Being as we’re a church plant with no building (yet - but soon!), those of us who plan services are all in different places and need an easy way to communicate that’s constantly up to date.

Writeboard

I discovered writeboard.com, brought to you by 37 signals, the developers of Basecamp and Backpack (the fee-based apps that offer tons more than writeboard).  This handy little free tool allows you to post a document, invite others to be able to edit, view and comment on it, revise the document and subscribe to an RSS feed to see any updates to the document.  It’s been so helpful in worship planning and in other areas for our church.

If you’re looking for a great way to collaborate online, you should definitely check it out.

Hello everyone!

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and am having some minor issues with the design side of things. I’ve been meaning to redesign the site for a long time anyway, so this will force me to, but in the meantime, the content is all the same, things just look a little different for now. Let me know if you happen to run into any other problems!

Warning - geeky material, but if you are a graphic or web designer, this is a must read! I promise that I will tie it in with worship, though, so no worries!

There might be several of you who have been asked by your churches to design a weekly email newsletter for them.  If you are a designer that holds fast to web standards, you know what a headache email newsletters can be.  There is not much standards support for CSS-based design so you have to make a choice:  design your email with CSS, keeping a prominent link to the html file so that those who can’t view it correctly can click there, or go old-school and design with ugly, bloated code using tables without current standards for design.

So the question is, why in the world do certain email clients not support CSS standards for emails?  If they did, html emails would be cleaned up, viewed correctly in each mail client, have much more accessability and many more benefits.

Enter email-standards.org. Campaign Monitor, probably the best service for sending html emails has been at the forefront of fighting a battle to get web standards in email.  I think with enough people speaking up and joining them in the fight this could happen.  Check out their new website and help spread the word.

So why does this matter for the church?  You’re probably thinking, “Okay, who cares, it’s an email!”  The only problem is, even emails have an effect on how people view the church.  Undoubtedly, churches are going to use html email newsletters.  We should learn all we can to be able to do them tastefully, in a way that will draw people to the church and not push them away.  Instead of not caring and producing either sloppy emails or emails that clients don’t support, we should lead the way in providing the smoothest way possible to get news to the people of the church.