WORSHIP. PERIOD.

Scenario 1: You put a worship set list together, print off all your charts for the band and arrive at practice. You say to one of your female singers, “I’d like you to take the lead/melody on this song,” and she agrees. Only one problem – “Can I have this a bit lower? It’s kind of high for me.” Now it’s transpose-on-the-fly time. You bark out chords to a band with pens in hand, while the drummer and vocalists get bored and distracted.

Scenario 2: You pick a song, the best fit key-wise is Eb. But you want to play it in the D formation (capo 1) so you print yourself a copy in D. Maybe another guitar player wants to go capo 5 so you print him one in C. Pretty soon you’ve killed 7 trees and confused everyone when you try and point out the punch on the “D” after the first line…”is that D…or Eb….or C…?”

I could continue with scenarios in perpetuity, probably, but you get the point. I’m sure many of us could insert ourselves easily into a similar situation we’ve experienced. Having a handle on chord changes and keys and transposition – all that fun stuff – becomes a pretty important skill when you’re leading a band whose players are different every week and you’re playing different material each week.

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Now you can follow worshipperiod.com on your phone with the handy-dandy new W.P. iPhone app! You can access the latest updates to the site via your Apple cellular telephone device with the tap of a finger – and it’s all free!

(Just don’t use it while driving, we don’t want Oprah coming after us.)

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(Or search on your phone’s app store for “W.P.”)

Hello readers (and listeners, for people who use that text reader function thingie). I’ve got an article to share with you from my buddy Jamie Cambers. Jamie is a fantastical practitioner of the electric guitar machine (and I don’t just say that cuz he’s been stage-left of me in JSB for many moons). He put together some thoughts on gear for you burgeoning axe-masters out there. I’m going to break them down into a couple of chunks and share them with you over the next little while. First up are some general thoughts and some talk about choosing a guitar (seems like a good place to start). – Jeff

FROM JAMIE: When I went to youth retreats or conferences when I was a youth, I wasn’t very interested in worship. Actually, let me rephrase that. I was interested in music as worship, but not worshiping. In fact, I was always far more interested in what gear the guitar players were using and watching contently on how they were using their instruments. After a service, I would often find myself at the front of the stage to get a closer look at a guitar players’ pedal board to see what they were using. Now, about 10 years later, I find myself on the other end of the spectrum. People often ask me what is on my pedal board, how I get my tone, or what I recommend using for certain sounds or effects. Some of those questions inspired me to share via this blog. Hope it helps in some way.

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There might be no more common link among music and worship folks in churches than a shared frustration and struggle with audio and all things technical. It seems like a pretty common refrain for a lot of us. Whether it’s a shortage of manpower, a shortage of proper gear or a shortage of technical ability and talent, many churches walk with a limp when it comes to sound issues.

Our lead tech is an professional front of house tech with a local production company vocationally, and we’re very fortunate to have him volunteer his time and expertise to the church. That being said, we still face plenty of challenges trying to mix a band in a building that was never designed for it while using whatever gear that a modest church budget can afford (I hope to have Evan, our tech, share some tips and suggestions with Worship Period very soon). Sometimes the sound desk can attract frustrated musicians with a chip on their shoulder, or technically-minded folks with little to no ear for music side of things. Well, at least that’s what the musicians always say…

Sound issues tend to be a bit touchy, and are often misunderstood and even trivialized by those not directly involved. It might seem like a contextually trivial thing. Sure, it may be a tough pill to swallow, the idea of spending a significant chunk of dough on something like sound gear, for a small church budget. But when you consider that part of the role of the worship leader is to manage distraction and minimize it, sound becomes an important piece of that puzzle. I don’t need to natter on in detail about all that, I just thought I’d share some context behind this post to get us started.

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I don’t know how many of you do live video in your services out there. Here on Canada’s east coast where congregations (and budgets) are on the smaller side we don’t see it as often, but for those of you who do or who plan to at some point, here’s a neat “director’s eye view” from the booth at Buckhead Church.