We had an email from Dave at Cheam Baptist:

“We have been wondering how best to provide sheet music for our musicians and are looking for an alternative to using numerous different songs of fellowship books. One option is to gradually build up a library of individual sheet music for each song then create an individual folder for each musician per service.

However in this increasingly paperless age this seems rather antiquated. So I would be very grateful if you could pass round an e-mail to your musos network asking if people have any tips on the best digital methods of displaying music for a worship band. I am assuming that I-PADs are too small?

Are largish TV screens an option? ie a couple positioned stragetically so everyone can see them. Page turning controlled by singers?”

Rather than tackle this ourselves, we asked Brenda Cameron, developer of Power Music to answer. We’ve used her wonderful technological soluntion ourselves and can highly recommend it:

A digital solution for worship bands to the problem of chord charts and sheet music

A solution implies a problem which needs solved, so what is a massive problem facing worship bands today?

We are in a digital age. Everything has gone digital – when did you last write a letter instead of sending an email to a friend or colleague? Mobile phones can now give you books, email, photos, music – all in your pocket. Your church probably has a song projection system for multi-media display. All these are benefits which save precious time and help to impart information in an interesting way, helping the congregation to focus better as a whole.

Meanwhile, while more and more congregations are benefitting from all things digital – what about the musicians? You plug in and switch on your instrument, have a sound check, but who sorts out the music? Usually one person takes on the job by default – finding the song sheets or hymn books, perhaps making photocopies or digging into the binder which holds all the copies. Perhaps you have the PDF files and print them out as you need them. What was that song filed under again? ‘Here I am to worship’ or ‘Light of the world’? Time is rushing by – has everyone got a copy of all songs in the set list? In the correct key? The worship leader has changed the order at the last minute. He/she wants to combine several songs together so that the flow is better. As worship teams spend time working on eliminating distractions so that they can focus on the job of leading the congregation in true worship, surely it makes sense for them to leave paper behind and go digital, too?

One answer which provides a solution is the software Power Music. Read More »

Creativity in Worship (Why I use loops)

A few years ago I moved to a new house situated along the flight path into Manchester airport, one of the busiest airports in Northern England. The first few weeks consisted mainly of broken sleep and sudden shock as yet another noisy plane would cut through the air above our little house. However, in a surprisingly short amount of time I adjusted to the familiar sound of the aircrafts and soon I didn’t even hear them.

Our next house was in a town centre adjacent to a shopping centre and a multi story car park which was also the evening residence for a tribe of noisy seagulls. At 6am every morning the metal shutters of the centre were pulled open, the alarms reset and the seagulls would launch into full chorus. Again, within a few months this noise was simply filtered out.

Scientists explain this process of filtering as Habituation. They refer to a specific structure in the brain stem called the pons, which as well as our hearing deals with our sleep, respiration, swallowing, bladder control, equilibrium, taste, eye movement, facial expressions, facial sensation, and posture. This process of habituation is even the main form of treatment for hearing issues such as Tinnitus.

Habituation is defined as the brains ability to filter or ignore familiar, repetitive or even boring noises!

Now as a worship leader I find this all a bit scary! Read More »