Song writing Archives

New song from Common Hymnal: Communion by Matt McCauley

By admin | April 18, 2019

We’ve worked for years with our dear friend Malcolm DuPlessis who was instrumental back when Musicademy was first founded in helping us get our DVDs out there, particularly into the US. Malclom has been working in recent years on a new project called Common Hymnal. Rather than me describe what it is all about, I’ll […]

New Remembrance Day Hymn

By admin | November 9, 2018

Former Musicademy drum tutor Richard Morgan is now a school music teacher and he has written a new hymn for Remembrance Day. Your congregation will recognise the tune (it is Londonderry Air / O Danny Boy) so it should be a fairly easy new hymn to teach this weekend: YouTube: Facebook In Every […]

The 6 defining characteristics of a badly written song

By Guest Blogger | July 26, 2017

Writer Laura Buckler has written this guest post for us. She tackles the topic of badly written songs regardless of whether they are “Christian” or secular in topic. The principles of good and bad song writing remain the same. Do you agree with her 6 main points? Can you think of worship songs that […]

Can we change or make a new arrangement of someone else’s song? Guest post from CCLI

By Guest Blogger | January 10, 2017

Copyright is an intellectual property right given to the creators of original musical, literary and dramatic works. In the UK the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 is the current legislation and provides the creator with both an economic and a moral right. This moral right means that only the copyright owner of a […]

Are we missing the point about Christian worship music? Guest article from Dave Bilbrough

By Guest Blogger | February 10, 2016

It’s funny how we have a tendency to evaluate good and bad. Recently I was reading an article on the current state of Christian music. ‘Is it progressive or creative, or has it cocooned itself into a safe formula; i.e Coldplay beats Big Country’, the writer asked. Whilst the arguments on both sides were convincing […]

Finding the right key for small church worship

By [email protected] | January 13, 2016

Marie’s intro: If there is one topic that we can guarantee lots of comments on, it’s the subject of song keys. On the one hand you have the die-hards who are convinced that it is essential to use the original key (we address that here) and on the other you have the (*coughs* diva-like) worship […]

Jake Isaac: Impromptu acoustic, properly unplugged performances at Cambridge Folk Festival

By [email protected] | August 2, 2015

I (Marie) have had a pretty mixed bag of live music this summer. I started the season helping out with social media in the “dance meets world music” area that is Silver Hayes at the Glastonbury Festival, and this weekend was at the other end of the spectrum at the fantastically laid back Cambridge Folk […]

Interview with Matt Redman. Guest post from CCLI’s Worship Fuel

By Guest Blogger | June 17, 2015

Matt Redman: Unbroken Praise Our very own Andy Chamberlain was Matt Redman’s guitarist for several years and we have used so many of his songs on our DVDs and as backing tracks. Matt’s new album, Unbroken Praise releases this week and we were pleased that our friend, CCLI’s Rich Burrough, was able to grab an […]

10 traits of top CCLI songs. Guest post by Marty Nystrom (writer of As the Deer)

By CCLI | June 3, 2015

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership with CCLI who have agreed to share a number of articles with our subscribers from their Worship Fuel blog over the coming weeks. CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International, Inc.) releases a semi-annual list of the top worship songs sung by churches throughout America. A similar list is also published in Europe, […]

(Re)writing a modern hymn

By [email protected] | April 20, 2015

We ran a session at a recent training day called “Modern hymns: how are they different? How to (re)write one”. Here are a few snippets from the session together with some of the new verses composed by our delegates for the hymn “Breathe on me, breath of God”. 4 categories of modern hymn Modern […]