So you’ve got a basic chord chart down, with all the chords on it. But a song chords do not make. There must be dynamics! Instruments must enter and exit, they must lead and paint the background of the song. And the vocalists sometimes must sing in unison, sometimes in parts, and sometimes only one or two should sing. (hint, if you’re not doing these things with your team then you really should start!). But how do they know when to do these things?

In short: you tell them!

Actually, you can do better than that. You can notate it in your chord chart. Of course, note that if you begin including notes for the musicians (singers and instrumentalists) in your chord charts, they will more often than not run into the two page range of length. Which is fine, at least in most scenarios (and in my experience).

Here’s an example to check out. As a side note, did you catch the what was not on that chord sheet that was supposed to be? Copyright/License information. Yep, this was a chord sheet emailed to me (I won’t say from who… . Suffice it to say they have since changed their ways – but do not make the same mistake. including that information covers the legality (through your church’s CCLI license) to distribute copies of the music of a song.

Okay, back to the task at hand. Did you note how there were, in blue, notes on when certain instruments entered? This is a song that builds, but you can also include a note such as “no piano”, or “no electric/acoustic guitar” as well. You will have to draw attention to these specific notes on entrances and exits for your band, but as they get used to having the notes they will begin looking for where you have them in and out.

Here’s a short list of “commands” you can use  - you don’t have to use these or just these. As long as your team understands what you intend is the key.

• Full Band – this means all band members in, playing their respective parts at the strongest dynamic
• Break – an instrumental break where all instrumentalists mute their instruments
• Piano only – piano is the only instrument playing
• add Bass – a common phrase to indicate the entrance of the Bass into the song
• Vocals melody – all vocalists on the melody line
• Vocals parts – all vocalists on their respective parts (however they have been divided up for the song)

The key to understand is that you can notate within your chord chart when you want specific instruments and singers. This serves two purposes: first, to help you remember how you decided you wanted the song to be arranged; second, to cut down on questions in practice on entrances and exits. Always be open to suggestions and input from your team, but having a plan already in place for a song cuts down on you having to make a call on the spot about something you should have already figured out.

Next up, indicating measures and providing more specific information on chord changes to your team in the chord chart: Part 3!

So you need to create a chord chart, huh? Well, lets dive in and see what that involves. The first thing to do is to check and see if you can find the chords online. And no, I do not mean to hit guitar tab sites (those should definitely be a last resort). Check the artist or group’s website first to see if they have copies of the tab or chord charts for their music. Here are a few I’ve found:

• Sovereign Grace Music – in their online store they have a section for the sheet music where you can download lyric and lead sheets for all the albums (at least the ones I looked at) and even guitar charts for a few. Note that Lead sheets use a music staff with chords on top to show the lead melody line with chord changes.
• Shane and Shane – Shane Barnard (of Shane & Shane) has a site where he has tabs and lyrics of most of their songs.
• Red Mountain Music – they offer lead and guitar sheets for all their music.

So, last resort, if you can’t find music on the particular group/artist’s site for the specific song you need to create a chart for, you can hit the guitar tab sites. Always – ALWAYS! – check the chords yourself. Make sure they are right and you understand how they work in the song. You are responsible for the chord chart you give your team, so make sure you make it as simple and clear as possible. Some charts list moving or transitional chords along with the primary chords of the song – figure out if/how you want to differentiate these, and if your team will even need them. If you’re not going to use them, then don’t put them on the chord sheet you give your team.

And if you haven’t noticed yet, I definitely believe in creating a specific chart for your team, whether or not you can find an official one or not. A little extra work up front yields a chart created specifically with your team in mind. This is a very good thing.

Alrighty, check out this example of a basic chord chart. Consider this your baseline model – it has been stripped of all extraneous items and is just a chord chart.

So here are the basic elements of a chord chart, top to bottom:

• Song title
• song lyrics and chords
• copyright and CCLI info for legal purposes

Yep, pretty simple. If your church has a CCLI license (and they should, no argument), then you can get all the copyright and license info you need from them – in fact, they have a huge database of song lyrics as well. You can download the lyrics and the copyright/license info (specific for your church) from their site and just paste it in a document file – it saves a lot of work! Then all you have to do is format it.

Note in the main portion of the chart, where the lyrics and chords are, how the chords are written (approximately) over top of the words where the changes happen. This is the most simple way of conveying to the band where the changes are – it syncs them up with the singers. There are fancier ways of conveying chord changes which better indicate meter and timing, but that’s another post.

As far as format goes, the sky is the limit, but simplicity is key. This chart is one I created about five or six years ago. The church I minister in now uses a different format. The song title is still at the top, but the copyright/license info is right under the title. Actually, both the Title and copyright/license info is in the page header, so it shows up on multiple pages if the chart extends past the first page. I would suggest including a “page X of Y” section on any header/footer with information so that players can differentiate easily between first and second pages.

This type of chart means that you either have to teach the team the chord changes and rhythms or have them listen and pick it up themselves – which is perfectly acceptable. The sheet serves more as a reminder of how the song goes than a music sheet which tells them how to play.

Okay, after understanding this very basic format of the chord chart you can begin to add other elements, like vocal direction, instrumental entrances and exits, repetition instruction, chord changes, etc. That’ll be coming in my next post!

“I don’t see why the praise team needs to practice during the week. Before you came they only practiced before the Sunday Morning service and it was okay. Do they really need to practice during the week?” It was my pastor (at the time) asking me this (well, an approximation thereof). My response? Well, to tell the truth, I was speechless. Flabergasted. This was an issue I had never even considered coming up. And when the question was asked, I sadly fumbled through an answer which should not have been hard at all.

So, should a praise team practice during the week? Absolutely. Point blank, end of story.

But why? Ah, there’s the rub, isn’t it? If your musicians are good enough to wing it, why can’t you just skip the mid-week practice and just have everyone show up early on Sunday morning? (note, in this latter argument, I find less fault in the argument and more in the motivation behind it)

First, though, let me delineate the difference between a small, growing church wherein the praise team is less a “team” and more a single leader with one or two (or even three) followers. Having a single leader who is accompanied by one person on drums and maybe a single vocalist is much different than a full team consisting of 4+ instrumentalists as well as vocalists. When you are a single leader who has a few “helpers” in the wings, all you have to do is make sure you have all your ducks in a row beforehand and you can usually “get away” without a midweek practice. Yet still, note that there is practice happening – it’s just you doing it by yourself, because you consist of a majority of the band (and also realize that when you do things this way you are relegating anyone who helps you to a secondary role which emphasizes unimportance and very minor involvement/ownership).

So practice happens in virtually every situation because wherever there is any level of preparation that preparation (at least in my mind, no matter how inconsequential) is practice. If you do not want your team to develop much beyond a single or dual instrument setup you can probably “get by” with this type of preparation. But if your motivation is to find some level of preparation you can “get by” with, then my response is that you shouldn’t be in the worship ministry in the first place, specifically in its leadership.

Here is why a mid-week practice is – in my mind, at least – an unarguable fact of reality: preparation to minister effectively, excellently and without distraction is an integral part of serving the local body. In a more commonsense approach, a musician must practice. Without practice there is stagnation. The same applies to a band or a team of players. They need time playing together to learn to play together.

(Warning: rabbit trail and soapbox to follow:)

Now, if you have the same team you’ve had for the last 10 years, and are playing the same 100 or so songs you’ve always played, then you might feel like you could cut that mid-week practice out and not lose much at all. Well, I would say you’ve already lost so much it probably wouldn’t matter. Why? If there has been no change in your team, then there has been no development of new talent and there has been no integration of new members and talent to the local body. Your team is closed. Is Christ closed? Is the Church closed?

And if you are using the same songs you’ve used for for the last five or ten years, then there is theological stagnation at work as well. Why do worship leaders seek out new songs? To find a new way to manipulate the congregations emotions? Well, there may be some who do so – which is sad as well as disastrous for the body. But the real motivation is to find/discover new ways of articulating the Gospel in theologically sound ways, so the local body is challenged to contemplate, consider and apply the Gospel continually, sometimes in differing ways.

And to introduce new material, there must be practice.

Finally, for your team to effectively eliminate distractions during the service there must be practice.

In short, the mid-week practice is an integral part of the worship team’s service of the local church body.

The last post on perfecting your praise team practice focused more on general organization and planning. Basically how you approach the practices and what you hope to accomplish. Now we’re going to focus more on getting (almost) everything accomplished in the time you have available for practice.

2 Hour Perfection

So how long should a practice be? I have noticed that while experienced musicians are fine for a full two hours of practice, less experienced ones tend to start to drift and lose momentum around the 90 minute mark. Personally, I like to aim for the two hour mark, planning things out so that I have a chance (however slight) that I will finish early, but realistically aiming for no more than 120 minutes. The team I am on right now actually has practices which err on the other side of 120 minutes, usually hitting the 130-40 mark. But our team only plays every other week and and practices once for that service, so one 2.5 hour practice every other week is more tolerable in our situation.

I would argue that in a team that practices every week, the leader should strive to never exceed the two hour mark. You must guard your people against burnout!

Simple Trick for High Spirits

One of the hardest things to do is manage your practice so that it doesn’t feel ‘grinding’. Like you’re just plowing through material and doing the best you can (though, in effect, that is sometimes what you are doing…). A very simple way to help with keeping the attitude up and the ‘grinding’-mindset down is to use familiar songs to offset more difficult ones.

This can be done very easily, the only drawback is that to do this the team will have to practice stuff out of the order it will be done in the service (usually). Clear communication usually keeps that from being a major obstacle. Look over the list of material to be covered in practice and pick out the song the team should know the best, the one you should really spend the least amount of time on. Start with this song! This will give you the opportunity to set a positive attitude for the rest of the practice and encourage your team about how great they are.

A related trick is to save songs which use only one or two instruments (usually guitar or piano) or less vocalists until the end, so some of the team gets to go home ‘early’. If your time management is on task, then the people who are involved in the song should still be leaving about the time they expected, while everyone else gets a nice little surprise of being able to leave early.

Time Management – Figure out how much time you have for each song!

This is key to finishing within the time frame you want to. Unless your instrumentalists are disciplined  in getting to practice early, you need to set aside at least 15-20 minutes at the beginning of practice just for instrument setup, sound check, and prayer. As a side note, I would suggest leaving the prayer until you are ready to start (right before the sound check).

So if you are aiming for a 120 minute practice, and you have 7 songs to go over (in 105 minutes!) that leaves you roughly 15 minutes for each song. Keep an eye on the clock as you practice. Assuming practice starts at 7pm, then around 8pm you should be finishing your third song or starting your fourth one. If you’re still on your second song then you need to stop and move on. Period. If the song needs more work tell your team that they are going to have to work on the trouble spots on their own. If the song is still exceptionally horrible you can start with that song in the pre-service practice the day of the service to iron out any lingering problems.

What must be understood is that you cannot make every song perfect. You need to fix problems, but if its something someone can work out on their own, it is okay to tell them they need to do so for the sake of practice time management.

Bits and pieces do not a quick practice make

This sounds a little counter-intuitive to many musicians but you should run the songs all the way through unless something catastrophic happens. This was a hard lesson for me to swallow, because – being a classically trained pianist – I have spent 30 minutes working on a four or five measure phrase. But you can’t do that with your team (though you can suggest they do so on their own). Any decent musician realizes when they are doing things wrong. Going completely through the song once gives them a chance to figure out what they are doing wrong on their own. Give them a chance to ask questions. If the questions do not address all the issues you noted in the run-through, then quickly and efficiently go over what needs to happen in the trouble spots. Then play the song through again.

Most songs will take at least two or three runs to get right – which is fine. Most songs you can run through three times in about 15 minutes, if you don’t dally around in between runs. Sometimes there are specific spots which should be focused on separately (like the primary crescendo of a song, or the transition into the instrumental and then the instrumental section itself), and this is fine, just be very efficient.

This is how starting with an easier song can help some as well. If you only spend 10 minutes on the first song, then you have 5 extra minutes for the second song or another song later on. Some songs need 20-25 minutes worth of work done on them – just pace yourself well with your other songs so the practice doesn’t ‘accidentally’ slip past the 2.5 hour mark (a definite ‘no-no’).

Realistic Standards and Expectations

In the end, it boils down to understanding that things will not be perfect. With time and experience every leader develops his own rhythm for practicing and “getting things done.” Some teams require different methods – these are just ones I have found to work in most every environment I’ve lead in.

That said, always remember the old adage, “Less is more”. In the end, if something is not working to the point that it most likely will be distracting in the service, consider cutting it out or simplifying it. You are not required to perfectly replicate a song, you are required to enable and empower your congregation to worship God.

Know that most songs will never be perfect, and some will be done much better than others. Just make sure that you push the team to an acceptable point in practice and then direct them on the portions to work out on their own before the service (if it’s exceptionally rough around the edges).

You can have an effective practice within the 120 minute time limit, you just have to be practical and disciplined.

Okay, I apologize. The “Perfect Praise Team Practice” title might be a little exaggerated - I’m not sure what I’m going to discuss in this and the next post will help your practice be perfect, but it should help it get much closer.

Goals

So what makes one practice better than another? I would suggest three elements: quality, efficiency and quantity. Let’s look at those in reverse order.

• Quantity – you want to cover everything that needs to be covered
• Efficiency – you want to use your time wisely so that in covering all your material your practices do not run much past the 2 hour mark
• Quality – in the time spent on what you need to go over you want to get the material to be as excellent as possible

Of course, there may be other things which are also important to accomplish in a practice, but these stick out to me as the most important. I am going to spend an entire post on streamlining your time management in practice, so I won’t really cover that in this post. But before we get to that point, there are some more general points of planning that need to be addressed.

Material to be covered

As I have experienced there are two types of practices. I would venture to call them “long-term” and “short-term”. As opposed to other types of musical practicing, in the Praise and Worship arena, both types are almost equally relevant and effective. Both also have their pros and cons. Which type you choose depends on the way you have your team(s) organized and how talented your people are.

Long-Term oriented practices

These practices spend at least the first 45-60 minutes on new material. The general concept treats your praise team members as a single band. This works if you have a very consistent team (you use the same people almost every week). With this type of practice session, team members are expected to be at every practice because this is where they will learn new material. The primary drawback to this type of practice is that it leaves a little over 10 minutes for each song that needs to be gone over for the upcoming service (figuring roughly 5-7 songs in that service).

But the positive of this type of practice (which I did for several years at my last church) is that less skilled musicians are given more time to learn and practice new material (I would start introducing them to new material a month before we played it, sometimes more).

Short-Term oriented practices

For these practices the entire time is spent on material for the upcoming service. The positive point is that you have more time to spend on each individual song. Another positive is that this type of practice is great for large teams where there are many different musicians (I consider vocalists musicians as well) rotating or multiple teams. If the Worship Leader/Pastor can plan several weeks ahead as far as his music is concerned he can get a songlist and even listening material to his teams a week or so before a particular service’s practice so they have plenty of time to prepare. With disciplined musicians and a bit of planning on the Worship Leader/Pastor’s part this is an excellent way to structure practices because you can introduce and do much more new material.

The primary drawback is that the musicians need to have a decent level of personal motivation (to prepare at least some on their own). And it seems to work much more smoothly if there is a higher level of musicianship on the team (talent+training+discipline). Though there is time for a bit of tweaking, this scenario does not give you a chance to teach each musician their part individually – they have to prepare it beforehand (to some extent, or be able to generate it on the spot!).

So, while it is called “short-term” it takes a bit of long-term planning on the part of the Worship Leader/Pastor so he can get the materials in the hands of his people a decent amount of time beforehand. I would suggest using a blog or even (if your budget can afford it) a subscription-based service such as The Planning Center Online to help with this.

Preparing the Material for Practice

Once you have figured out how the general structure of your practice is going to be, you need to prepare all your materials and get your brain in gear so you know what’s going on in each song. For new songs, I’ve blogged about how to go about learning them and then teaching them to your team (Learning a New Song Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). For other material which the team should know already, make sure the day of the practice you go over the entire service, planning how each song fits into it and the transitions between each. The more you figure out ahead of time the less you have to make up on the spot (and admit it – you do it, I do it, we all fly by the seat of our pants when we don’t plan well…). If you can, check over your chord charts to make sure the chords and keys are. The best way to do this is play through the songs according to the chord charts on guitar or piano.

Coming up next!

Next time I’ll go over these points as well as a few others:

• Time Management – how to get through those songs effectively in 90-120 minutes…hopefully…
• Why 90-120 minutes is the perfect practice length (at least in my mind)
• The simplest trick/technique to keeping your team’s spirits up while you work them hard