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Robeless Choirs

Nov 5, 2009

Choir robes were no doubt invented to give a unified look to the group. Hundreds of years ago highly decorated robes with elaborate stitching added pomp and ceremony to liturgy.

If you’re ministering in an ornate, stately First Baptist-type church, choir robes no doubt approriately fit the bill. However, if you’re going the pop praise choir route, robes might seem out of place. But if the choir simply wears their Sunday best to sing, the group can look disorganized.

Take a look at the above video to see how the Brookwood praise choir solves the problem. A color scheme is chosen by choir ladies with good taste and color swatches are given to the choir members. The solution can be as expensive or inexpensive as the choir member wants – matching clothes might just be in the closet and a color blind bass can always go with the default black. Scarves and other matching accessories can be thrown in for variety.

Even if robes are your choir’s default look, you might want to try this method for a unique look on special Sundays like Christmas and Easter.

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Earliest American Church

Oct 25, 2009

Last weekend I was in Jamestown (the first permanent English settlement) and saw a huge building – a church! The settlers were instructed to initially construct 3 public buildings inside the fort: a storehouse, a guardhouse and a church, so religion was very important to these people.

I took my new Kodak Zi8 mini HD video recorder with me just in case I saw something interesting. I was with CBN News producer Tracy Winborn – she shot my video introduction as well as helped produce the clip. It even ended up on CBN News last week.

Choir Rock Band

Oct 7, 2009

Steve Smith from WorshipIdeas.com talks to Brookwood Church choir director Joe Wood about making choir rehearsal a fun experience.

Worship Leader Kristian Stanfill

Oct 4, 2009

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My New Recording Studio

Sep 20, 2009

A few weeks ago I wrote about how your ministry might benefit from recording. Read the article and watch a video. This week I’ll give you a tour of my home studio and give you some ideas of equipment to be using.

When I first started HymnCharts.com several years ago I figured it would just be a sheet music website – everybody knows the hymns, right? Wrong – I was shocked when I threw my new version of the Thanksgiving hymn “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” at the praise team and they looked at me with blank stares. None of them knew it!

At that point I realized I had to start recording my arrangements. I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to get into recording – just writing and arranging – but technology has changed so much in very recent years that I decided to reexamine the issue.

My main objection to recording was simply cost: I couldn’t afford a decent studio. I remember a well-equiped home studio I went to in Nashville during the mid ’90s that had several compressor, eq and other effects boxes – one for every channel, and all very expensive.

But now, with everything on computer, what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in 1995 only costs a few hundred in 2009! So I got a computer and loaded Sonar as my recording software.

To interface with the computer and record vocals and guitars I had an Emu 0404 USB 2 Audio/MIDI Interface. But, being an inexpensive interface, it didn’t have the internal guts to handle heavy vocal usage – louder vocalists would overdrive the circuits resulting in distortion.

Also, I had switched gears in my home office/studio. I moved my entire business production (creating charts/sheet music/business stuff) to my laptop computer and rarely worked anymore in my office on my desktop – instead I’m working in my living room or a coffee shop. In my office/studio my music computer and keyboard were regulated to a corner of the room. I decided this summer to completely redesign my work area and make it a dedicated music studio. What I thought would take a week or two took over two months! Maybe you can avoid my headaches.

First I removed my enormous office desk and hutch. Yuck – the carpet was dirty and steam cleaning didn’t help so I went to the local carpet remnant store and got a nice blue berber (to match my HymnCharts colors.)

After measuring and more measuring I decided on a cool setup of IKEA Billy bookcases. Three trips to IKEA later I finally got it right and set them up. I kept one of my office desks and used it as the center of my workstation – my 20+ year old KX88 piano keyboard controller still works great and fits perfectly under the desk.

Once I had my basic setup designed I then started shopping for new equipment. I started looking at audio interfaces. I bought the new Lexicon I-ONIX U22 because it looked cool. Unfortunately it didn’t work so cool – it made Sonar cough and stutter. After searching online forums I discovered this seems to happening to many Sonar users and the brand new device with brand new audio drivers was the problem – basically the thing just wouldn’t work.

Next I bought an M-Audio Fast Track Ultra. More stuttering and coughing in Sonar.

Exasperated, I decided to go all out and get the near pro-grade MOTU 828mk3 FireWire Audio Interface. (Keep in mind that each new audio interface meant ripping apart my neatly tied cables behind a ginormous desk – as I laid on my back groaning, bruised and aching ribs from a nasty bike fall!) The MOTU has all kinds of bells and whistles. It’s a little bit more complicated than I care for but I’m reasonably happy with it. All this trouble and my old EMU worked without a glitch – so if I had to do it all over again, I’d try to go with a higher end EMU audio system. However, the MOTU does look lovely nestled between my new 24 inch monitors (great deal at Fry’s Electronics.)

Above my monitors sits a Monster MP PRO 2500 to plug in all my gear. Then above the Monster is the ART Pro Channel Tube Mic Preamp and Compressor with EQ. Plug a mic into the ART and it will warm up your vocals and guitars, plus control the sound so you get a good signal going into your audio interface. I’m using Event powered monitors.

I got acoustic foam to deaden the sound in my room at foamorder.com, however a Google search will find many such places – I found one site that made foam in every color imaginable.

Something often overlooked in a studio is comfort. I had a plain old office chair for years and didn’t realize how uncomfortable I was until I sat in a new (more expensive) one. Online research suggested the Herman Miller Aeron is the chair of choice in high end studios but they’re super expensive. I thought I’d get one if it truly was as comfortable as they say. Of course, you can’t find anything like that in Greenville but I found a furniture store in nearby Charlotte NC that had several used Aerons. The used, nasty and dusty Aeron was $600 and I didn’t even think it was as comfortable as a chair I tried at Office Depot. So I got the Quantum Recycled Mesh Mid-Back Task Chair from Office Depot. It’s magic and I can sit unbelievably comfortable for hours (the secret is mesh!) In fact, I just realized I’ve been sitting here for over 3 hours working on this article and haven’t moved a muscle. I also picked up two handy “Zarty” laptop desks.

More gear shown in the video:

Frontier Design AlphaTrack Control Surface
This looked cool when I bought it but it seems to lose sync with Sonar often so I don’t use it much.

Rode NT1A Vocal Condenser Microphone

Event Powered Monitors: I can’t find these online so maybe they’re out of production.

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Chris Sligh Sings “Vessel” on the Hour of Power

Sep 18, 2009

Christian artist Chris Sligh sings his song “Vessel” on the Crystal Cathedral’s Hour of Power TV show.

by Don Chapman

Back when Chris Sligh was working on his debut album he talked uber-producer Brown Bannister into using me to orchestrate some of the songs (which is a miracle in itself – producers don’t do that sort of thing.) Read about the experience at my blog.

Chris decided fairly late to use a song he had written many years ago in college: the ballad “Vessel.” He wanted it to be simple – just an acoustic guitar and a string quartet.

I hadn’t thought about string quartets since college and Googled the term for a refresher course. Famous composers of the past often wrote string quartets as a sort of exercise of their compositional abilities. Since you only have 4 instruments to work with, as well as limited harmonic color, you had better write some good lines to make a string quartet piece interesting.

Chris played some pads over the track to give me an idea of what he wanted and I started working. I really slaved away on this thing, trying to make each instrument move independently and interestingly, almost like a Bach fugue.

There are several ways to listen to music. The most natural is to simply enjoy it and let it wash over you. Another way is to listen to the arrangement… the keyboards… the drums… the guitars… the strings… and pick out what each part is doing.

Try that with “Vessel” – and notice how the strings weave in and out, creating a unified whole out of independent lines. The above video is of Chris performing the song live on TV, and you can download the MP3 or his entire CD below from the Amazon links.

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Recording for Worship

Sep 10, 2009

How can recording help your worship ministry? It’s not a top priority, but if your worship ministry is under control and well managed, recording can speed up the learning curve for your musicians and enhance the worship experience of your church.

Is your ministry managed and under control? By this, I mean: does everyone know their job and can perform it on autopilot? Does your band and praise and tech team show up on time for rehearsals and Sunday morning without being pestered? Does your band know the bulk of your worship material so rehearsal doesn’t take too long? Are you in a steady routine of selecting music and planning your services? If your foundation is this solid, then you can try getting fancy.

At my last ministry I was able to do little recording because there simply wasn’t time. In a small church with no support staff I did almost everything myself: picking the music, charting, copying, EasyWorship programming, scheduling and leading the music.

Now, at a large church like Brookwood, there are many people filling many roles on the worship team. And after a year of steady guidance by worship pastor Steve Smith, the ministry is running like clockwork – which gives us time to take things up a notch by recording. Here’s what we’re doing:

1. Recording demo CDs for the choir. After we’ve selected the praise choir music for the next few months, I’ll take the original recordings and play the alto, tenor and bass parts on top of it using a piano sound. I’m using Cakewalk’s Sonar recording software, importing the original recording from the CD into Sonar and playing the parts with a piano setting. After securing permission from publishers we make CDs for the tenors, basses, altos and sopranos, giving each group their own CD with their part highlighted by the piano. This has helped incredibly to speed up the learning process. We considered having vocalists come in and record their parts, but it’s as effective and much faster for me to just record their parts on the keyboard. Watch the YouTube video above of one of our recent choir recording sessions.

2. Recording band rehearsals. NewSpring Church records their band rehearsals and burns a CD for everyone. At Monday night’s rehearsal, they’ll practice a song until they get it perfect, record the song, then move on to the next song. At the end of rehearsal they’ll burn a CD and give it to each band member so they can listen and practice all week.

3. Recording original songs and arrangements. Have you written a song or created a contemporary hymn arrangement? It’s imperative to get those ideas recorded. Last week at a worship conference a worship leader approached me and wanted to send me some of his hymn arrangements. I told him to email me some MP3s but he told me all he had were charts. A chart with no audio won’t do me or any other publisher any good (or your praise band, for that matter.) People learn best by hearing the music, and any publisher I know that still accepts material won’t be bothered to look at only a lead sheet.

4. Sweeten the mix. What makes a recording sound professional? One big element are the bells and whistles thrown in – called “sweetening” – things like synth pads, leads, drum loops and orchestration. Watch the video of my HymnCharts arrangements of “He Hideth My Soul.” You’ll hear drum loops, shakers, synth strings and a bubbling synth sound sweetening the band and choir.

Advanced live sweetening like this can only be done if your entire band uses in-ear monitors and a click track – topics I’ll address in an upcoming article. If you can pull this off your music will be so good your congregation’s mind will be blown, and you’ll approach professionalism that rivals major touring acts.

You’ll also hear on the “He Hideth” video a technique we’ve recently been experimenting with: sweetening the choir. Our sound guys pull their hair out when we have our praise choir sing (once or twice a month) because it’s so difficult to mic a large group on our stage. So, we pull a few voices for each part from the choir and record a few of our songs for upcoming Sundays on a weeknight. Adam Fisher (our guitarist and staff worship gearhead) will mix these recorded guide vocals into our live worship giving the sound guys a core sound to use as well as feeding vocals back to the choir through the monitors. These guide vocals also help Adam get a better mix as he prepares the audio for the Brookwood website.

Bottom Line: Use recording techniques to take your ministry to the next level.

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Hip Hop Senior Adult Choir

Jun 2, 2009

My favorite part is around 3:07 – their rendition of the Pussycat Doll’s “Don’t Cha” (Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me.) If you haven’t wet your pants yet, wait until 4:06 when they sing Nelly’s “It’s Getting Hot in Here.”

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