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Worship & Tech Series: Part 8
Whether you’re a “push-play” kind of person or you’re looking for flexibility to add more dynamics to what you’re already doing, keep reading as Zarc Porter, from The Worship Zone, shares about the iSingWorship app. Zarc is an award-winning music producer and songwriter with an incredible ministry to small churches! Learn more about the most affordable and flexible worship app that we’ve found for churches looking at options for:
- Lyric projection
- Adding fuller sound to your regular worship
- Help for no song leaders or missing instruments
- Solutions for no band at all
The Beginning Of Worship Zone
The Worship Zone began as a small idea that came up years and years ago. Zarc and his team started by doing evangelism with high schools. They started by doing these types of concerts on Fridays, which were loud and vibrant. However, the kids, who had never had any experience with church, would come to church on Sunday and be shocked at how culturally different it all was.
Zarc and his team decided to produce backing tracks of worship songs that could be used in both the dances that they held as well as at church on Sunday. They started developing these resources as a way of getting children engaged in the church, and creating a space that felt like home.
This initial idea grew so much. Zarc and his brother began developing a worship app that gives people a flexible backing track player for worship. They then saw a need for smaller churches that struggle with a lack of musicians. They needed one simple solution. Zarc and his brother created a worship app that allows these people, who don’t have to be musical or technical, to just plug it in, press play, and have lyrics displayed on a live screen for your congregation. It’s in the right key and you can sing with it naturally. The worship app is deliberately designed to keep it as simple as possible.
3 Challenges When Using YouTube
1. The Songs Are Recorded In The Wrong Key
With YouTube videos, the songs are generally recorded in the artist’s original key. Understandably, artists want their voices to sound the best they possibly can, so they record their songs in a key that works best for them. This is a problem because the keys that work well for them, rarely work well for congregations.
2. The Arrangements Can Be Random
When you play a song from YouTube, it could be seven minutes long, full of random guitar solos and cheering in the middle. This makes people feel disconnected and detached in worship. With this also comes the problem of volume. If you’re switching from a hymn to a more contemporary song in your worship set, the volumes are likely to be different. This means that you’re constantly going to have to adjust the sounds as you go. This can leave your worship set sounding inconsistent, and it can be very distracting.
3. There Are Inconsistent Lyrics
Some of the videos on YouTube have really great lyrics, however, there are a lot of them that have lyrics that are too small to see or they’re animated in a distracting way, or they even come in late! All of this can be really distracting, and will limit people’s ability to fully connect with God in these moments of worship.
3 Alternative Solutions With No Band Or Song Leader
1. Worship Lyric Videos
Out of all the projects Zarc has been working on, the one that is closest to using YouTube is something called Worship Lyric Videos. These are lyric videos specifically designed for congregations. All of the songs are recorded from scratch, using a team of top-session players from all over the world. They’re recorded in the right key for a mixed congregation to sing along with. They’re also recorded in the right tempo, so they’re not too fast or too slow.
They all come in a standard MP4 format. This means that they’re downloadable. You can purchase a video, download it, and store it on your computer. You don’t even need to have an internet connection in your church because it runs offline, making it very reliable.
Because these are MP4 lyric videos, they run in almost any media player available on the market today. You can run them in PowerPoint, Keynote, iTunes, Media Shout, and pretty much any of the other big platforms that you’ve heard of.
With all of that, you can create playlists too. You can put your songs in the order that you want to play them and run through the service the way you want. You can also put your sermon notes in there. All you need to do is press play. The lyrics will pop up on a large screen that plays the music in the right key, and people can sing and engage with it. It’s a very natural solution.
2. The iSingWorship App
The iSingWorship app and the Worship Lyric Videos use the same music. However, they are both very different. If you want to keep things very simple, the Worship Lyric Videos are a great resource to use, but if you are more technically minded and want to do something more advanced, the iSingWorship app is the way to go. Although this worship app does add a lot of extra flexibility to your Sunday mornings, it requires more of a technical understanding to use it. The app runs on Mac OS, IOS, iPads, iPhones, and even Android devices. It is very simple to use too.
The worship app does everything the videos can do, but it has extra flexibility. For example, if you’re singing a chorus and you notice that the congregation is really engaged in the worship, you can repeat a chorus by just tapping on the chorus section in the app.
You can repeat the chorus again, or, if you decide you want to pray or read Scripture, you can tap ‘talk’, and at the end of the section, the music will break down into a soft pad, which allows you to speak or do whatever you need to. You can then hit ‘final chorus’ and it will do a drum fill, and bring the congregation back into the final chorus. This is very similar to having an experienced worship band, but it does it all for you.
3. Multi-Tracks For Worship
These multi-tracks also use the same exact music as the lyric videos and the iSingWorship app, but these are aimed at churches that have some musicians but not a full band. If you have a drummer, a bass player, and a guitarist, but no keyboard player, then you can use the keyboard parts of the multi-tracks. So, you can use piano or strings off of the multi-tracks and play along with it. These multi-tracks bring the sound of the production level up to a full band. It’s a great way to make your worship sound bigger and more full.
The reason the multi-tracks are a bit more complicated is that you have to use other software. You would have to use something like Logic or GarageBand in order to load the multi-tracks into it. You should also provide your worship band with in-ear monitors so they can hear a click or cues in their ears. If you have people who can help with the technical side of things, this is worth exploring.
Consider What The Best Option Is For Your Church
Just because you don’t have a full band or a leader for worship, does not mean that you can’t have great worship through music. These resources are amazing, and I encourage you to look into what would work best for your church. If you want to learn more about the resources on The Worship Zone, check out Zarc’s website. If you’re a small church, we see you. There are a million points of light in small churches, shining out all over the planet, and our heart is to help us all shine a little brighter!
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