042: The Most Affordable, Flexible Worship App For Small Teams & No Teams With Zarc Porter | Worship & Tech Series Part 8

Episode 042: The Most Affordable, Flexible Worship App For Small Teams & No Teams With Zarc Porter | Worship & Tech Series Part 8

Laurie Graham 0:01
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the small church ministry podcast.

Laurie Graham 0:15
Hey, welcome back to The Small Church Ministry Podcast. If this is your first time popping in, you’re in for a treat, because Zarc Porter is joining us from the UK again, just as we continue our Worship and Tech Series for Small Churches, and if you’re looking for some foundational learning about small church ministry, apart from worship and tech, we have covered everything on this podcast from how to lead meetings that people actually want to come to, leadership stuff, children’s ministry solutions for mixed age classrooms, an entire series on volunteers, help for women’s ministry, and lots more. But we’ve been spending the last several weeks focused on worship and tech, and talking about specific issues that are facing small churches, and since I am not the biggest tech person, it has been a blast to welcome some other experts in small churches, who not only get the struggles of small churches, but they have solutions to share! 

Laurie Graham  01:03
So today, we’re going to talk about the most affordable and flexible app that I have seen anyway, and it’s an app that offers solutions to some really specific struggles in small churches in worship and tech. And so, whether you’re looking into options for lyric projection, or solutions for no song leaders or missing instruments that you wish you had, or even if you have no band at all, whether you’re a push-play kind of person, or if you’re looking to add some flexibility, you know, adding missing pieces to what you’re already doing, I’m just really excited to share Zarc with you and his wisdom! Zarc is an award-winning a music producer and songwriter, and on the side, I don’t know, can I say on the side, Zarc? Does that make sense? On the side, I think he does some really cool things with and for small churches and even schools. So we’ll be talking about one part of that today. Something that really serves small churches, which is the worship zone. So Zarc, before we dive too far in, although we have a worldwide audience, I am, personally, one of those who have never been across the big ocean. So, can you let everybody know where you’re from, and even what the landscape looks like by you?

Zarc Porter  02:08
Yeah, of course. Well, as you can probably tell, Laurie, from my accent, I’m from the UK, and we live in a place called Malvern, which is kind of in the middle of the UK. It’s north of London, and south of Manchester, and a little bit south of Birmingham. It’s a lovely spot. It’s quite rural, where we live, and there’s lots of green fields around us. Where we live is actually a little village, and we can see a view of a place called the Malvern Hills, which is a big sort of range of hills. That is funny because the Malvern Hills, they’re nearly classified as mountains, but not quite. They’re not quite tall enough to be mountains. They’re just a few feet too small. So we call them Malvern hills, and they’re quite well known in the UK. So, we can see them outside our kitchen window, which is quite, quite nice. It’s a lovely view, really. So that’s where we are.

Laurie Graham  02:52
Well, you just, you totally surprised me because I was actually thinking my picture of where you lived was totally wrong. I was thinking you’re probably in a city because I had this picture of rolling hills and maybe some sheep walking around, and you seem like you’re kind of in that idyllic spot. That’s so beautiful.

Zarc Porter  03:08
Yeah, it’s lovely. We did used to live in Manchester, which is a big city, and we used to live there. We lived there for about 26 years, and then we moved down here a few years ago. So yeah, it’s been great, and I think with the internet, you know, with my, my job now I can work from anywhere, as long as I’ve got a good internet connection. You know, I collaborate with people all over the world, and musicians all over the world. So, you know, as long as I can do that, I can pretty much work from anywhere now. So it’s nice, really.

Laurie Graham  03:32
Amazing! Technology is so fabulous when you know how to use it, right?

Zarc Porter  03:35
Right. It is, that’s true!

Laurie Graham  03:38
I love that you have the flexibility to, to work everywhere, with so many different people too. You know, when I visited your website, the worship zone, I saw a lot of different products listed. There were lyric videos, backing tracks, flexible worship app, multi-tracks, worship chord charts, and for somebody who’s not techy and like, there’s a lot going on here, I was kind of expecting that your audience was just churches who were looking for, like, an alternative to YouTube, because the people I had seen using what you were doing had no bands and no musicians, but I think your audience is broader. Is that true? Like, what kind of churches or worship leaders do you serve?

Zarc Porter  04:14
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, to be honest, when we started this project, I think, in our heads, we imagined it would be more aimed at small groups and kids groups, that kind of thing. When we started it, we launched it, we quickly became aware that it was churches that were using it, and I don’t think we understood, at the time, how many churches were struggling with a lack of musicians. You know, there’s so many churches, certainly in the UK, where they have maybe one person who can play like once or twice a month but, and then they have nobody for the other, the other Sunday’s; or sometimes they have you know, a small, a very small group or they have like a clarinet and flute or something like that, but not, not something that you constitute as a band. So, people struggle with, with finding musicians to be available all the time on a consistent basis. And so, we found that churches were using our resources more than anything, but, but yeah, as you say, we find that other people use it. I mean, we’ve found, it’s been used in all kinds of different situations. We find that prisons, chaplains use it, hospitals use it, funeral services use it crematoriums, that kind of thing, as well as churches and small groups and house groups use it, like, it’s great for house groups, because you can just plug our resources into a TV in the corner of the room, and project lyrics and people can sing with it and engage with it. So it can be used in all kinds of different situations, actually.

Laurie Graham  05:28
Okay, you just blew my mind again, because I wasn’t even thinking about the house churches. We have many, many people meeting in our community who meet in homes, and especially after COVID. I know that rocked the UK as well. A lot of churches, like a lot of things changed. Some of our small churches who were renting buildings lost their leases, and we have a lot of church plants. So the fact that this is something that could be used in a home church, or I think with a stage with 200 people in the room, correct? Like you, kind of, minister along the whole breadth of that.

Zarc Porter  06:00
Yes, I mean, it can be used in that way. I mean, obviously, most, most, in most circumstances, when you’ve got 200 people, you would find that there’s enough musicians to put together a team and put a band together, but I mean, we’ve done conferences ourselves, here in the UK, with our schools ministry, where we’ve just decided to, you know, get maybe get one person to come and lead, and then just use the app. And it’s just so simple. It saves you setting up a whole PA with a mixing engineer and set, you know, line, line checking everybody and getting all the levels mixed. It’s just a really simple way of doing it. And when you’ve got a conference, or you’re just doing something really quickly, it’s, it just sounds good very, very fast, which sometimes is very, very helpful. So.

Laurie Graham  06:38
Yeah, well that’s what I was thinking too, because I’ve been in midsize churches before, and we would have certain events on the side that the band wasn’t available, or we didn’t have what we wanted, or we wanted a simpler setup, or we were off-site for a women’s retreat. And so, I just love the flexibility that you’re talking about here, too. So, before we jump in and talk more about the app, why did you actually start, decide to start worship zone? I mean, you’re busy enough writing music, producing music, all kinds of stuff that, why did you actually dive into this? How did this project get started?

Zarc Porter  07:08
So, I think it started actually, well, the very beginning little embryo of an idea started years and years ago, when we, as we talked in our last podcast about the fact that we were doing evangelism with high schools. And what we found is that we were going into schools and doing these concerts, and it was very funky and very loud and kind of very vibrant. And then, the kids who had no experience of church whatsoever, they would come to the church on a Sunday and it would be just so bizarre because it was so, such a shift, just culturally so different, the music was so different to what they were hearing on the Friday. So we thought, well, we need to kind of do something that, kind of, brings them in gently to church, kind of bridges that gap a little bit. So we started producing kind of, it, this is back in the 90’s I’m talking about now, so we started doing kind of dance, kind of, backing tracks of worship songs that people could then use in church. And we’d encourage the kids to come and lead worship themselves and kind of doing, like, almost a DJ led worship, that kind of thing. In the old days, they used to call it alternative worship, but, you know, it was the term they used in the 90’s. 

Zarc Porter  08:08
And so, we started developing these resources as a way of just getting, getting the kids engaged in the church and making them feel, kind of, at home there, but something that they understood. But then, we, you know, that went on for a few years, and then we started working on other things. And I think it was when the, when Apple came out with the, the initial iPhone, I was chatting to my brother, who is a computer programmer. And I said to him, I said, you know, these phones are so powerful now. They’re like little computers in your hand. And I said, couldn’t we develope something that gives people, like, a flexible backing-track player for worship on, on a phone. And so, he’s, he’s a clever, very, he’s much cleverer than me. He’s very clever, a technical guy, and he went off and he did some testing. And he worked out actually that the it was the iPhone 3G, I think that he had, an iPhone 3, and he tested the, the power of this phone. And he said, it’s about the same power as a top-of-the-range Apple Mac was about eight years previous. So that is incredibly powerful in a phone. So we thought, you know, what, we can do an awful lot with the phone these days. And so, he started to develop this, this app. And then, we started putting music in and started playing with, just technology and working out how we can best do it. And it just grew from there, really, and we just thought there was a need for smaller churches who struggle with a lack of musicians just to have a simple solution. They don’t have to be musical, they don’t have to be technical. They can just plug it in. Press play. The lyrics are displayed on a live screen for your congregation. You know, it’s in the right key, it’s natural to sing with, and it just sounds right. And often, church leaders or people who are leading the worship, they don’t have to be musicians. They, as long as they, as long as they understand enough just to plug the phone into the screen, that’s about it really, and they want it to be very simple. So we’ve deliberately designed the app to keep it as simple as we possibly can.

Laurie Graham  09:50
Okay, let’s just dive in. So we have a lot of small churches out there, who are basically projecting YouTube lyrics on the screen, and that is what they are singing to. And we’re going to talk more about other flexibility and other church situations, but let’s get super specific here. What are the challenges that you’ve seen when churches are just playing songs off of YouTube? Because they’re there, they have lyrics. It’s easy access, easy to find. Can you talk about some of the issues or challenges with the churches who are using YouTube for their songs?

Zarc Porter  10:21
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and as you say, Laurie, there’s a lot of churches here in the UK that use YouTube as well. And there are several issues with YouTube, but I’m sure that people who are listening to this, who’ve used YouTube will, will find this is the case, several things. First thing is the song, songs are often recorded in the wrong key for congregation to sing with. So you’ll find with a YouTube video, often it’s recorded in the original artist’s key. So if it’s somebody like Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman or Tim Hughes, or somebody, they, understandably, they want to sound good on their own recordings, so they record it in a key where their voice sounds really good. It’s really strong, but that is very, very rarely, if ever, in a good key for congregations. So, as we said in the last podcast, you know, females and males have to sing an octave apart when we’re mixed, in a mixed congregation. So you have to have it in a range where it’s not too high or too low. So those often is a problem with YouTube videos, it’s often in the wrong key. 

Laurie Graham  10:22
Yeah, and I know that a lot of churches have hit this when they’re streaming their services online, that Facebook will shut them down, or things come up, like you’re not, you don’t have rights to that song and stuff. But you’re actually saying it’s not just illegal to stream it, it’s actually illegal to be using it in a public setting in your worship service, just for the 30 of you who are in your church, like that’s actually illegal.

Zarc Porter  12:16
The second thing, which people will know, is that, sometimes the arrangements can be a bit random. So, you know, you could, particularly for in a small group or a small church, and you put on a YouTube video, it can be seven minutes long, it can have cheering in the middle, you know, can be a live-recording some times and lots of instrumental sections, and lots of guitar solos and, and that’s great if you’re in a big stadium, but on a smaller setting, it can just feel a little bit, it just feel, it makes people feel a bit disconnected and a bit detached. So what you really want is something a little bit more organic and a bit more natural, not such a big, kind of, production, and so long, and so kind of epic, you know. So that can be a negative thing as well. Another thing is volumes. I don’t know if people have spotted this, but when you, if you pick a, a hymn off YouTube, and then a contemporary song, sometimes, you’ll find that one of them is really quiet, and the other one is really loud. So you’ve got this constant thing where you’re trying to control the volume between each song, because they’re just not consistent, which is, again, understandable, because they’ve been produced by completely different people, and completely different studios, with different settings. So they just sound completely different. So that can be, again, it can just be a bit distracting when you’re doing a set of worship and suddenly, it just sounds really quiet or really different. 

Zarc Porter  12:16
Another thing is lyrics, you know, you see some YouTube videos where they’re great, the lyrics are great, but some of them were the lyrics are just way too small, or they’re, they’re kind of animated, and they’re coming in a bit late. So it’s just very distracting to sing with it, and it’s not very natural to follow, and it can just give you a bit of a headache sometimes. And again, what you really want is something that’s a lot simpler than that. Background as well, I mean, again, if people have noticed this, but some YouTube videos will have, the words will be in white, and the backgrounds will be generally darker, but sometimes they get lighter, and then you can’t see the lyrics. The contrast goes, so you can’t actually read the words very easily, not without straining a bit. And the background, as well, can sometimes be very distracting, very fast moving, which again, is not really what you want in a worship setting. And actually, the biggest point, the number one point, I would say, is the legalities of it. Because the, legally, YouTube will say, if you want to, what they call, broadcast, when I say broadcast, I mean play one of their YouTube videos in a public setting. So like in a church, or in front of a group of people in the congregation, that’s effectively broadcasting it publicly. That’s, that’s legally what you’re doing. You actually need, legally, to get the permission from the original content creators, the people who created the song originally, you need to get their permission, written permission, in order to use it in that way. Now, obviously, that’s very, very difficult to do, because you don’t know who owns it, in a lot of cases. Some content providers say that you can use it, some of them say nothing, some of them say you can’t use it. So, it’s very, very difficult. It’s a legal minefield. Now, I know a lot of people just kind of think, well, I just can’t cope with this. So I’ll just ignore it, but legally, that’s a bit tricky. They really ought to be looking at that and saying, okay, we need to make sure this is actually all done aboveboard. So that’s a whole minefield, actually working through that stuff as well. So that’s, there’s lots of reasons, you know why YouTube’s tricky and complicated.

Zarc Porter  14:11
Well, if, it’s not, it’s not illegal in every case, but a lot of the time, it will be illegal. It depends on the original content creators, terms and conditions, but we, often, we don’t know. So we don’t know what they’re saying. If you actually could contact the original creator, they’d probably say, yeah, that’s fine. Go and use it in your small group or your small church, but you don’t know that. And sometimes people are saying no, you can’t use it that way. They don’t like it. And actually, you’re absolutely right Laurie, that, you know, when you go on Facebook, they tend to blow block a lot of the songs and we actually with our products, we found sometimes Facebook block our stuff, even though we’ve, actually, waived our rights. And we said, look, we want to encourage people to stream with it, they still block it, sometimes, on some songs. And the reason why that happens is, not to do with our recordings, but it’s to do with the publishing, it’s to do with the songwriters. And obviously, when we’re using somebody else’s song, we have no control over what their publishing, publishing companies rules are, you know, we can’t control them. So we’re at their mercy. So if they decide no, you can’t stream with it, then you can’t stream with it. If they decide yes, okay, then you can. So that’s a whole, you know, there’s a whole nother area there, actually, which is legally very complicated. And sometimes, if you find with YouTube, it’s fine. You find with peer-to-peer services, like Zoom or like Teams, any of those kinds of things, they’re all fine, but Facebook actually is very difficult. And they do have some very strange rules where they flag things. Sometimes, they find them completely erroneously as well.

Laurie Graham  15:57
Wow. Well, besides the legality of using YouTube, some of the other issues you mentioned is just inconsistent, the songs aren’t in the right key, you’re finding different lengths, live versions, it actually is more difficult to use YouTube, well, then, then to use it as most churches are doing it. So what are the solutions to this? Tell us about what you’ve created, that is an alternative to YouTube when you don’t have a band or a song leader?

Zarc Porter  16:22
Right, okay. Yeah, so the one that, so, we’ve got various projects, as we mentioned before. The one that is the closest to using YouTube is something called Worship Lyric Videos. And basically, what we’ve done there is we’ve created lyric videos that are designed for congregations. So first, first of all, all the songs are recorded, you know, a fresh, they’re all recorded from scratch using a team of top-session players all over the world, but they, they’re recorded, in the right key, for a mixed congregation to sing along with. So they’re also recorded in the right tempo. So they’re not too fast or too slow. They’re paced right to be for people to sing along with. They all come in standard MP4 format, so they’re downloadable, so you can purchase a video, download it, store it on your computer. You don’t need to have an internet connection in church, it runs offline. It’s very reliable. Because they’re MP4 videos, they run in almost any media player that’s available on the market today. So they can run in PowerPoint, or Keynote, or iTunes. VLC Player, Pro Presenter, Easy Worship, any of them, Media Shout, any of the really big ones that you’ve heard of. In fact, nearly any of them, I think, I don’t actually know what it does, they don’t work in. So, and they can be run offline. Obviously, with all that, all those packages like PowerPoint and ProPresenter, you can create playlists, so you can put your songs in the order that you want them to play in, and just run through the service. And you can put your sermon notes in as well, and all your other things that you’re doing in the service as well. So it’s a very simple solution. 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. People can sing with it and engage with it. So, it’s a very natural solution. It’s very similar to YouTube, but it just solves all those issues that we talked about. 

Zarc Porter  18:01
The other thing is with the videos, every video that we do comes in four different versions. So if you’ve got singers who can lead from the front of your church, then we have versions are instrumental, and they can sing live. If you don’t have any singers, then we’ve got versions of a vocal on, so that becomes your worship leader. So it’s kind of a guide-vocal, which leads your congregation. And we also have versions that come with motion backgrounds, but, now, our motion backgrounds are very gentle. They’re very, they’re very attractive, kind of, patterns and swirling things very nice, but they’re very gently, they’re not too distracting and they’re quite slow moving. And, and obviously, we make sure that you can always see the lyrics very clearly in front of the backgrounds, but if people don’t like motion backgrounds, we also have solid standard blue backgrounds, which people can use. I know some churches just want to have something very, very simple. And they don’t want to have lots of flashy things. So we offer those as well. So there’s different versions. 

Zarc Porter  18:52
The other thing, we’ve mentioned that with YouTube videos is the song arrangements. All the arrangements that we do, we cut out lots of extended instrumental sections. We make sure there’s no big guitar solos. You know, it’s great when you’re in a big, in a big stadium somewhere, but obviously, when you’re in a small group or a small church, it again, it’s just something that feels wrong when you’ve got a backing track playing a big guitar solo, and there’s nobody playing, it’s just this track. It feels, it makes you somehow disconnect from it. So we cut those down, keep the instrumental sections to an absolute minimum, and so it becomes much more, kind of, congregation friendly, basically. And yeah, we’ve got free videos on the, on the website, the people can try it if they want to just try it before they buy anything. And I think the library now has about 400 songs, and we have, we actually have contemporary songs, traditional hymns. We’ve got kids songs, Christmas songs. We’ve also, recently, started doing acoustic versions. So, we have unplugged versions of some of the most popular songs, and we’ve just recently started doing piano accompaniment versions, which people have been asking us to do. So we’ve now got piano version so if somebody wants a very, so, you know, if you’ve got a small group and a house group of six people in the in the front room somewhere, then sometimes the acoustic version can be really nice in that, in that setting because it’s very organic, it’s very natural, it’s quite small, so it feels much more natural, whereas the big versions can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. So, we offer all those different versions to give people the maximum flexibility to use it in different situations. So I think that’s it really for worship. 

Laurie Graham  20:20
Wow! So even, even with your worship, even with your worship lyric videos, there’s so much flexibility in there. I totally love that because it’s so true, every small church has such a different culture, and they’re looking for different things. I did not realize you had all the flexibility in your lyric videos, like with some, you know, being more acoustic and some without the vocals. That is awesome! What, can you tell us about your iSing worship app? So this is another product you have? So you have the worship lyric videos and then the iSing worship app?

Zarc Porter  20:51
Yeah, exactly. So the worship lyric videos and the iSing worship app, actually, they both use exactly the same music. So it’s the same music, they’re just different, different ways of using in a church setting. So, excuse me, if you, if you want to just keep it very, very simple, the videos are great, as I say, you can drop them in PowerPoint that’s very, very simple for anyone to use. If you’re a bit more technically minded, and you want to do something a little bit more advanced then the app is, is much better, because it does add a lot of extra flexibility. So, but it does need a bit of technical understanding to use it, it’s, I mean, we’ve tried to make it as simple to use as we can, but nevertheless, it is an app. So, it runs on Windows computers, it runs on Mac OS, it runs on IOS, it can run on iPads, and iPhones, and it also runs on Android devices as well. It’s very simple to use, as I say, but it, it basically has everything that the worship lyric videos has, so you can turn the vocals off and on on the app, you can, you can change the backgrounds. You can still background or you can have motion backgrounds. 

Zarc Porter  21:48
So everything that videos do, you can also do with the app, but it has extra flexibility. So for example, if you’re singing a chorus, and you think, actually, the congregation they’re really worshiping now, they’re really engaging and worshiping and connecting. So you think, let’s repeat this chorus, let’s do another one. You can tap on the chorus, again, on the app, and at the end of the chorus, their singing, it just goes round again and repeats it again, so they can sing that chorus again. Or, if you decide I need to pray or I want to read some scripture, then you can tap talk, there’s a button that says talk, and at the end of the section that they’re currently singing, the music will break down, it will go into a pad, a soft pad or something, you can then speak or pray or read some scripture, or we can do some liturgy or whatever you need to do. And then, you can then hit final chorus, and it will do a drum fill, and it will bring the congregation back into the final chorus. So it’s kind of like, it’s like having a very experienced worship band, and you can say to the chorus, and they’ll, if they’re experienced, they’ll bring the chorus back in. So it does it all for you, and it doesn’t just, kind of, jump between the sections, it does actually do it musically, intelligently. So it will bring in a fill or a swell or something to bring them back in again afterwards. So it’s very flexible. And in fact, you can, sorry, go on Laurie.

Laurie Graham  23:00
I am completely shocked by this because this is one of the reasons, as a person who’s led worship in the past, and in a lot of different settings, this is one reason I’ve hated tracks or backing things is because I am pretty sensitive as a worship leader and when I want to pray, I’m gonna pray and when I want to repeat a chorus, I want to repeat a chorus. And I have never seen anything that does that, and even though you’re saying it takes some technical skills, I feel like even me, I could hit pause. I feel like I would even, would I even be able to use an app like that, like, do you think?

Zarc Porter  23:31
100%? Yeah, 100%. I mean, we spent a lot of time keeping the main interface on the app very, very simple. So when you see it, you just see the lyrics, and you see the song sections down on the left hand side. So intro verse, chorus, verse two, chorus two, verse three, chorus three, end, and then you see the lyrics. And then on the bottom, you see play, talk, stop soft, it has soft versions as well. So you can take the drums out and the guitars out. It does it all, it pre-mixes it all for you. So you don’t have to use a mixer, you literally just press a button and it mixes it under the hood for you. So, it’s very simple for people who are not musical, who are not technical, and we spent a lot of time keeping it very simple because we understand that, you know, when people are leading worship, you know, you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be thinking, you know, you’re gonna be thinking about where your congregation is going, how to lead them, you know, what’s God saying to them? How, where’s it going? The last thing you want to be thinking about is technology and something that’s all this could go wrong. You know, you don’t want to be thinking like that, you need to relax. So we’ve made it very simple to use, but you can get complicated if you choose to get complicated. There’s, there’s a button that says ‘Advanced Settings’, and you can go in there and you can change everything. You can change the key, you can change the tempo, you can change all kinds of other things, but obviously, you don’t need to do that if you don’t want to do that. So yeah.

Laurie Graham  24:45
That is amazing! Do you want to tell us a little bit about the multi-tracks because I don’t even know what those are?

Zarc Porter  24:50
Yeah, so we also do multi-tracks for worship, again, as with the videos, and the iSing worship app is the same music again, but these are really aimed at churches who have some musicians but not a full band, but they want to have the sound of a full band. So, for example, if you’ve got a drummer and 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, that kind of stuff, or pads off the multi-tracks, and then they can play along live with it. So it kind of brings the sound of the production level up to a full band. So yeah, I’ve used them myself. I use them all the time, actually, in different settings, and it’s great. It’s just a great way of just making things sound a little bit bigger. And, you know, sometimes, in fact, even if you have a full band, it’s nice, just have a pad or some, you know, maybe some percussion, some loops or a tambourine or something, just going quietly, and it just gives it a little bit of a lift, it just makes it, just gives it a nudge up in quality. So, there’s all sorts of ways you’re using them. Obviously, if you, if you’re a guitarist or a pianist, you can just turn the piano off or the guitar off and just have everything else playing. So you can use it like that. 

Laurie Graham  25:51
It’s like you have something for everybody. So just to break it down simply, the worship lyric videos are basically like an alternate to YouTube, and lots of churches use them, and even if you don’t have internet, that is something you can download, because we have a lot of churches with no internet. Is that correct? For worship lyric videos? Did I say that right?

Zarc Porter  25:51
Absolutely correct. Exactly right. Yeah, you can download them at home, put them into PowerPoint, or Keynote or whatever, using church, and then just play them in church offline without any internet connection. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Zarc Porter  25:51
So it’s, they’re very scalable, the multi-tracks, but what happens is you have to use little bits of some software. So you either need to use, you know, things, something like Cubase, or Logic, or GarageBand, something like that. Or you can use one of the other multi-track players like Prime from a company called Luke Community. There’s one called Worship Song Band as well, which is a free one. So there’s different apps that you can use, and the multi-tracks can load into it. So they, the multi tracks do need a bit more technical skill than using the other, the other projects because, obviously, by using multi-tracks, you should really have in-ear monitoring as well so that you can hear a click, and you can hear cues in your ears. So that does take a bit of work. You know, it’s not something for a very small church where they’re struggling with a lack of technical people, you need somebody who’s quite technical, who can run those. So, so if you’re not, you know, if you haven’t got that, I would recommend iSing worship or the videos. If you have got that, then it’s worth exploring that as well because it just gives you that extra flexibility, again.

Laurie Graham  27:08
And iSing worship is for anybody who can use an app who wants an app, and there’s tons more flexibility with the same music, and what else, who else would want the icing worship app over the worship lyric video?

Zarc Porter  27:30
So yeah, I think, as you said, it’s mainly the flexibility. The videos, in a way, are simpler to use and, as I said, it’s the same music. So the question, I guess, for people to ask is, do I need, do I need that flexibility, and you said, Laurie, that you, when you lead you need, you don’t want to be frustrated, you need to have the freedom, and some people love that freedom. Other people are just happy to leave the song as it was, not to change anything, you know, and you find you get, you get both kinds of schools of thought. And it, obviously, it depends on the church, and some traditional churches don’t want to have things changed around. So it depends on on the tradition and what the church is used to doing. So, if you want the flexibility, it’s best to go for the app. If you want the simplicity, and you’re not worried about flexibility, it’s best to go for the videos, and if you’ve got a band or some musicians, and they want to, just, polish the sound up a bit, add some extra elements, then it’s best to go for the multi-tracks.

Laurie Graham  28:20
Oh, I love it. I love it so much! Okay, so I did a little research preparing for our conversation today because, as I mentioned, I’ve kind of always avoided these backup things, because I haven’t found something that would have really worked in my situations. And as you’re talking right now, I’m like, when I was a baby youth director, I would have loved these things for just the youth group in the other room, with the 10 kids who want something hip and new or something more than I can do, you know, as a guitar hack, who’s trying to, you know, play everything in C, D and A, or G, G, D, and A. So, when I was researching, I came up with some really different versions, different other organizations that, of course, do worship lyric videos, or some sort of multi-tracks. Can you tell me what, like, tell our audience what makes your resources unique? Because honestly, when I was looking at the options, I got all confused, like, oh, my goodness, I can’t even put it all together what I would need and what’s best, but what makes your resources unique?

Zarc Porter  29:17
Well, hopefully, hopefully, I mean, it’s not for me to say this, hopefully other people will say that they’re good quality, hopefully. They’re consistent. All our resources are coming from the same team, so you’ll find that some of the third party companies, they’re picking resources from different production companies and different people. So they sound quite different. So you lose that consistency, but then we’re very, very strong on making sure that things, you know, if you pick a very traditional hymn, and then a very modern worship song and you put them together, they sound consistent. The levels are the same. They’re broadly, the arrangements fit together well, if there’s not a big jump in style, so we try and get the style fairly, fairly consistent. Obviously, I know it varies from song to song, but you know, we try and keep it so that nothing jumps to extreme. That’s one thing. 

Zarc Porter  30:02
Um price, I think you’ll find our, certainly, our mult- tracks on our videos are cheaper than certainly any of the competition that I found yet. But, you know, that’s not to say that, I know there’s other guys doing stuff really well, there’s some good stuff out there. Luke Community are great, they do multi-tracks. They’re really, really big in the States. So it’s worth looking at them. And in fact, we actually do license some of our music to that community. So I can say that, and we actually worked with them. They’re friends of ours. So, you know, so they’re great, and but, I think you’ll find, you know, pricing wise, if you look at the multi-track providers, the big ones, you’ll find ours are a lot cheaper. So, you know, when it, when it’s a church that’s smaller, and they’re on a tight budget, that’s a big deal. In the UK, you know, there’s a lot of very small churches, and they just don’t have the money to spend on these big resources. So that’s a big, a big deal is the pricing. And yeah, hopefully, people will, hopefully people will feel that they’re, they’re getting a good product, you know, but again, it’s what people, people should try, people should try the alternatives and see what they, they prefer. So yeah, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I’m not so arrogant to say, ours are better you know. So we’ll see.

Laurie Graham  31:05
I totally hear you, but I do think everybody has, like, a different bent and a different audience they serve and some uniquenesses that are different. One of the things, I think, that I understand about everything you do, especially talking to you more, is it’s almost like every, all the different venues, like layers of an onion, like they’re all kind of here in one piece. I was looking at a lot of sites where you’re paying for one song at a time, and even the track is separate from the lyrics, and it was, it got really pricey when I was looking at that. And I know your iSing app. I know several churches who are using this, I’ve talked to a few, and they’re like, yeah, I think, is it less than $20 a month or something?

Zarc Porter  31:43
Yeah, I think at  the moment is $12.99 a month for the iSing worship subscription and that gives you all the technology and access to all the music. So the whole song library, well, obviously, the library is growing all the time. In fact, we just released a new song today. So the library is growing all the time, and we’re releasing new stuff all the time. And we have a form, actually, on the website where people can vote for a song if we, if we haven’t yet made a song that people want, they can go and vote for it on the website. And we, obviously, we look at the votes. If it gets a lot of votes, we’ll bump it up the order, and we’ll go and make the song. So we’re trying to make songs that people actually want, rather than the ones that we think are great, and then nobody actually wants them. So we do try and make it quite democratic. So.

Laurie Graham  32:22
I so love this. I love that you are responsive to your audience and you’re always trying to meet needs, because that’s what I do too. And I think it’s so important just to be in tune instead of just doing our thing and seeing who wants it, is to actually see a need and really work to meet it. So can I just ask for a sneak peek? What’s the brand new song you’ve just released,

Laurie Graham 32:40
So fun. Okay, so what else have we not covered yet that you wanted to touch on?

Zarc Porter  32:40
We’ve just released, today, on the app, we’ve just released Jesus at the Center, which is a Horton song, and we’ve, on the videos, actually, we’ve just released a song called By Faith, which is a Getty Townend song, great song actually, great song. And we just released the video. So what tends to happen is we release, once we’ve made a song, we released it in the videos, usually earlier, because it’s quicker for us to make the video. It takes a bit more work to get it encoded for the app, it takes a bit of time to get it through our systems. So usually it lags a little bit. So it’s a little bit later for the app than it is on the video. So if people will look at our list of songs available on the videos, they can see what we’re working on that’s going to come out soon on the app as a way of looking at what’s coming next. 

Zarc Porter  33:15
I think you’ve covered that. Yeah, I think we’ve, we just to mention, we do also do MP3 versions of all the music, again. So if somebody just wants to get a, an MP3 audio track, just to listen to at home, or just to use for rehearsal, all our entire library is available on there as well, and you can just get an MP3. And in fact, you can stream them actually on Spotify, and so you can stream our versions. If you look on Spotify, and search for The Worship Zone, you’ll find our versions of the songs on there, and that’s great for just rehearsing or if you if you’re in a team, and using a multitrack or using it as in worship, and you think you want to get your team to learn it before they come to church and rehearse it, you can send them a link and they can listen to our version. They can get used to it, used the tempo, the key, then come into church and play it and everyone’s on the everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet to use the phrase. But also, we have chord charts. So if people want to get our chord charts, they’re all available now as well. Again, those are all from The Worship Zone website.

Laurie Graham  34:24
So they can actually, so you’re, the songs that you do are on Spotify in the right key. I am totally laughing because my team used to hate me, they’d get so upset because I’d say listen to this song, we’re going to do this song. They would practice it and I had a couple of like real musicians who understood key signatures because I’m a vocalist and I’m not that technical with the music, but then they’d come into practice and go it’s in a different key? I’m like yeah, just playing it in a different key and they’re like, trying to explain to me muscle memory and how they just worked on this riff or something. And yeah, so I love that that’s even part of it, too. Like I, I don’t honestly even think most people listening will really see all the different pieces that you’ve covered. And I think, one of the reasons you’ve done this is because you are a musician, and your brother is a, you know, like really technical, you know, on the programming side, and you have all this talent around you. So, I really, I really see you as solving issues that you have seen and making it so easy for everyone else.

Zarc Porter  35:25
Awe bless you. Bless you, Laurie, I think it’s encouraging. It’s very encouraging to hear you say that, and I know you’re, you’re somebody who understands small churches and understands the challenges and the needs. So it’s, so it, you know, it means something when somebody like you says that, so that’s great to hear actually really encouraging. And I hope, I do hope we can help people, you know, I hope we can resource people who are struggling, because at the end of the day, you know, we want to glorify God, don’t we? We want to do things well, and we want to be excellent. So if we can help with that, that’s that’s just good news, isn’t it? So.

Laurie Graham  35:52
Yeah, well, I hate to say it, we are almost out of time again, and I’m totally gonna beg you to come back again because I really want to talk about the classroom ministry that you’re part of, and iSing pop, and how to use some of those resources in small churches, because I saw like, I’m, I’m googling everywhere, I’m researching, and there’s something called the Pop Box that I think, is really going to make a difference in small church children’s ministry, where we have people just pulling their hair out with multi-ages, you know, not feeling like they’re capable of teaching, wanting to introduce worship. So we’re gonna do that on another episode. So I’m totally asking you live, will you come back again? 

Zarc Porter  36:33
Of course, Laurie, I will always come back. Absolutely, no problem at all. Thank you.

Laurie Graham  36:38
Okay. That’ll be so fun. Well, thanks for being with us today, Zarc. I really appreciate you and I even appreciate the image of, of your landscape in the UK, because I’m gonna put myself there, because I’m in Tucson right now and it’s like, 1,000 degrees, and we’re rocks and desert. So I’m gonna, like, be imagining the rolling hills that you get to look at every day, but if you could give one last piece of advice, just today, for somebody who’s out there worship leading in a small church, like, what would it be?

Zarc Porter  37:06
I would say, I would say if, actually, if you, if you’re a worship leading on your own small church, be encouraged because there are lots of great resources coming through now that can help you. I would encourage you to explore it, explore, try, try different things out, you know, try some, try some, try using our app, some free songs in there, just try it out, see how you feel with it, try exploring multitrack, just try different things out. Don’t, kind of, get set, too set in your ways. I would say, keep exploring and developing and digging for new ideas, and to kind of, kind of keep exploring things. But there are some really good things out now it’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not like it used to be where there was really nothing. Things are changing. There’s lots of good resources out and about there now, I think, to support and help people.

Laurie Graham  37:49
Yeah, thank you so much. Hey, everyone who’s listening, if you want to learn more about the resources on The Worship Zone, visit theworshipzone.com. Don’t forget the ‘the’ the worshipzone.com, and the link is also in the show notes. You can connect with Zarc there by email, just go to the ‘About Forum’ in the contact form there, and he’s the one that gets those emails. And better yet, if you’re listening live, you still have time to grab a free ticket to The Worship and Tech Conference coming up on, for small churches, on October 22, and Zarc is one of our speakers there as well. So we’re excited to spend even more time with him. The link to get your free ticket is also in the show notes. And if you are a small church, we see you and you are not alone, and there is more support out there than you probably even have touched on yet. But I just think about, like, there’s 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, because that’s the call of Christ! So thanks for hanging out with us today. Connect with us on Facebook or Instagram at Small Church Ministry. We would love to hear what you’re doing in your small church and how we can serve you more. So until next time, be a light.