Worship Technology 2.0

It is pretty cool what we can do with technology these days. We can put literally $1000s of dollars of outboard gear, computer hardware and network capabilities into these devises we call "smartphones."

Sound techs, now if you go digital you can mix from anywhere in the room with your ipad. Oh, and if you have enough Aux sends to support individual monitors for musicians and singers they can mix their own monitors from stage without even bothering you!!!! Then once you get some basic levels you can switch over to an app that allows you to analyze the sound in the room to get your EQ dialed in. Ever heard of Smarrt??? You can have that in on your iPad for under $100. INSANE!

Visual Techs, there is a world of stuff for you as well. Lighting magazines are filled with new apps and programs to function as a lighting control. And for your screens... here is a fun new projection system that is designed solely to be mobile.



Worship Leaders, there are endless tools for us as well. My favorite are:

• Planning Center Online's mobile app for scheduling and live events. Great for those conversations on stage of "am I playing next week" for someone as scatterbrained as me.
• Evernote!!!! Love this one as a songwriter. I can type out some lyric ideas, record audio clips and photo/videos to hold on to that melody line or lyric that junps out. 
• Shazam. This is a first generation app that still holds it's ground because it is so useful. Listening to the radio or something when you are out? Shazam it and share it to your email inbox. Perfect. 
• Bible App... nuff said.
• Metronome - This will help any worship team if you can utilize it well.
• Dropbox - free cloud sharing is great for storing large files that you may need to access from anywhere.
• There are so many more...

One recommendation if you are using your iphone in a live worship setting... "airplane mode." The other day I heard a call/text (don't know which one) come in when someone was using their phone for click track... not fun.

There's an App for that...

There is a new Worship App for iPhone/iTouch users called Song Suggest. I was able to check it out and it seems pretty cool. You can do a lot with it. It helps you find songs, lyrics/chord charts, and videos for any song that is listed. It draws from a pretty huge database of songs.

Check out the website online at: http://www.worshipapps.com/ or find it in the app store.

Here is the video about the app and its features.

Planning Center

Ok.

So here is a great website that I have been using for planning the worship service and scheduling the team. It has been great. I have had nothing but positive reponses from the Worship Team and it has helped clarify and customize the information that the team needs.

This is a screenshot of the website and it shows one thing that makes this program stand out from the rest. The tutorial videos are great. They have videos for everything, but my favorite is for the Volunteers.

There is a video that plays for each of the members as soon as they first sign on and set up thier member account. It is very simple and communicates exactly what the volunteers need to know. It is extremely user friendly and anyone who knows how to use a computer and the internet (even the basics) can figure this out. And anything that they do not know they can easily learn with this video. Watch it below.

Volunteer Training from Planning Center on Vimeo.

Also, another mentionable feature is the transposing of music... not only pdfs and chordcharts... but MP3s. They have a really easy to use system for transposing. It doesn't slow the track down and sounds pretty decent. The music quality is great and vocals are ok. But is is perfect for vocalists or musicians that would like to play along to the tracks in the correct key.

Finally, it interfaces well with CCLI and Songselect. Which makes it easy to get the correct copyright info and better yet, keep track of all the times and ways that you have used songs. I know that some of the other planning programs have this feature as well, but compiled with everything else... it just makes you smile.

I think the best part is that you don't have to pay per time you download, or use, a song. It may sound obvious... but I've looked around and seen that a lot. You are able to keep track of the copyrights so that you don't 'steal' useage, but you don't pay for every little thing. The plans are fairly cheap and easy to get set up.

I highly recommend this to any worship leader to help stay orginized and save a lot of time.