Christmas Time is Here Again

What is God stirring in your heart this Holiday Season for your congregation? Maybe you will highlight a few of those Christmas Hymns that are so near to your church’s heart. Maybe you will have a celebration service incorporating the worship of your church through the arts. Maybe you will have a Christmas choir, a powerful retelling of the meaning of Christmas, a group of carolers singing through your neighborhoods, or maybe you will share a meal with your church - all in honor of the birth of our King. This King came as a lowly newborn baby in a humble manger in a little town long ago. What an incredible paradox! The King of Kings and Lord of Lords entered this earth humbly. I can’t help but think of Matthew 23:12.

This Christmas Season let us ‘make much’ of our King and welcome Him with great celebration and joyful hearts! Let us exalt Him through our singing and join with the Angels as the ‘official messengers of His good news’ or the "herald" worshipers:

           

Hark! The herald angels sing "Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled."
Joyful, all ye nations rise. Join the triumph of the skies.
With the angelic host proclaim: "Christ is born in Bethlehem."
Hark! The herald angels sing, "Glory to the newborn King!"

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.

Figuring out what all those little knobs do...

This post is for any beginner Electric Guitar players and/or worship leaders who feel like they need to brush up on some 'techie'ness or learn about more gear.

I'm always telling electric guitarists to play around with their pedals and find sweet sounds that you can really get inspired by. Most of the time I get blank stares with bewilderment from the beginners as they think to themselves... "I really don't know much, do I?" This is for you, and ME!!

There are a ton of resources online for you! Really the best way to do it is to research what sounds would work for the style you most often play and then track down a few pedals at your local guitar shop to demo them for yourself. But, in order to do that you need to

Take a look at a run down of some of the most basic sounds that Boss put online featuring guitarist Johnny DeMarco. Great simple easy to understand format. Here are a few that I think are useful.

Overdrive

Tremelo

Compressor

If you are a true beginner this site is for you! Find more here: http://www.bossus.com/go/effects_101/

As you learn what there is out there, find out what pedals might sound like paired with other pedals for your style of music! Take a look at some of the interactive stuff on this site:
http://www.bossus.com/experience/interactive_demos/

This is not meant to be a "Boss" heavy review but an page to link you to overviews of options. There are so many brands and unique sounds that you can get lost pretty quickly. So, I just gave demos from one company. Here are some more sites that you can find great pedals from:

http://www.digitech.com/
http://www.fulltone.com/
http://t-rex-effects.com
http://www.ehx.com/
http://www.bossus.com/

If you want to find any mainstream brand:
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/
http://www.sweetwater.com
http://www.guitarcenter.com/