We’ve also uploaded the instructional video with the dance moves, which you can check out below. If you’re coming to camp this summer, feel free to rock the tune at your church and bring your kids knowing the dance. Enjoy!

http://vimeo.com/42154468

The real problem lies in the question itself: Where do you get your ideas? It’s almost as if they think I have access to some kind of information, some kind of magazine or web site that is so rich with ideas, so rife with creativity that it makes it easy to develop incredible concepts.

Occasionally, when I get asked this question in a group setting I’ll have a little fun with the person asking the question and respond that whenever your church reaches a certain size a highly-secret organization will contact you and offer you access to a web site full of ideas that will blow your mind, but again, only when your church reaches a certain size.

I think a big misconception about creative ideas is that they’re born almost fully formed. That is, that the genesis and the finished product somewhat closely resemble each other. Sure, we assume there’s going to be some tweaks made a long the way, but for the most part the crux of the idea is born in tact. We think John Lassetter woke up one day with Woody and Buzz dueling in his head, that Steve Jobs had a miraculous vision of the iPhone in his sleep, that George Lucas knew Darth Vader was Luke’s father from the inception.

We want to believe it works that way don’t we? Why? Because it’s sexier, because It’s more fantastic, because it’s more grand and mysterious. But above all else, this misconception persists because it let’s us off the hook.

Let’s suppose for a minute that ideas aren’t born fully formed and that great artists simply take inspiration from everything around them and not from some secret stash that you & I don’t have. And let’s suppose for a minute that their art isn’t the result of a stroke of genius but rather from years of study, dedication and hard work.

What if that were true? What would it mean for me and you? Well, it would rob us of our excuses wouldn’t it? I mean if it all came down to hard work and study then we could no longer hide behind the notion that we just don’t have access to what they have or we just aren’t as gifted as they are, right?

I’m not arguing that talent and gifting don’t play a role here, but in my opinion, when it comes to creativity, talent and gifting have been emphasized to exclusion of hard work for far too long and it furthers the notion that the best ideas pop straight out of the mind of the genius fully formed rather than the product of hard work.

You want to know the secret to creativity? It’s all about idea development. It’s not about the moment an idea comes to you, it’s about the hours upon hours that you’ll spend developing that idea AFTER it’s come to you.

Andrew Stanten who is a member of the Pixar brain trust and the writer and director of many of Pixar’s best films was asked about the writing process and this is what he said “Write. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite.”

The point is, almost nothing comes out fully formed. The best ideas are almost always the result of a long, intensive process of development. When the iPhone was being developed there were two versions, one with a click wheel and one with a touch screen. Even the amazing Steve Jobs needed time to arrive at that decision.Now we can all see that touch screen technology has completely changed the mobile phone industry, but what seems like a no-brainer now was the result of a long and grueling process then.

I know personally that my best ideas have all started off so small that most people would pass right over them but the “genius” of them (if you want to call it that) was in the development phase.

“What if we found a way to play a Michael Jackson song at Christmas?” That thought turned into the Grinch+Thriller.

“Oh crap, Father’s day is in two weeks and we’ve got nothing! Let’s watch this Swagger Wagon video” That thought turned into Dad Life.

It’s not about the genesis moment. It’s all about the developmental process AFTER the genesis moment. Yes, you have to have some kind of leaping off point but so many people are trying to give birth to fully grown creative ideas. I say, give it up.

I promise, if you’ll change your mindset from trying to hatch a genius plan and simply develop the small, seemingly insignificant ideas you already have, you’ll see a world of difference in the quality of your ideas and pretty soon people will be asking you “where do you get your ideas?”

And, chances are, if you work within a team, then you aren’t the only one throwing out ideas for the weekend. Other people on the team are bringing their ideas and experience to the table as well. And here’s the funny thing about ideas: people have a tendency to get emotionally attached to them. Especially when it’s their idea! They pout, they get upset, they get angry when their idea isn’t given the chance at life they think it deserved.

So, here’s the question, and it’s a question I get asked ALL THE TIME, whether your team is massive or tiny: How do you juggle the different opinions and ideas that get thrown out during the course of planning a weekend service without (and that’s the key word!) hurting people’s feelings permanently (another key word) and damaging your relationships?

Well, I can tell you this, it can be done, but it won’t be because you found a way to give criticism more nicely, it’ll be because you created a culture where the team values the whole over the parts. Here’s some specifics:

1. Start with vision

One of the biggest issues I see with a lot church creative teams is that they lack vision and direction. Believe it or not artists WANT direction and definition and when they don’t have it they’ll create it for themselves every time. In other words, if your team lacks creative direction they’ll default to creating the kind of weekend experience THEY want to create. The video team will make videos THEY like. The musicians will pick songs THEY like. The designers will create designs THEY like and so on and so on.

Because each member of the team lacks clear vision everyone starts to pull in their own direction, they run wild (I think that’s a verse somewhere), they craft ideas for the weekend that suits THEIR idea of what a successful weekend should be and when that happens you inevitably have power struggles and hurt feelings.

At COTM we don’t have five ideas of what the weekend service is going to look like. We have one idea. Mine.

I know that sounds egotistical and creatively stifling, but in reality it’s liberating because each member of the team is free to create within the boundaries that I’ve provided instead of trying incessantly to set those boundaries for themselves and fighting with others who see it differently.

Great artists like Walt Disney, Steve Jobs & Alfred Hitchcock, all provided a crystal clear vision to the artists they worked with and when you worked with them it was clear whose vision mattered, theirs not yours, and that changes everything.

Interestingly, many of the artists who worked with these great men would tell you that it was under their leadership and direction that they did their very best work.

2. Create a Culture of Evaluation

I’m convinced that the reason many people get their feelings hurt when they get critiqued is that they’re almost never critiqued! Most people just aren’t used to having their ideas ruthlessly evaluated so when they finally do experience a little critique they have no idea how to handle it and they sulk and pout.

One way to help your team get over their bruised egos is to critique them so often that they get used to it. In our world we’re constantly evaluating and critiquing so when someone says “I hate that idea” it doesn’t ruffle any feathers.

Occasionally our creative team will interact with other departments of the church to aid them with a project and in a couple of those interactions we’ve unintentionally ruffled some feathers and hurt some feelings. Not because we were trying strut our stuff and show how big and bad we are but simply because we mistakenly used the harsh language of critique that we are so accustomed to and it was a little shocking to those outside of our culture.

In those instances we had to go back and apologize where it was necessary, but in our environment, I want it that way. I want our team to be constantly looking for better ways to design, sing, write, shoot, edit etc.

Your goal isn’t some static standard of quality, that standard should be constantly moving forward and you can’t do that without constant critique. But, if you only critique every once and while your team will default to doing only just enough to reach some perceived static standard of quality instead of constantly trying to get better. Keep up the critique and keep the standard moving forward.

3. Tell me why

Did your parents ever tell you that you couldn’t do something you really wanted to do and when you pressed them for a reason as to why you couldn’t do it all they would tell is “because I said so!”? How frustrating is that?

From childhood to adulthood it’s just in our nature to want to understand why. We’re hardwired that way and so when we encounter a “no” without a why it’s really frustrating.

One thing I never do as a creative leader is offer arbitrary criticism. Whether I’m speaking to my superiors or to my team I’ll never say I hate it and walk away. If you respect the people you work with then they deserve to know your reasons so I’ll always provide them with a well thought through reason. After all, if I can’t explain to myself why I don’t like something do I really deserve to criticize it to others?

Taking the time to understand why you don’t like that font, or why your camera shots look so pathetic, or why that song sounds like garbage not only sharpens your own skills (and it will, big time!) but it also helps your team to understand your point of view and helps them to see that your criticism is not aimed at them personally, but at their ideas which are distinctly different in my view.

We have to learn to value our team and be ruthless with our ideas. Understanding that I can value you as a person and not like your ideas is a HUGE culture shift for your team, because it creates resiliency to critique and not a sensitivity to it.

Alright, I’m on vacation and that’s all I have time for at the moment. If you have any questions leave a comment below and I’ll answer as many as I can.

GAME:
Memory Verse Mania

OBJECTIVE:
Unscramble the Memory Verse
Faster time = more ping pong balls
Toss the ping pong balls into buckets to win prizes for everyone!

PROPS:
7 giant cards, each with part of the verse on it
5 buckets
10-15 ping pong balls
Prizes

The game is in two parts. For the first, pick eight kids and hand seven of them a giant card with part of the series verse on it. We used 3’ x 2’ cards and had them printed out of house. Have the seven scramble up the verse and the remaining one put it in the right order as fast as he/she can. To keep track of the time, we created a little timer that counts up. Once the scripture is unscrambled, stop the timer. The first unscrambler wins two ping pong balls. Let’s say he did it in 55 seconds. Choose a new kid and up the ante. “If you can get it in 50 seconds, you’ll get another ping pong ball and you guys will have 3!” Continue this way until you have 5 - 10 or so won.

For the second part, think Bozo’s Grand Prize Game from back in the day. Bring out the five buckets and place them in a line. Give the contestant a spot to stand, facing the buckets. For each bucket he/she tosses a ping pong ball into, prizes are won for EVERYONE! We assigned the prizes as such:

BUCKET 1: KOTM bookmarks with the verse
BUCKET 2: Poppers (link)
BUCKET 3: Kazoos (link)
BUCKET 4: KOTM wristbands (link)
BUCKET 5: A CD with our new song (Jesus Is Alive Right Now [Remix])

Obviously, any assortment of prizes will work as long as the biggest prize is saved for the end. For the contestant, the odds of winning are in their favor if they’ve won a lot of ping pong balls.

A FEW NOTES
Because everyone wins prizes, we didn’t split the room into teams. Everyone was after the same goal. We’ve also uploaded the slides, timer, bumper, and artwork for the cards and bookmark. You can download them here!

I’ve also included a couple of photos we snapped this weekend of the buckets so you can see how we built them.

Questions? Let us know in the comments below!

Fast forward a couple decades later…As I lead a group of young worship leaders I continue to challenge them the way “the Twister” challenged me - to embrace the struggle of the performance. 90% of worship songs are very easy to sing. They have to be. A great worship song, or a great pop song for that matter, needs to be easily accessible to the listener. Musicians who have a knack for their instrument can knock these songs out in their sleep. And that’s where we lose the energy and passion in our services.

The dilemma: how do we make what is inherently easy into a passionate struggle? Here are a few ideas…

1. If you can sing your song with ease, you aren’t working hard enough.
I worked with Jordan the other day on a song that came easily to him. The key was perfect for him and his phrasing was smooth and tight. But I asked him to rough it up a bit and shorten his phrasing, as well as hitting each word that started with a vowel with a new breath. I wanted him to work harder to present his message. His delivery needed to seem as if he were pondering every word, which in this new mindset he was. The result was a sense of immediacy in his voice rather than a nice, sweet tone.

2. The struggle in your performance = passion to your audience.
The people in the room don’t necessarily want a song they can sing, they want a song they can believe. And if you don’t believe it, why should they? As you work through the song during the week, wrestle with it until you understand the weight it carries.

3. If you are not emotionally drained after each set, you haven’t worked hard enough.
Sweat every word/phrase/thought. I encourage those on our stage to give it all each service, no matter how much they’ve got left in the tank.

4. Don’t be afraid to fail or be embarrassed.
I remind our guys, especially our vocalists, to own their mistakes on stage. The audience knows you missed it, so don’t run and hide. Acknowledge your humanness and allow them to see you as real.

The great performers work hard to communicate their message, even with the simplest of songs. Let’s make sure we aren’t taking the easiest path each weekend. God deserves more than that…

Lee was gracious enough to make his Lessons In Leadership PDF on time management available to our Seeds community, so click here to download it!

REFERENCE LINKS
Roberts Drum Company
Dream Cymbals
SE Electronics (HiHat Shield)

DRUM MICS
Audix D6
Shure SM91A
Shure BETA57A
Shure SM81
Sennheiser 421
AKG C480
Shure BETA98

To check out the front lighting blog that Andrew mentions, click here.

Click here to download the PDF.

• To even be eligible to audition for a spot on any of our worship teams, one must go through our church’s partnership process. Once that is completed, he/she must be cleared via a background check.

• The musician must contact our music director Marcos Cruz for a quick interview. Marcos will ask about their musical history and their goals - do they want to be a soloist, BGV only, be on the main stage, KOTM?

• Marcos will set up an audition time and have the singer/musician come prepared to sing 2 worship songs that we are currently doing here at COTM, plus a song of their choosing. Auditions must be held with at least 2 of our staff present and must be recorded on video.

• If Marcos feels like the person who auditioned has potential then I will view the video and give my input. If I notice potential as well I will have him set up a 2nd audition ASAP and have that person sing/play the same songs with me in the room.

• During this 2nd audition I will offer feedback and direction to get a sense of the flexibility and teachability of the singer/musician. If I feel that they have what it takes to join our team I will then spend the next 10-15 minutes explaining what we expect from team members, rehearsal schedules, etc. Honestly, a lot of people disqualify themselves simply because they cannot put in the time that is expected to do what we do…

Out of the 30-40 people who auditioned for us last year only 3 made it onto our main stage immediately. If someone showed promise but needed work I immediately put them on the KOTM radar. If someone who sang or played for us was just…well, not good, I or Marcos would have an honest talk with them to let them know that there are plenty of other places in our church where they can serve.

Also, we have tried the “cattle call” auditions in the past and felt like it was a total waste of time. Our experience has been that solo auditions show us what we need to see and gives us time to get to know the person auditioning.

If you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear them…

The basic setup uses (2) AT-4050’s to pick up the singers studio-style. Since this setup is in the middle of a busy backstage area, we use a couple of SE Electronics reflection filters to give a bit of focus and directionality to what the mic is hearing. There are plenty of old drum shields floating around too that have further helped isolate some of the unwanted background noise.

For monitoring I send 1 mono mix down to (2) Rolls headphone amps. This gives each singer a volume attenuator and a set of studio headphones that offer a bit of isolation to what they’re hearing.

We’ve also supplied a 40” monitor with the video program feed so they can keep their bearings of what’s going on out front—this is quite important so they can stay connected with the other parts of a service.

This isn’t a real pretty setup but it’s extremely flexible, is easy for the stage crew to setup and strike while remaining quite functional—everything is already something we had on hand and using road-cases for tables and such is perfectly acceptable for a backstage area (or my office).

I’ll second what Andy said about getting a full sound—I still have to be careful with how I use this in the mix so it doesn’t take over or sound contrived but it’s an effective and creative way to bulk up the “bigness” of the vocal sound.

Even though this is far from conventional or standard to how one would normally mic or utilize a small choir or ensemble—it bodes well that there really are no rules in creating good audio. Achieving success by adapting to a situation based on factors like content or set design can send you in a completely different direction. We’ve had a love/hate relationship with the sound of a properly mic’d choir for quite some time—strictly from a mix standpoint, our house mix precludes a choir from being very effective in the house—this process has allowed us to revisit some of the same sounds while going a different direction.

You can hear this setup in action on both of the weekend service videos below:

Lost & Found - Part 2
Easter 2012

We have forced ourselves to stop relying on Pro Tools tracks in the past year or so during services - there’s always that risk that if it doesn’t run right, your best laid plans go down the toilet. So, in an effort to do everything live all the time we’ve gotten creative with, among other things, our group vocal sound.

As you can see in the pictures below, it’s a pretty simple set up. The best part about it is that Andrew can really control their sound without any bleed from stage volume. Let me know if you have any questions about the gear you see in the pics.

By the way, our choir members LOVE this set up. It’s way more relaxed and it encourages those with shy personalities to get involved. And they can “come as they are” as you can see in the pictures…

In other words, the longer your video goes, the more tension is created, and as a result, a bigger payoff is expected.

That’s why season finales are usually longer than a normal episode, because the payoff is much greater.

Here’s the point, unless your video’s payoff is HUGE, you may want to shorten your video, or you’ll leave your audience thinking “that’s it?” One of the biggest mistakes I see in church videos is simply length. Most 3 minute videos could easily be shortened to under 1 minute.

Give it a try.

This post is an answer to the question I’m asked the most: “How do you key the background out in your announcements?” Here is a walkthrough of the process I use in Adobe After Effects. Pay special attention to the brightness of the graphic background and shadows on Sam. There is no keying or tedious rotoscoping, just an illusion. It’s so simple to do that my audio commentary isn’t even necessary. Click here to download the After Effects CS5 project to try it yourself.

We use a service called Twilio and it is really fantastic, but there is a catch… you need to have a developer who can build out where / how you want the texts displayed. Twilio is basically for developers who just need to buy a cheap phone number and get an XML feed to do with what they will. We have a dev on our team who also does video / graphics work so he custom built what you see on the screens during Stuck In A Rut. It updates real-time and was a really cool element to each weekend’s service, both during the service and polling people pre-service. Basically you buy a phone number for $1/month and then every text sent or received is $0.01 so it’s a great deal, even for high volume usage. Our number is a 10-digit local number rather than a 5-digit shortcode, but because of that, we don’t have to require a keyword in front of the text, which is great for the people who get easily confused by how to format their text using keywords!

We’ve used JarbyCo before and they’ve done a great job for us, but Twilio gives us more flexibility with their blank slate approach to create exactly what we want and to have full control over the process. Another option I just heard about today is Google Voice which sounds like a pretty incredible (and free!) tool to use for easily connecting you to your church guests via text, though I can’t speak to the polling ability of it. Texting overall is such a great way to connect with people since it is universal to the masses and doesn’t require installing an app or extensive details on how to text in. Do some research and find out how you can utilize it in your services!

At COTM, we’re known to change it up considerably from time to time but overall there is consistency on several levels that is always present. This could translate to something as simple as the warmth you feel when entering our main auditorium prior to an event; how the house-lighting, music, volume, color, and texture of the décor all work to create an atmosphere that is consistent and true to what our guests have become accustomed to. Or maybe it translates to the complexity of a full-blown production element involving layers of personnel, equipment, scene changes, lighting cues, audio mix, and video shots all converging into one glorious moment.

However basic or complex our production is, our consistency directly reflects the level of excellence that has been established by everything that has preceded us—we’ve grown accustomed to the consistency of a professional and top-notch production: consistent audio, consistent speech intelligibility, consistent lighting, consistent video, etc. Maintaining these consistencies has just about become a state of mind as they start to operate from the same common denominator. My production team’s commitment to maintaining this consistency is what protects us from losing valuable production ground as we continue to grow and change.

No matter what situation you come from or whom you represent, staying consistent doesn’t cost a cent nor does it involve being lavish or extravagant. You don’t even have to make some huge leap from marginal to awesome overnight—you can make a massive difference by simply finding what things you already do great and make them amazingly consistent—then spend time focusing on making improvements consistently over time.

Consider this, if your event fails from the most fundamental task, a mic goes out, a lamp blows, a projector dies, etc—a better foundation could be established by perfecting these small things on a consistent basis. Excelling at a small level may allow you to start rising above the minutia and build to something bigger and better.

I’m in the middle of prepping for some my sessions and getting content together and I’d love to hear from YOU! That’s right, you reading this blog right now. I don’t care if you’re planning on coming to Seeds Conference or not, I want to know what you want to hear from us. I can’t promise I’ll use your suggestions but they will provide me a leaping off point for what I’ll share when the time comes so respond using the comments of this blog and let’s hear it!

2011 was an incredible year for us at Oneighty! Over the past year, we have gone through a ton of evaluation and improvement in our ministry to students. Because of that, we’ve been pretty quiet on the Seeds scene as we have been hard at work - restructuring our high school and junior high ministries, remodeling our facility, and changing how we connect with students. We’ve had some good wins this past year and we are excited to share with you some of the series and elements that have worked well for us. We just uploaded a ton of content and we hope that these are of use to you. If you end up using any of them, let us know - we’d love to hear how they work for you!

Many people worked long and hard on this one! We have a HUGE behind the scenes video blog scheduled to post in January so stay tuned for that. In the meantime here’s some behind the scenes info on this years Christmas services:

Planning for the service doesn’t begin at all until November 1st. We literally have nothing in mind until then and it’s a mad rush to get it all put together in roughly 7 weeks.

Many of the songs this year are completely original arrangements. This proved to be quite risky but very rewarding.

Drummer Boy was inspired by Sade’s Soldier of Love, Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Really Care About Us & Coldplay’s Princess of China.

The costume design for Drummer Boy, I hate to say, was greatly inspired by Justin Beiber’s Santa Claus is Coming To Town video that played before Arthur Christmas and Michael Jackson’s classic military jackets. Lisa Ensor did a phenomenal job decorating them for us.

Cirque du Soleil has been a big inspiration to us these past couple of years. You can see/feel their influence all over this years performance.

The clown piece was actually an idea we developed last year but abandoned because we felt it was too difficult to pull off. You have no idea how many hours were spent watching clowns perform just so we could learn how to communicate without speaking. EVERY single physical gesture they make is very intentional was developed during several intense practice sessions in front of a mirror.

We arranged a gorgeous version of Favorite Things to be sung by Dyana Bush that was cut in the last rehearsals because we felt it just didn’t fit quite right. I’m sure we’ll find a place for it next year. She sang it beautifully.

Hours were spent picking each song that plays in advance of the service. It’s all French music and most of it isn’t Christmas music at all. It was chosen specifically to get you in the right frame of mind to accept the clown bit that starts the show.

EVERY shot in the Santa Claus Is Coming to Town Movie sequence was made by us including the shot of the city.

We watched the 1943 film Double Indemnity very closely to authentically craft the dialogue for Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. The scene where Fred MacMurray meets Barbara Stanwyck for the first time was especially useful.

You may notice a line or two from the old movie in Home Alone in the Santa Claus is Coming to Town movie.

The scene from the movie Chicago called “They Both Reached For the Gun” was of great use to us in creating the dance for Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

The set this year was heavily inspired by Radiohead’s 2008 Tour. Although our’s looks similar to their’s we used ours in a much different way, giving it, I think, a totally different feel.

Last but not least thank you so much to ALL the people who worked so hard to make this year’s performance the HUGE success that it’s been. You guys make it happen!

Editor’s Note: We’ve noticed parts of this video are difficult to see due to incorrect camera settings. We’re working with our Production team to get this issue resolved.

Daniel Connell and I recently attended Live Design International, a large production and lighting design conference and exhibition held down in Orlando. In our quest to keep our production design current and relevant, this is one of the better places for us to stay informed to what new options are out there. Since we were in Orlando, we took advantage of checking out some of the production situations at Disney and the Cirque du Soleil show at the La Nouba theatre.

Have never been much of a Disney guy but will go on the record right off the top that I have THE utmost respect for what it has taken to build that empire and applaud the technical expertise highly evident on every front. Must be an amazing situation to have a worldwide team built only of the best of the best. I’ve been to Disney many times but always with a visiting production or entertainer trying to complete the gig and get out as unscathed as possible.

At Disney, I didn’t fall in love with everything I saw but what I DID love was witnessing one of the best displays of teamwork, co-existence, and synergy I’ve seen in a long, long time. An ideal I try to implement in our COTM productions was summed up quite well from the Production Manager of one of their evening shows (where they project 3D imagery onto the castle) stating “It’s not about opening night, it’s about every night.”. Truly ultimate words to live by as we all strive to keep things at a consistent level weekend to weekend and event to event.

Was greatly encouraged to see these guys at Disney embracing older technology and devices and USING THEM EXCEPTIONALLY WELL. As one who has never been much of a gear-head, I’ve never been at ease with the way some production people think that the new tricks, bells, and whistles are going to make everything great—ultimately hoping it will cover up their lack of experience and skill. On the contrary (and as witnessed at Disney) it’s team, discipline, maintenance, knowledge, and plain old skill coupled with hard work that makes an excellent production, NOT the gear you’re using. Disney certainly demonstrated this perfectly while using a lot of older gear to its complete potential. THAT was worth the trip.

As for the Cirque show–we spent some time meeting some of their technical staff and touring the facility to see how they pull off their completely amazing production. Ever since being blown away by one of the original tent Cirque shows in Madrid many moons ago–they’ve never ceased to amaze at how they continually turn things upside down to pull off something new and crazy. My view on production, shows, and creativity has been skewed ever since. As for their shows, what can you say? Creative, epic, perfectly simple, amazingly complex…always a perfect display of creative genius and production prowess blended into one. While their team functions on all cylinders using every tool and trick available to them, they also use some old and seemingly outdated technology that might cause the uninitiated to scoff; but it not only showcases the superb skill level of their staff, it also perfectly demonstrates to those of us working at churches that if the gear is right for the job—who cares if it’s older technology? If we’re using it to its utmost potential and it fills the need—then it’s perfect.

In both of these examples, it’s never been more clear to me of just how cool the mundane can be and how amazing “old” gear can be if put in the right hands and used in the right way. One of the things I’ve started to look at over the years is how well a production person can do with old gear and the old room—serves as a great primer to the potential of that same person when they get blessed with the new gear and/or the new room.

While reflecting on these great examples of outstanding crews using old gear to pull off amazing shows, I am mindful of the state of our situation here at COTM. Yes, we have some great equipment in some great rooms, but we also have PLENTY of old stuff in old rooms that we employ week in and week out with outstanding results. We’ve made the choice to keep the focus on the technical expertise and skill sets of the production staff and volunteers instead of trying to keep up with every bit of technical gear out there.

By NO means, have we arrived nor is that even in our sights—we still have plenty to learn and much room to improve. Seeing these brilliant Disney and Cirque examples of how the team expertise (and not the gear) made the show, I’m reminded that what truly makes my team great IS the team itself.

http://vimeo.com/31864188

Hey Jenna,

We’ve had this question come up several times lately so I thought I’d give you my thoughts. This is a common issue for worship teams who want to get rid of the choir robes and matching outfits, yet keep a sense of order when it comes to the personal clothing choices of their players and singers. Below are a few guidelines we ask our people to follow:

1. Keep it “G-rated”.
It should be obvious that they refrain from wearing plunging necklines, short skirts, and tight-fitting clothes (this goes for men as well). There’s no good reason to flaunt what God gave ya on the church stage. Sometimes we do have to remind our people from time to time that we want the congregation to appreciate their musical abilities and not their physiques.

2. Reflect the style of the congregation.
There are very few men who wear suits and ties in our church and most of the congregation are in jeans. It’s a casual atmosphere. Someone wearing a suit on our stage is going to be extremely out of place. Also, our pastor tends to dress in a casual style as well (slacks/jeans and a button down shirt). We like our worship team to look as if they could have been pulled up from any row in the auditorium. However, this is not a license to be sloppy….

3. Take a little pride in the way you look.
We have a number of 18-22 year olds on our stage each week, and having a 19-year old son I know that, for the most part, not a lot of forethought goes into appearance. Before you come to church: take a shower, run an iron over your clothes, keep the MuteMath t-shirt in the closet.

4. Dress your age.
18-year olds should look like 18-year olds, 40-year olds should not. I can’t think of many things more sad than someone trying to look young and hip well beyond their ability to do so. Enough said.

A good way to keep these rules enacted is talk about them often. The more we discuss them, the less awkward a situation will become when it arises. I will say that I refrain from talking to the ladies on our team about their appearance if at all possible. I will designate one of my female leaders to address these issues in private one-on-one. I also encourage certain members of our creative staff who are not on stage to critique the appearance of our worship team from time to time.

Earlier this year we dealt with a situation with one of players where his appearance was extremely different from the rest of the people on stage. This was a young man who had a great heart, loved our church, and had become a “go-to” guy at his position. I sat down with him in my office, told him how proud I was of him and how much we all loved having him as part our worship experience each week. I asked, not demanded, if he would be open to changing his look just a bit. I even offered to have one of our younger worship leaders take him shopping (on our dime) and set him up with a hair stylist who goes to our church. He was not offended at all by our conversation. In fact he was thankful that we would invest in him and care about his progress. Sometimes people just need a nudge in the right direction.

Hope this helps. I’m sure there are tons of stories out there dealing with this topic. Would love to hear some of them…

Good news! We finally have our “Christmas Story” music available for purchase! For the past 5 years, our Christmas show has featured our pastor reading the Christmas story set to a beautiful orchestral piece, written and produced by one of our volunteer musicians. Creative Audio Lab has graciously made this available for our Seeds members at a nominal charge. There are 3 packages to choose from which include the Soundtrack, Script, Cueing Video, Piano Notations, and much more. Click the banner above to purchase this for using in your Christmas service!

http://vimeo.com/18160763

http://vimeo.com/16286561

http://vimeo.com/16672975

http://vimeo.com/8559480

• Download the Kiosk Card

• Check It Out Here

• CCLI (we use Copyright, Rehearsal, and Streaming & Podcast licenses)
• Copyright Solver
• Planning Center
• How We Display Our Copyrights in Service (scroll to the end of any service video)
• COTM Worship MP3 Downloads

http://vimeo.com/29109242

Hey everyone - If you’re like us, Christmas is now on your mind! Lately we’ve had a ton of people ask us for charts, audio files, and the like for many of our Christmas songs from Celebrate With Family 2010. Most of what you’re looking for is easy to find. We’ve already posted a ton of files here on Seeds under the Resources tab. But, just to make it a bit easier I’ve added links below to all of our Christmas files. Also, if there’s something you want but hasn’t been posted, don’t be shy. Just ask! We’ll do what we can to help you out. For those of you who are interested in using the Christmas story score, Creative Audio Lab is currently packaging it up for purchase (available in early October), so you can contact them for more info.

• Little Drummer Boy
• Deck the Halls
• The Grinch / Thriller
• Carol of the Bells
• Christmastime

Last year, when the Grinch idea came up for our Christmas event, it was already November. A bit late in the game? Yes, but there was no question about moving forward! My project was to produce the choreography (with help, of course! The electric slide is as far as I go when it comes to dancing), cast the scene with dancers and of course… costuming. At the time, we thought it’d be pretty simple to find an existing Grinch costume that had been used in some brilliant theatre production. We Googled and made phone calls to no avail. All we could find were corn ball Halloween costumes online. The clock was ticking, so we decided to make our own costume from scratch. 

Of all the Christmas projects I’ve gotten to be a part of over the years, this was one of my favorites. So I thought I’d share some of the steps we took and resourses we came across in case any of you are thinking about adding a Grinch to your Christmas event this year and have higher hopes than a lame Halloween costume! After all, it’s only September! You’re in a great place, my friend!

Inspiration
Our first step was to find a couple of inspiration pics. Here’s a look at a couple that we drew from. We loved the realistic look of this long matted hair and the color of it looked like it would pop on a live stage. We opted to go for makeup instead of a masked face so we could capture expression from the Grinch on the big screens. 

Seamstress / Pattern
I contacted a super talented seamstress in our church that I had worked with before. We ended up using this pattern (Simplicity 2853). It’s a Lion Costume so we made a couple of adjustments. We didn’t use a full head piece, but instead made a collar that laid over the top to thicken up the chest. We make our own hands out of a pair of gloves and added room for a belly. I will say that we went back and forth with our seamstress several times to get the costume to fit properly. I was glad we worked with someone who was so close by, super creative, and didn’t mind working hard until we found the right fit.

Fabric
The fabric was a tricky thing. Here’s the site that we ended up purchasing fabric from. We went with a Mongolian Fur (acrylic) in white and did the color ourselves. I called on our friend Andrew Dale who is a bit of a genius when it comes to all things spray paint. Here’s a quick video of us doing the work a couple of nights before the first CWF Show.

Feel free to hit me up with questions if I missed a detail you’re curious about! Happy Grinching everyone!

• Click here to download the SeedsConf 2012 schedule PDF. (Subject to change, of course.)

http://vimeo.com/24246815

http://vimeo.com/28469933

We get a ton of questions about our announcements so I thought I’d upload an entire After Effects project with all the source files. You can see all the keyframes,  masks, and what blend modes we use to get a pseudo chromo key.  Everything is highly compressed or has a watermark on it just for licensing and download purposes. You’ll need to have CS5 to open it up, but if anyone knows how to save a version to CS4, let me know so we can make it available for more people.

• Click here to download the After Effects project. (updated link)
• Click here to watch the announcements in our weekend service.

Click here to download our children’s ministry code of ethics.

Check out our Slip ‘N Slide in action by clicking here!

http://vimeo.com/27543703

• Follow Tim on Twitter
• Pavlovs Puppets
• Silly Puppets
• Thistledown Puppets

Kids on the Move is proud to announce its 2011-2012 internship beginning this fall. If you have a heart for ministering to kids and love the church, we invite you to spend a year working alongside us as we teach kids the Word of God. As a KOTM Intern, you’ll help us create services and events that illustrate the Bible in a way that kids understand. You’ll also learn firsthand what it takes to manage an effective children’s ministry.

The KOTM Internship begins September 6, and the deadline to apply is August 15. Download an application and find out more information by clicking here or emailing Adam Bush.

If you want to read more about our process, click here:
Capturing Audio for Video

To see the final video for this weekend, click here:
Now Faith Is - Part 2

This is a HUGE blog filled with great info. Hope you find it useful! Enjoy.

Here’s a tour of our “game day” process. It’s quite lengthy and hopefully extensive enough for you. If we left anything out let me know!

You asked for it so here it is!

1) Personal life should be consistent with the teachings of I Timothy 3 and home should be filled with peace both with spouse and children.

2) Have two or more years of experience on a local church staff.

• If not in full-time ministry at this time, applicant must be actively supporting their local church with attendance, volunteering and financial resources.

3) Have two or more years of experience in the following areas:

• Biblical counseling for families, marriages, children and relational conflict
• Hospital visitation and funeral oversight

4) Be in full agreement with the Church on the Move “Statement of Faith”.

5) Have excellent administrative skills.

• Must have a proven record of developing and evaluating systems to insure continued success of programs and ministries
• Proficient in managing and training volunteer staff
• Prompt in following through with tasks and the completion of assignments

Applications can be obtained by clicking here. All applicants must send their resume and completed job application to Pastoral Ministries before applicant will be considered.

One of my favorite movies lines goes something like this: “Spontaneity has its time and place.” Yes, we take time to chase a few rabbits during rehearsals, and yes we spend a ton of time looking for a more awesome keyboard sound. And spontaneity in worship is an awesome thing! But we have to make sure as worship leaders/pastors that we know when enough is enough. I want to make sure each week that we budget our rehearsal time in such a way that we get the most out of our team members. It’s frustrating to everyone if we work for 2 hours and get nowhere.

This is why it’s important to come to rehearsals as prepared as possible. If I as a leader don’t have a plan or vision for what the set is going to be then I can’t expect my team to stay engaged as I try to figure it all out. Being prepared is crucially important to the production team as well. I waste their time by not giving them a clear idea as to what’s supposed to happen.

Try a few of these ideas this week to keep your rehearsal focus a little tighter:

Keep the information pipeline running - Send emails and texts to team members throughout the week to keep everyone in the loop. Get your soloists prepared ahead of time. Make sure your players can handle the songs and arrangements you will be attempting.

Consider shortening your music set - I’d rather be able to knock 3 songs out of the park than come close on 5 songs. It’s simply a matter of time and energy.

Limit the number of people who can talk to the sound guy - You want to shave off 45 minutes of rehearsal and keep your tech team from pulling their hair out? Don’t allow every single player and singer to have direct access to your audio engineers. It took me 2 years of retraining my guys to let me or my music director know if they needed a monitor mix change, not yelling it from the stage.

Identify the team members who slow you down - Sounds harsh, but it’s worth doing. I’m not saying you need to replace them, I’m just saying you need to know when they are on the stage. Maybe take some extra time with them BEFORE rehearsal starts and get them comfortable with their monitor mixes, tones, etc.

That’s just a few ideas on keeping a better focus during rehearsals. I’d like to hear from you on how you keep things rolling…

Shooting on green screen has its challenges, so here are five tips that will help you get a cleaner key and more natural backgrounds.

• The most important thing is lighting. If you don’t evenly and brightly light your curtain or wall you’ll be spending some frustrating time in post. Evenly lighting your wall means it should be the same brightness from top to bottom and left to right. You can check this with a waveform monitor and some cameras have them built in.

• Keep your subject as far from the wall as you can to avoid light from the green screen bleeding onto your subject. If you’re not framing up full body shots then avoid standing on green, it will reflect green light into the shadows and cause some problems when keying.

• Use a higher shutter speed to help cut down on motion blur. Motion blur creates soft spots that will mix the green into your subject and it’s tough to key without losing some edge detail. I like to set my shutter at 1/120th. Now check out this tutorial to help you get started on basic color keying.

• Replace the background with something more interesting than a solid color or and less distracting than a stock animation. Keep it subtle. You can find some great textures to use at YouWorkForThem.

• Add a small amount of blur to your backgrounds to help your subject stand out and your backgrounds will look more natural, too. I use “fast blur” in After Effects with the amount set to 3 or 4 on a wide shot. The tighter the shot the more blur you’ll need.

So, how do we find those moments on a consistent basis? Do we just hope they happen as we sing and worship? And do we hope that the congregation all feel the same way at the same time? As I’ve visited with worship leaders from around the country I hear their frustration in trying to make these moments “appear” on a regular basis. Let’s face it - this is what we are hired/expected to do: lead God’s people into His presence. And if we consistently fail to do that, well…..

The old school philosophy says: Let’s just sing our songs and those moments will happen. Don’t over-plan or over-rehearse because we’re not sure where that moment will show up. I believe this is a recipe for constant disappointment. Do we need to be sensitive to the moving of the Holy Spirit at all times during worship? Of course! A sincere and prepared leader can sense when God says, “Slow down. Let’s stay here for a bit.” But I’ve found that we can absolutely know ahead of time where those moments may appear. Here are a few ideas on “Producing the Moment”:

1. When you put your set list together think about where the lyrics of the songs are taking you. What the song has to say will determine our mindset as we worship. Try not to shift gears too abruptly with the lyrical content. Also, think about how hard the congregation will have to work to sing the songs later on in the set. Lots of lyrics could mean lots of reading the words on the screens which is counterproductive.

2. Limit the number of new songs per set. Again, making the crowd work for it decreases the chances of finding the moment.

3. Where are you going musically? Are you shifting gears to much? There’s a way to build a set musically that can set you up for a beautiful moment of worship. Staying in the same key and tempo for more than one song can allow you to build momentum.

4. During rehearsal it’s important to find the soul of the set, not just getting the songs to sound good. This takes extra time and concentration. We rehearse the set as a whole, not just song by song. We make sure the songs flow together and that there won’t be any hiccups, no awkward transitions. We want to take the worshippers on a journey, much like the pastor will do in his message. And during rehearsal we will look for that “moment” where we can slow down and let God speak to us. It’s a lot like trying out a recipe before you serve it to your guests.

5. Don’t try to manufacture the moment on the spot. I see so many worship teams that will sing a song WAY too long trying to make the moment appear. Mostly you just get an overlong set that never really goes anywhere that’s devoid of peaks and valleys.

I realize this is a highly debatable subject. I look forward to your responses…

Stay tuned for any potential Kids on the Move openings in the future as well as some great internship opportunities coming soon!

I spent a large chunk of my life touring, going from city to city across America performing and leading worship. One thing I learned from those days is that I’m best at communicating through song; I’m not nearly as skilled in the art of public speaking. Doesn’t mean I can’t do it, but in a contest, music will win every time. I suspect that it’s the same for the majority of musicians and worship leaders. We let our songs tell our stories. However, there are times when it’s necessary for us to talk between songs or to exhort in the middle of a song. Those moments, no matter how great our voices are, can make the difference between a good and a great worship time. Below are a few points that I spoke to my worship leaders about today (in no particular order of importance):

1. Be Yourself
Don’t be a fake. You have a unique personality so use it! Be the same person on the stage that you are off. Let them see YOU. That’s what will ultimately endear them to you, and when they trust you they will be much more willing to go where you want them to go. Speak in your own words. Try not to mimic what you’ve heard others say. Be prepared for where the song will take you and…

2. Speak from the Heart
Nothing beats life experience. If a song reminds you of something great God has done in your life, use it. Are you leading a song about heaven? Allow yourself to remember loved ones whom you desperately miss but are comforted to know that they are safe in the arms of God. Are you singing about the sacrifice of Christ? Think about where you would be had Jesus not gone to the cross. Allow these emotions to guide you as you speak. I realize this is a little more difficult for younger leaders to employ, seeing as though a 20-year old probably has yet to experience the ups and downs in life, which brings me to…

3. Less Is Best
It’s a serious pet peeve of mine to hear worship leaders ramble on between songs. Say what you have to say and move on to what you do best – leading songs. I’ve painted myself in a corner so many times, or worse yet quenched the spirit in the room, by talking too much in an effort to explain why we are there and why we are singing. If you’ve planned for a scripture reading or an announcement between songs, don’t belabor the point. Remember the old showbiz adage: “Keep them wanting more.” You never want people to feel as though you’re rambling.

4. Are You Glad to be There?
Nothing’s worse than a worship leader just going through their paces. I see this so many times. Your face and body language tell me that you can’t wait for this thing to be over, or that you’re terrified that the whole service could fall apart at any moment. Your demeanor should be one of excitement and expectancy. This is the highlight of your week! This is what you’ve been preparing and rehearsing for! Even if things do go wrong, so what? We’re all here to honor God, not to get a pat on the back, which leads me to my final point…

5. Take the Pressure Off Yourself
I think this point helped my young worship leaders more than anything else. If you mess up or say the wrong thing, it’s ok. It’s gonna happen. The big thing is to keep reminding yourself that you’ll learn and grow from every service you lead. I cannot begin to count how many times I’ve blown the lyrics of a song or stumbled over myself as I led communion. But instead of feeling embarrassed (which is different than critiquing yourself later) I allow myself to realize that the congregation doesn’t expect me to be perfect every time. I blew it, they know I blew it, and it’s ok. We’ll get it right next time. With that kind of freedom I can learn to speak from the heart and not worry about whether I did it perfectly or not.

If you prepare, rehearse, and relax, you should find that those 10-20 seconds of speaking between songs should become easier the more you do it. And more meaningful…

If you love Church on the Move, have good public speaking skills, and some children’s ministry experience with this age group, please fill out our online application with your resume attached. Plus, if you’d like, email us a short video (up to 2 minutes) introducing yourself and telling us why you’d like to be considered for the position.

Tally-ho! The Pre-Teen Pastor hunt has begun. We look forward to hearing from you.

Switching from touring to church production about 6 yrs ago, it’s been interesting to note the wide variation with which churches tackle the HOW. Some churches have a near-perfect scenario with a distinct separation between a creative team determining the WHAT and a production team staying focused on the HOW.

But what to do if this isn’t the case? Perhaps you have only a few people who are tasked with doing it all or maybe you’re a one-person-show? Whatever the case may be, we all still have to accomplish the task at hand, but I’ve noticed that sometimes basic production principles and most importantly, safety, is usually completely disregarded. Reviewing some of the more popular websites and blogs here and there I’ve noticed that most safety and fire-code restrictions & regulations are rarely addressed or mentioned. Although this blog isn’t the proper forum to try and address all of this, it’s imperative that we all exercise due diligence to cover the bases so safety guidelines are followed to the letter. We owe nothing less to the churches and congregations we serve. Over the past 20 years, these guidelines became the mainstay of my career, as non-compliance with a safety guideline or a fire-code here or there could be the kiss of death for a show or event.

This may be the first time this safety topic has come up for some or for others it might seem that it doesn’t really apply to your specific situation–but hang in there with me! Here’s a few examples that may be of interest:

• It’s rare to find a church that doesn’t have some type of soft goods and/or curtains in use as part of their production and stage setup–check this out:

• Most of us employ some type of audio rig–some small, others quite massive–how well is it rigged?

• Stage lighting of some sort is something else almost all of us have in common: large or small, complex or simple–the safety issues are elementary. Look at this:

I could go on and on with example after example of safety and compliance concerns but I’d wager a guess that with very little investigation, most of us could find several areas that need improvement. Becoming adept at the correct way to accomplish the HOW of your WHAT is an art and there are some of us that have spent our career cultivating what we do, however, have hope as it can certainly be done on any level as long as you are willing to cover all the bases.

With this in mind, hear me say: If it can’t be done safely–it shouldn’t be done at all. There is no middle ground. You MUST commit to either acquiring the knowledge personally, consult someone credible AND knowledgeable or adding someone to your team or sphere of influence who possesses the knowledge.

Most of us are investing real dollars into real gear resulting in real safety concerns to factor in–if not taken seriously, structures can be damaged, services can be cancelled, money gets wasted, and people can get seriously hurt. Investing a bit of time to acquire a base of knowledge on the HOW can be remunerated many times over as it will distinctly affect the development of the WHAT you are planning. Over the years, Whit and his creative team have started to really understand some of the basic principles of what is realistic in regards to HOW we can go about making their WHAT a reality and a success. It is a continued learning process amongst all of us but it only serves to make our team stronger and more adept at how we look at our future.

Although it’s easy to get great production ideas and such from this and other websites and blogs–some ideas and suggestions are simply that: an idea or suggestion. They may need to be taken with a grain of salt as everyone has built their production based around their own specific needs and situation. Take heed as what you see on the web may be (and most often times IS) completely different than your situation.

Check out a few resources that might steer you in the right direction:

The “2009 International Fire Code” and the “2009 International Building Code”–I’ve given these guides quite a workout over the last several years especially when it comes to working with architects and building designers–have been told this is pretty much the holy grail for them. Do not be afraid–dig in!

Also the “Backstage Handbook” is a great but simple reference book that provides a bounty of info for basic stagecraft–from building a scenic flat to tying perfect stage knots (please learn how to properly tie a bowline–perhaps the world’s most perfect knot)–it lays it out. This should be a staple for anyone needing solid stagecraft answers or just a reputable reference guide.

A final note that everything we do at COTM is applicable to our situation only. It remains the responsibility of all of us to determine what is safe and right for our particular buildings, environments, and locales. This premise is paramount as you take into account your own specific context, needs, and limitations in the pursuit of your own version of production greatness.

Tell me if you’ve heard these statements before:

“Let’s don’t rehearse too much - we want the Holy Spirit to have room to work.”

“We don’t want this to be a performance…”

“It’s just worship…”

One thing I learned from being on the road for more than 20 years and performing nearly 5000 concerts is that you either “wow” the crowd or you leave them shrugging their shoulders. “Wow” them and they’ll buy a ticket the next time you come through town. Leave them underwhelmed and you can cross that market off your next touring schedule. And if you string together enough poorly performed shows it’s guaranteed that your record sales will drop and your ticket sales will dry up. To stay viable in the music industry you have to learn to “Bring It!” night after night. Yet when it comes to worship there’s a prevailing attitude that “just good enough” is ok for church. It’s no wonder that the church has lagged behind in the arts.

Before I ever approve a singer or musician for our worship team I explain to them that we are going to work hard every week to bring our church an amazing worship experience. We’ll rehearse until we get it right and I’ll expect no less than a maximum effort every time we hit the stage. They’ll be evaluated and pushed toward excellence constantly. And if I ever see that they are mailing it in I’ll sit them down immediately. As you would expect, a lot of people bow out at this point. They are not willing, or more fair, able to give this kind of effort week in and week out.

Seem a little harsh for church? It’s just worship, right? Let me ask you this question: does God deserve “ok”? We’ve changed the culture of our worship department over time (this is NOT an overnight fix) and have begun to stock our teams with people who understand the concept of excellence. Once the attitude was successfully changed we began to attract players and singers who couldn’t wait to be a part of something special. It’s amazing how quality attracts quality.

I strongly encourage my team members each week to “Bring it!” when they hit the stage. Most weekends we do 20-25 minutes of music, which in the big picture of things is a really short amount of time. The challenge is to focus on every word, note and phrase; to work hard to communicate the story and passion of each song; to be exhausted emotionally after each service, knowing that you gave everything you had to lead your church in worship and to honor God with the best you had to give.

In the following weeks I will post blogs on the earlier statements that permeate so many worship teams…

One of the main themes of the book that’s present in the movie, though not to the same extent, was that the answer to “how’d he do that?” is almost always so obvious that our minds would never allow ourselves to consider it as a real possibility for how the illusion was performed. In other words the “magic” behind the magic isn’t really all that magical at all. In fact, almost always, the answer to the riddle is quite simple.

The best example of this in the book was a story of an old Chinese man whose big illusion was making a fish bowl appear out of thin air. The answer to “how’d he do that?” was simple. He keeps the fishbowl between his legs and underneath his gown and using a little sleight of hand he’s able to make it appear like the fishbowl materializes magically out of thin air. The real discipline of the trick is walking like he has a fishbowl between his legs ALL THE TIME, every hour of every day, so that people think that’s how he normally walks. This is the discipline of great magic. He’s selling the illusion even when he’s not performing the illusion. There’s really nothing all that magical about it, it’s purely a discipline.

The thing about it is, that’s really disappointing to us, the audience, because we WANT to believe that something greater is at play here. When we watch Criss Angel or David Blaine on TV, nobody ever suspects that some of the people in the crowd are in on the illusion or that they use actors and trick photography because that would be too easy, that would be disappointing because it’s so obvious, so we rule that out as a possible explanation and begin to attribute abilities to magicians that are superhuman.

Here’s my point. Anytime we see anything great, anything fantastic, anything, dare I say “magical”, we automatically assume that the process that created it must also be just as fantastic, just as great, just as magical, and the plain truth of the matter is, IT’S NOT!

The more opportunities I’ve had to be around people who do great work, the more I have discovered that there’s nothing magical about the magic they make. It’s purely the discipline of pouring over the details again and again looking for ways to improve their craft that makes them so good at what they do. It’s easy to assume that those who write great songs just wake up everyday and write five killer tunes before breakfast because hey, they’re Joel Houston after all, but the truth is for every amazing song they write, there are hundreds more that are utter garbage. Their magic is in their daily discipline of writing, writing, and writing some more.

So if you’ve been feeling less than adequate and wishing that some amazing artist would take you behind the scenes and show you the secrets to the artistic universe, don’t feel bad, we’ve all been there, but realize that while there’s always more to learn, the greatest lessons are learned through the discipline of doing it everyday.

1. How do you implement new songs? How often do you put in new songs? Is there a process to put in new songs?
We don’t have a specific timeframe for new songs being added. We are always looking for new songs that we feel will connect with our crowd and when we find one, we get it in there for a test drive. As far as a process or implementation we just make sure that the new song “feels” like us. Our current set up of players and singers seems to be a little more adept at playing Hillsong and Jesus Culture styles of music. And we’ve come to that conclusion through much trial and error. Bottom line, we don’t mind trying new styles but we try and limit the awkward moments as much as possible.

2. How do you rotate your band and vocals (volunteers) and keep them motivated and happy? How are you developing new leaders? Recruiting?
We are always looking to add new singers and players so we try and rotate as much as possible. Team members will never get better unless they get up there and do it. I think it shows your church members that you are serious about growing when they continually see new faces up there. Having said that, I believe you need to have as many familiar faces up there every week as possible, too. I am always up there, every service, along with my associate worship leader, my band director/keyboard player, and my lead guitarist. This also helps with continuity musically. You are playing with fire if you don’t have your top players covering the essentials every weekend.

I’ve never really concerned myself with keeping my team members “happy”. I continually cast the vision of our department before them: we will be diverse and always growing. If you are connecting with people and growing as a musician you’ll have a place on the team; otherwise we’ll use you only in a pinch. I’m upfront and honest with all of them, constantly evaluating them. And they deserve as much. As a leader I do them a disservice by not helping them get better and letting them know when they are putting it on auto-pilot, or worse, just punching their spiritual service time card. They are the happiest and most fulfilled when they see the church thriving and reaching the lost. And if they can’t rejoice in that, I release them to find a church that will satisfy their need to sing and play more.

As far as developing new leaders, we have started an intern program here called NEXT. I’ve been able to pour into young leaders daily through this. We’ve also started Church on the Move Creative to help us connect and spend more quality time with those in our church who have specific artistic gifts. It’s a great chance for me and my team to continue to pour into our younger players and singers off the stage.

3. How big is your song database? How many new songs in a year?
I’d say our current weekend song database is probably about 20-25 songs. We wear out songs here. When one works well we do it over and over and over. On Wednesday night, however, we’ll open up the vaults and pull out all sorts of oldies.

4. How do you plan a worship set and why do you do what you do?
Our worship sets are planned in our creative meetings which consist of me, our creative director, and our service director. We never randomly pick songs to sing. We try to find the heart of our service and build around that, whether it’s an illustration, a drama, a video, or whatever. Once we’ve established the tone of the entire service then we begin to find songs we feel will move the service in the right direction.

5. How do you lead an intern? What’s your game plan to help a future worship pastor?
Our interns are chosen very carefully. We want to make sure that the ones we bring in are here for the right reasons: to serve the church and to grow into leaders. They lead worship, put together rehearsal schedules, email worship team members, change guitar strings, run errands, and anything else we can find for them to do. But the most important thing they’ll learn is our culture. At the end of the internship they’ll know why we do what we do and how they can take that knowledge and be successful wherever they end up.

As far as creating a future worship pastor, I make sure I spend quality time with these young men and women and show them how to balance becoming unique in their gifting and serving the people of this church. This is the balance that eludes so many young musicians. The year they spend with us hopefully teaches them that although God has something great for them, He has something even greater for the church through them.

Every day I spend time in my office watching worship services from other churches and scanning YouTube for different ways to perform old songs, or just to help spark an idea that may lead to something creative we might attempt musically. I’m continually amazed at the number of great singers and worship teams there are in our country. But mostly I’m seeing beautiful people with pretty voices singing nice words. Those few that stand out to me are those that proclaim the goodness of God through their music. There is a marked difference between the two.

One who proclaims is one who demands the attention of those within earshot. I think of John the Baptist – a voice crying out in the wilderness, preparing the way for Jesus! A mere singer is one who pleases the ear but doesn’t move anyone to action. As I work with my singers I continually remind them that they have a message that needs to be heard, that the people in the room need to pay attention to what God wants to say to them through us. A worship leader should feel a sense of urgency to convey the message that his/her song embodies.

Take time this week to read through the lyrics of the song you are leading and proclaim that message to your congregation. Spend some time listening to Kim Walker-Smith and Chris Quilala of Jesus Culture and pick up on their passion. Watch a video of Kari Jobe and notice how sincere she is when she sings. Pick any one of the Hillsong leaders – they all get it! And dig deep within yourself and find out why God has put you in the position of “worship leader”, then get out there and proclaim the great news of salvation and redemption through Christ!

At many churches, haze seems to be one of the last components of the lighting system to get attention. There may be several possible reasons for this: Leadership doesn’t like it? Not as sexy as moving lights and flashy consoles? Production staff doesn’t understand the importance of it? Whatever the reason, it is often neglected and here’s a few thoughts as to why it should be the first thing we focus on, instead of the last.

Let me start with a bit of Haze 101. Haze is not fog, fog is not haze. The sole purpose of haze is to create particulate in the air that shows off the “fixture to floor” light beams that we all love so much. Adversely, fog is simply a thick cloud of smoke. A cheap hazer tends to act more like a fogger by producing clouds of thick haze. A quality hazer should create an even level of particulate across the entire room, although several factors make this easier said than done.

Haze gives mass to lighting. In a room without haze you only see light where it has a surface to reflect–usually meaning the lens of the fixture and the surface where the fixture is aimed. We know that there is light between the two but it is often barely perceptible–by introducing haze we can create individual beams of light that help give our lighting a perceived mass. This mass is what allows us to use lighting as scenery.

At COTM, I am fortunate to use some very nice fixtures along with a great hazer. If this wasn’t an option, I would choose a slightly lower quality fixture but keep the great hazer. Any fixture will look brighter in good haze, but even the best fixtures will suffer in thin or uneven haze. If you’re working on a budget for a new system and are having trouble fitting in the $1000 to $5000 for a quality hazer, consider spending less on fixtures to make room for it. Every light in your rig depends on the quality of your haze to operate at its full potential.

So what I’m saying is that if you buy the nicest hazer out there all your problems will be solved, right? Wrong. Enter the dreaded HVAC. There should be a proverb that says “He who hazes without regard to air flow will suffer the pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth.” At COTM my haze always seems to look great during rehearsal. The minute the doors open and the HVAC units kick in, everything changes. What was going left goes right, what stayed down now goes up, and what hung in the air for ten minutes now dissipates in only two. EVERYTHING can affect your haze–some common culprits are air conditioning, doors being open/closed, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. Even our most recent stage design has caused a change in onstage airflow patterns–as of this writing I’m having to consider a new location for my hazer to combat the changes.

Is there then no hope for great haze? There absolutely is. Start with the highest quality hazer you can afford, then put in the necessary time to understand your room and how the haze reacts. Try multiple locations. Try it with a fan and without. Try saturating the room before the event and then not using the hazer during. Try everything until you find what works best in your room. You may not be able to make it look perfect every time but with better understanding of your room your chances will increase. Once I have the lighting programmed for an event I find that most of my time from then on is spent monitoring haze levels. Put in the work and your diligence will pay off.

There are lots of great hazers out there and I hesitate to endorse any specific brand although we’ve had great luck using the MDG Atmosphere in the In the main auditorium of COTM.

Getting someone to come to life and have personality on camera can take a lot of coaching and directing. Just telling someone to up their energy is pretty vague advice to give and usually only yields more hand motions and an extra smile.

Something we’ve found that helps bring out personality and life is to ask the talent to speak with more volume, to speak loud enough to clearly reach someone in the back of the studio. When you speak louder you speak with more confidence and it helps personality to show through on camera. It will feel unnatural for most people at first, because it is unnatural, so you’ll have to keep pushing them to be louder through the entire script. Give it a try and see how much more energy comes through on camera and how much more you can connect with your audience.

We are a next generation church, especially where worship is concerned. We believe in getting as many young people involved in planning and pulling off our services as possible. They bring an energy and excitement that’s hard to match. I thank God that we have a steady stream of talented teens that can’t wait to be involved in COTM worship. And the best news is that the older contingent of our church loves it! They understand that we must continue to raise up the next generation of leaders to take our church forward.

But as I sat down with one 65 year old gentlemen, he echoed what I heard over and over in Oasis that day: “Don’t forget about us. We love what you’re doing and thank God for it. But we still love the old songs.” He said he’d been a member of our church since 1988, supported the church financially and prayed daily for our pastor and his team. I thought to myself, “We wouldn’t be here doing what we’re doing without the faithfulness of this man and so many of the people in this room.”

Since that day I’ve visited Oasis at least once a week and have encouraged my team to pay these beautiful people a visit as well. It reminds us that we have a wide range of ages represented here at COTM and that we must honor (not to be confused with “catering to”) those whose faithfulness has paved the way for where we are now. And I have promised them that we will remember that they are in our services; that we will sing a hymn for them every now and then; that we appreciate who they are and what they’ve done.

What are doing to reach every age group in your church in worship? Would love to hear your thoughts…

We had a great time last night at our first ever “Monday Night Music Club”. More than 50 musicians from Church on the Move came together to fellowship and to learn how to become a better singer, player, and musical communicator. I had the privilege of leading the vocal workshop and I wanted to share with you what we discussed.

As a professional vocalist for nearly 25 years I’ve picked up on 3 key elements that I believe can turn a good singer into a great one: breath, pitch, and emotion. Each one of these builds upon the other. Emotion cannot be attained without breath control and pitch, and pitch cannot be attained without breath support. When I hear a singer for the first time, whether it’s on American Idol or in a worship audition, I immediately listen for proper breathing technique. Does he/she fill their lungs to capacity before each phrase? Is the singer pushing the notes out with a steady stream of air, finishing each phrase solidly with plenty of breath to spare? Is it obvious at the end of their song that they have worked hard, making sure they’ve pushed every note toward good pitch and proper emotion?

A mentor of mine many years ago taught me the art of “singing on the breath”. The idea is that we push the notes along a steady column of air, and although the sound of the note may stop, the air dies not. Listen to your favorite singer and hear how they end each phrase with a burst of air.

Learning to breathe properly while singing will help your pitch and ultimately your presentation.

So holding the mantle high of being a production control freak with a mild obsessive/compulsive characteristic here and there–I’ve always appreciated the finer points of how to clearly communicate production information. Prior to an event–I can prattle on about all the cues and details as much as anyone but in just a moment’s time most of my crew will be glazed over wondering about what really goes into a hot dog or something. On the other hand, I COULD choose to completely nail the thing and figure out how best to articulate only the pertinent info through nothing more than a stageplot and a runsheet. I choose the latter.

Over the years I’ve found that the less information I allow myself to give to someone–the more I can get to what is most important… Sometimes too much information just amounts to confusion–less info can lead to clarity–especially regarding logistical production info.

Check out the following runsheet for Easter weekend: (click for larger version)

This runsheet layout is common for us–it has just enough production info for the crew to know what’s happening but not so much that the pastors, musicians, and other stage talent glaze up when they give it a glance. Worst case scenario if we magically didn’t have any rehearsal time, everyone could glean enough info from this runsheet to actually pull off the event to an acceptable degree. Understandably, some areas may require some more work (such as training our scrim crew on the actual mechanics of the scrim system) but it doesn’t need to be reflected in the runsheet.

All of this is fairly self-explanatory but a few things to note regarding the various designations of CG-VIDEO, CG-Sidebar, CG-Title and CG-Slide. All of this comes from the same CG (computer graphics or character generator) computer but it helps designate what the actual display or playback element is: straight video, lower 1/3 title bar, sidebar-style slide or a full-screen slide. A perfect example of how the CG Op and Video Director can stay in sync–all without uttering a word.

Had been creating this type of layout using FileMaker Pro for the last 15 years or so but since discovering Planning Center a few years ago–it’s been a great way to keep the personnel and event information organized while serving our staff and volunteers to a much higher degree. If you haven’t checked them out–do yourself a favor and click here. The cool thing about this product is it allows you to make custom templates for anything you need to print–this layout was made to emulate the look of my original FileMaker Pro files.

Here are the two stageplots we’re using for this weekend: (click for larger versions)

These plots are all created in Illustrator and utilize the same premise as the runsheet–only the most pertinent info is included. Here’s the real beauty–more often than not, there is no added explanation from me to anyone else regarding the stage layout–everything the production crew and musicians need is on here. Admittedly, this layout is fairly intense but that’s mainly due to the complexity of the current stage set.

I could go on and on discussing the finer points of all of this but to accurately put into practice the less is more mantra–I will stand down. Andrew out!

http://vimeo.com/22725711

In preparation for our Seeds Conference last month, I did a lot of writing for one of my workshops: Puppets and Characters. When it comes to characters and story, I’m a huge Jim Henson fan. The Muppets (including Sesame Street) are in a league of their own. Probably one of the most emotionally touching scenes I’ve ever seen was Big Bird singing at Jim’s memorial (watch here).

Michael Davis talks about the purpose of Big Bird in his book Street Gang. The character’s whole objection is to respond to situations as a 6-year old would. This causes a connection between young kids and Big Bird which allows them to learn from Sesame Street. This shows me something: if our characters can connect with our kids, they can teach our kids.

Our series in KOTM have one overall theme; each week we look at that theme in a different way with The Big Answer. We support The Big Answer with an illustration, Bible story, music, and a story line. It’s in the story line, or sketch, that we use our characters to communicate The Big Answer.

A great example of this can be found in Kids on the Move Live! Our Big Answer for the service was FEAR IS NOT THE BOSS OF ME. During the service we met Majunga, who was dealing with the fear of something he saw on television. Over the course of the service he expounded on the depths of his fear, after which, we taught him The Big Answer and ultimately stood with him as he overcame the obstacle. The principle behind why Majunga works so well is the same principle behind Big Bird’s success. Majunga is our 6-year old. He deals with the same temptations that our kids deal with. Granted, his voice and mannerisms are hilarious, but our win with him is his connection with the kids.

The way we use our characters range from puppets, to host and antagonist personalities, to simply reading stories on stage. We just use the tools we have available to create the best possible characters that connect.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. As soon as we get through Easter I’ll write a little more on how we write scripts in KOTM. We’d also love to hear about characters you are using at home. Comment below and let’s get the conversation going!

http://vimeo.com/22363618

• Young Worship Leaders Finding Their Way

Had thought of this contraption and laid it out for the wizard Chico. My primary goal was to create space for every person to have whatever they needed for a rehearsal and/or event all in one place that was clearly labeled and safe from rolling onto the floor or something. Chico did his customary workup on how to make things cooler than I had drawn up (i.e. can you say LED’s, baby?) and here’s how it turned out:

The cabinet is built quite basic–just made it fit in the wall-space we had available–used masonite to make all the partitions and some thin-wall foam to protect the surfaces so all the equipment had some shock protection. Chico used some LED’s and spread them around throughout the compartments–a vendor suggested some that were designed to backlight advertisement signage. This helped tremendously to keep things visible in the low-light conditions backstage.

The compartments were completed with a strip of plastic across the front of each row so you could write on them with a wet or dry erase marker or run a piece of artist’s tape across it (as pictured) so everything is easy to label.

One last thing was creating a small channel in the top and bottom of the front lip so that a set of doors could be put in place and locked if need be. Something we don’t need to use all the time but a good way to secure things whenever the need arises.

In addition to this being a great way for us to put all of this in one place, it’s a convenient place for the band & singers to wire up and get prepped before hitting the stage. With the amount we’ve all invested in our wireless systems, it’s no doubt a priority to keep the gear secure and safe. Hopefully this can serve as a small example of a way to keep some level of control of this vitally important gear while serving the needs of our musicians to a higher degree.

So here you go, it’s all yours. Hope this helps.

Is this the best of the best? Not necessarily…but there is a lot of incredible equipment here that we are privileged to use; But all of it, the cool and the not-so-cool, serves the needs of COTM nicely.

Being a total nerd inside despite my amazingly rugged exterior…..I’ve always enjoyed looking over the gear lists of different bands, venue, churches, etc. as it can sometimes articulate the flavor of what’s going on. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to find the right piece of gear to help our staff do what we do best–check it out. Click here to download.

So many of you have inquired about our gear lately that we thought we’d post pictures and lists for you to let you know how we roll. We’ve found that owning all our own stuff helps with quality control. That assures us that all our stuff is in working order before we hit rehearsals and it’s a real time saver. Hit us back with any questions – we love gear talk!

• Guitar gear
• Keyboard gear
• Reason patches

Here is the down-low on how we achieved the scrim-panel move for the opening nights of our Seeds Conference. We kept it mostly low-tech (emphasis on mostly…) with technology we already knew how to operate and sort out. The impetus for keeping things simple was pretty much culled from self-preservation as we knew the one time we didn’t really desire major technological issues was the opening of our first Seeds session. Go figure.

These 6 sharkstooth scrim panels were custom fabricated out of some larger pieces we had used a few years ago–a local company was able to make this happen for us but scrim material is available in almost any kind of custom size at Rose Brand.

The object of this element was to project 6 different images on 6 different scrim panels that could raise/lower as needed. Due to the heavily populated stage area overhead–working out the mechanics of the manual raising and lowering process proved to be the biggest challenge. Although not completely groundbreaking, here’s a brief breakdown on how we made it work out for our needs.

To give us a starting point for both the raise/lower mechanism and a place to tie off the actual scrim panels we mounted (6) horizontal runs of uni-strut on the ceiling hanging exactly where we wanted them to hang. Using pulleys in some strategic positions, we used nylon parachute cord that ran from our six “custom” (ahem–homemade) winches mounted on the catwalk, up to the ceiling, over to each scrim area, and then down to the scrim itself. Here’s a few photos to illustrate:

As for these winches, it’s essentially a wooden box with a reel in the middle that would wind up the parachute cord without too much or too little friction. Didn’t want it to be a huge struggle to wind up while raising and didn’t want it to have the tendency to free-wheel when lowering. Powdered graphite came to the rescue to keep the reel lubricated within the wooden box and between the nylon cord and the pulleys, the friction point was fairly easy for our stage crew to deal with. You can see that we installed a stop of sorts so when the scrim was set to the desired height, you could pull out the metal peg for the handle to rest against with no continued rotation. This made it an easy maneuver to operate: the crew could move the scrim up or down, pop the stop into place and walk away secure that everything was locked down and stable.

The scrim itself was equipped with grommets spaced 1’ apart all across the top edge and down each side. The grommets at the top were used to tie each panel to the uni-strut and all the side grommets were affixed with a snap-link. The snap-link allowed us to run that continuous piece of nylon from the winch upstairs all the way down through the snap-links where it was tied off. At the bottom, we put a piece of 1” conduit through a sewn pole pocket in the bottom of each panel–this gave us a little bit of rigidity without adding too much weight.

For projecting–we used six Barco R-12 projectors–we’ve used these quite a few times and the 12,000 lumens have always delivered a decent punch while still being pretty easy to setup and operate–finding six that had similar hours on the bulbs was a bit of a challenge but projecting onto scrim vs. screens gave a little bit of latitude in how they were all matched. We flew these on three different trusses positioned around the room that were all about 60’ out from the scrims–based on the actual scrim, this was +/- about 5’. Our video engineer spent some time dialing in the edge-blending on board each projector to soften the projected hard edge of the image area–this created a nice drop-off to the edge of all the projected areas.

Getting the content to the projectors was a bit more complex as we had to send six different video feeds with different content on each but still remaining in sync with each other–having used Catalyst media servers for quite some time it was a natural choice.

With the Catalyst, each server has only one physical output or two if you don’t mind sacrificing your reference monitor. In order to keep the reference monitor intact, we used a couple of Matrox TripleHead-2-Go’s. This device can take one video input and create three video outputs–these are not actually three separate signals but separate sections of one display that is three times the normal width. For example, if the input signal has a resolution of 1024x768 then the output signal will be 3072x768; Output 1 would use horizontal pixels 1 thru 1024, output 2 would use 1025 thru 2048 and output 3 would use 2049 thru 3072. With the Catalyst’s ability to create internal video “mixes” (windows in the program that act as separate video outs), and the TripleHead units, we were able to meet our playback needs with only two media servers.

A bit of clarification on the Catalyst–a Catalyst media server is a Mac Pro computer utilizing Catalyst software–although this software is complex, the computer setup is still relatively basic. The signal path for each media server (routed to three projectors each) is as follows:

• Output 1 was a simple DVI reference monitor and output 2 was our signal to the projectors–this output first hit a TripleHead where it became three VGA outputs, then each VGA went to its own analog video DA (1 VGA in x 2 VGA out). The TripleHeads must see an EDID signal to function properly so output 1 on each DA went to a VGA monitor and the DA output 2 was converted from VGA to 5-wire RGBHV that was sent on to the projectors.

It made sense to set the Catalyst rigs up near the GrandMA in lighting world since that was what would be controlling them and design-wise it kept everything in the same sandbox. This did add a bit of complexity to the lighting control area–check out these pics:

When it was all said and done–we had put in enough pre-production effort to wrangle in most of the obvious problems that reared their head–the technology was kind to us and our crew did a magnificent job of dealing with the winches. The result was exactly what Whit and the creative team had in mind.

For the full version of seeing the scrims in action, check out Night 1 and Night 2 general sessions from the conference.

We audition people every week who desire to be a part of our worship teams, many of them with pretty decent chops. Once we’ve established that they have the ability to play or sing I begin looking for a few intangibles:

JOY
Does he/she exude the quality of a worshipper? Do I enjoy being around them? If they are lifeless off the stage, they’ll practically be a corpse on it. Everyone on the worship team should be a model of joy and enthusiasm, ready to shine their light and encourage those in the congregation to join in! Contagious is a word that comes to mind…

COMMITMENT
Will they go the extra mile to show up to rehearsals prepared and with an attitude of working toward excellence? Do they understand that leading people in worship is serious business? I’ve worked with plenty of singers and players who do the least amount of work possible, look at their watches and ask, “When will we be done?” They’re not on our team anymore. Granted, it’s on me as the worship leader to make sure rehearsals run as efficiently as possible, but at some point we need to dig deep and spend the time to make the set amazing. Our church deserves it, and so does God. I need people on my team I can count on to put forth a great effort each and every week.

PASSION
I’m not looking for a bunch of Billy Grahams, but those who grace the stage need to have an obvious passion for God. They need to have a grasp on just how important this all is. Singers and players who love what they do and love the God who gave them the ability to do it are worth searching out. These are the ones who worship during rehearsal when no one is looking. These are the people you can build around because they get it. And best of all, they will attract like-minded musicians – passion breeds passion.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been moved emotionally by one person onstage with a guitar, genuinely pouring their heart out for God and for their church. I also can’t count how many times I’ve been disappointed to see 10 musicians onstage going through the motions, just hoping to end the song at the same time. Is this a quality vs. quantity thought? In a sense. The point I’m trying to make is this – be careful who you put up there. What you model onstage will cause you to attract more of the same. Great players and singers who have a great time doing what they do will send the signal out to others who are wired up the in same way. The inverse is also true. It’s worth the effort to find those who have the gift of music and a passion for serving. These are the people who will truly lead your church in worship.

…A Digiorno Pizza.

Feels out of place doesn’t it? Here’s the deal, there’s nothing wrong with a Digiorno Pizza but in the wrong setting it doesn’t make sense. Imagine the same food in a different setting, like say, your home. What was, in one setting, a disappointment is now a tasty meal in another.

This happens in our churches all the time. We serve Digiorno Pizza like it’s steak and lobster and people respond with comments like “it feels like a performance.” What they’re really saying is, this just doesn’t feel right. Something is amiss.

Here’s my two cents.

Some people on our stages are Digiorno people and some people are steak and lobster people. That’s reality. The trick then, is presenting them in the appropriate way. If you don’t have a GREAT band than by all means, don’t try to light them like U2. If you don’t have great lights, then stop flashing them through every color possible.

The point is, when we overdo our presentation we come off as, at best, overambitious, and at worst, arrogant.

I realize that for so many of us, all we’ve got to work with is Digiorno people. I get that. But here’s my advice: Embrace it and be real about it because when we play and create within our strengths AND weaknesses we relate to people in a more genuine way.

First, make sure the lyrics you are asking your congregation to sing are actually Biblical! So many times we hear a song and it moves us emotionally and we can’t wait to rehearse it and introduce it to our church, but a deeper look may reveal that what the song is actually saying does not line up with God’s Word. I’ve heard tons of songs through the years that are simply foolish in their lyrical content. We have a serious responsibility to think through what lyrics we sing. Before you add that new worship song to your repertoire make sure you can stand behind what it has say. Better yet, take a look at your existing songs and double check the lyrics. Chances are pretty good you’ll find something you have missed all this time.

Secondly, does the spirit of the song match the spirit of your pastor and your church? Many worship songs dwell on the idea that “life is hard, but one day it’ll all be over and we’ll be in heaven!” These songs were popular in the early 1900’s and fill the hymnbooks. Conversely there is a genre that proclaims an idea of “everything is awesome all the time!” This was the theme of a large number of early worship songs written in the ‘80s & ‘90s. At COTM we tend to be drawn to lyrics that focus on redemption and the greatness of our God. And these are the types of songs that resonate best with our congregation. Take time this week to find songs with lyrics that best fit your church’s personality.

Finally, make sure the lyrics are right! Nothing is more frustrating than singing one thing and seeing another on the screen. Nothing throws me off balance more than seeing wrong lyrics in front of me. I can imagine it’s the same for the people in the room trying to worship. Take time each week to make sure that you import the correct lyrics to the system that projects them onto your main screens and onto your worship team’s lyric monitor. I know this sounds extremely basic, but it’s often the most overlooked detail of a worship service. It’s something we’ve been diligent about lately, and it’s made a huge difference in the comfort level of our leaders.

We have found over and over again that attention to lyrical details affords us a better opportunity to create a more worshipful environment. I encourage you to spend a little extra time this week to make sure your lyrics are spot on.

ATTENTION: Although some level of nerd-speak is to follow, there are applicable thoughts to those outside the world of tech. I promise to be gentle.

So, in part one of this topic, I gave some info on where the live mixes at COTM seem to live volume-wise–allow me to go ahead and blow your mind just a bit. Track with me… If you have been privy to a mix in our main auditorium, you may swear that there is NO WAY it’s only 97-ish dB–it’s a big mix that is very much in your face but at the same time, it’s quite smooth and easy on the palette (sounds like a nice beverage actually). There’s nothing screeching out at you trying to drill a hole in your forehead like a lightning bolt–but herein lies the secret…

Many moons ago, I started to spec touring rigs that were considerably larger than what I could’ve gotten away with. This was done mainly to make sure we were covered from an audio perspective for any venue that may show up on an itinerary–many shows had to have gear prepped and out the door before the end of the tour had even been booked. But here’s what I began to notice–the times that I used way more audio gear than was really necessary for the venue du jour, the better it sounded. I had considerably more presence and tone in the mix while able to significantly decrease the mid and high range information… The result was a much bigger-sounding mix with smoother high end that wasn’t nearly as invasive–it made it much easier to listen to and much more friendly on the dB side. Since I was using more low-end presence, it was injecting more energy and coupling into the actual building which when translated to a human body, creates the illusion or sensation of increased volume.

So over the years I’ve worked a bit of this into conventional audio rigs and mixes wherever applicable. This is what we’ve done at COTM–the low-end isn’t just killing you from a volume perspective, but the presence that it builds is something you can feel–thick enough to cut with a knife. Vocals sit better in the mix, music feels better and our dB meter stays quite happy since we’re making better use of the 95-100 db that comprises our mix product. Yes, this is the same 95-100 dB that others may use that at times can feel completely loud and overwhelming. This is accurately demonstrated by the following SMAART screen grab of a previous worship service:

If you’re not completely familiar with seeing a frequency analysis–it’s pretty easy at first glance. The graph represents the frequencies that comprise normally “hear-able” (yes, my own word) audio. From 18Hz on the far left to 18,000Hz on the far right–or extreme low-end on the far left sliding all the way up to extreme high end on the right. Using this explanation you can see that the low end of the spectrum is greatly exaggerated in the mix while the high end is diminished. This is exactly what the feel is like in the room and is indicative to the type of mix I’ve been describing–seeing it visually sometimes helps make sense of it…

Although this type of thick mix resonates nicely in our space and really seems to define our musical sound–it’s really obvious when you listen to the DPA headset we use on Pastor George. He has a massive voice anyway but I really wanted our audio system to accurately reflect his unique vocal characteristics after being amplified. This style of mixing completely lends itself to an increased presence in a vocal which translates to a very commanding and authoritative sound. Quite fitting for an old west gospel gun-fighter–I mean, for our Pastor.

As I noted in the previous blog–I am still on an endless quest to find new and better ways to pursue a great mix but approaching my mixes from this vantage point seems to provide a good foundation to our current musical and audio presentation.

I love mixing audio–love listening to a good mix–also love hearing a record created by people who play at the top of their game. For obvious reasons, my favorite recordings are usually live albums as they demonstrate a snapshot of something that happened during a specific moment in time. There is an adrenaline rush when you hear a mix that takes you to a different place–imagine the rush of being at the audio helm of such a moment…

All things considered, the punch-list that determines a good mix is purely subjective to each listener which can make the audio job at a church somewhat of a challenge. What sounds awesome and pure and amazing to one can sound equally horrific, loud and terrible to another with varying degrees of success or failure to others. But such is the job…

The mix at COTM has changed dramatically over the years–currently, we operate with a concert-style format utilizing a full complement of arena-sized line array boxes giving us the ability to have a massively dynamic audio mix. But where much is given, much is required–it’s pretty simple to crank it up and blow out a mix but it’s another thing altogether to tame the beast and create a rich and smooth mix that accentuates the awesomeness from the stage–listed below are a couple of the tools I’ve used to help me analyze our audio product from week to week…

My main tool to make sure things are in check is by using some software from Rational Acoustics, Smaart V.7. This is used for real-time sound system measurement and analysis and has become one of the most valuable tools I have to make sure the room and the audio system is performing to the desired result. The screen shot below shows a fairly typical measurement taken during the music set this past weekend. The graph represents a cross-section of the audio frequency spectrum from 20Hz to 18,000Hz. The GREEN line is what is “heard” by a tuned and fairly flat reference microphone (Earthworks M50). The BLUE line is the output of the console and the RED line is an average between the two.

In a perfect world, the GREEN reference mic and the BLUE board reference would match up perfectly but given the dynamic and constantly changing variables of a live room (temperature variance, humidity changes due to people, the reference mic hearing more clapping and crowd response), you tend to see a few variances where the BLUE and GREEN don’t match up. Overall, if something doesn’t feel quite right, I will refer to this setup to give me a quick visual analysis of what the room is doing (i.e.: how it’s reacting to what I’m putting into it). With over 59 power amps and 125,000 watts, being able to react quickly to any observed change in the audio rig can help us greatly in not only adjusting a mix on the fly but avoiding massive technical or equipment problems.

As for maintaining a certain decibel level in the room–I don’t necessarily mix to a meter so I don’t get too bent out of shape over crossing the sacred line of a certain dB but we have found a happy spot that seems to keep everyone cool–plenty of uumph for the ones who want to rock but not enough to make others run for the lobby. We tend to hover in the area between 95-100 dBA for most of the music while the speaking portions tends to be closer to 68-74 dBA. The shot below is another example of Smaart–note the dB meter in the top right-hand corner. I’ve got this set to a two-minute A-weighted average so I’ve always got a good contextual reference for where the mix has been…

This next shot is of from a secondary program that logs the dB reference from our Galaxy Audio CM-150 SPL meter. This is a great tool since it has software that records a log that we keep filed away in case there is ever a need to reference it. It’s a great way to keep a handle on the dB’s during a mix and to look at the dB activity and correlation of the mix as a whole.

Large or small venue–these same tools can really come in handy. Although nothing takes over for a golden set of ears, tapping into products like these can really lend a hand in giving an engineer another resource to help keep a mix in line.

After spending 20 years as a professional Audio Engineer listening to, mixing, and analyzing different musical content, my hope is that I never violate the trust to ably navigate the positive and negative characteristics of sound. You know, coupling the boring things like humidity, air pressure, acoustics, and technical variance with the much cooler stuff like epic musical moments and amazing musicianship. Figuring out how to meld the audio with the other production and creative elements is what continues to give me the impetus to pursue a great mix.

Stay tuned for part 2 on how I make the most of the dB’s I have at my disposal–It may just change your approach on the subject…

I think the reason we get stuck in the development phase is because we’re waiting for everything to be just perfect, for all the pieces to fall into place before we’re willing to launch.

Here’s the bad news. It’s easy to hide from making any real changes and launching any new initiatives in the planning stage. It’s easy to “act” like things are changing and growing when they’re really not because we’re always in a perpetual state of planning.

I love what Leon Fontaine of Springs Church says: Ready. Shoot. Aim.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t plan, but there comes a point as a leader where you just have to venture out into the unknown and figure it out as you go.

For years at COTM we knew we needed to get younger on our stage. It was no disrespect to the people who had served on our worship team over the years, but we knew if we were ever going to connect with a younger crowd we were going to have to make changes and give younger people opportunities to serve and grow.

The trouble was that because the people we needed to make the change weren’t just waiting in the wings, we hesitated in making it. Finally, after years of realizing that it was never going to be convenient or easy to change, we decided we just had to go for it and two years later, we have loads of young people serving on our stages.

I’m convinced that many times the right people and the right answers that so many of us are looking for are hidden from us until we are willing to take a step of faith and begin something.

You’ll never be able to plan for everything so you might as well just get ready, shoot, and aim.

Years ago I ran across these bizarre-looking chord charts that most studio musicians in Nashville were using. They called it the Nashville Number System. What looked so foreign to me then has become my favorite way of reading music now. Most worship music consists of five basic chords: 1, 4, 5, 6 minor, and occasionally 2 minor (especially in Hillsong music). So, for instance, if you’re playing a song in the key of C, your numbers would look like this:

C = 1
D = 2
D minor = 2m
E = 3
F = 4
G = 5
A = 6
A minor = 6m
B = 7

If I want to move the song to C# then all I have to do is capo up one fret and play the exact same chord positions. Easy as that. Purists scoff at playing this way (believe me – I’ve had my share of down-lookers), but for churches this is an easy way to help everyone speak the same language when it comes to chart reading.

For example, the chorus to “How Great is Our God” in the key of A goes from this (the 4 little lines below the chord mean “4 beats per bar”):

To this:

It makes calling out changes in the middle of a worship set easier as well. Instead of shouting out chord names, I can just hold up the appropriate number of fingers to let everyone know on what chord we will end or where we are heading. Regardless of the key the numbers remain the same, and this is just one more little thing that makes our worship sets fly just a bit smoother.

Here’s what I mean by that.

So often the best ideas come when you’re not “trying” to be creative. You might be watching TV or taking a shower or listening to a favorite song and inspiration will strike, the question is, are you even aware that it’s striking and if so, how are you capturing that inspiration?

Here’s what that looks like for me.

First off, I try to filter everything I see, hear, and experience through the filter of “is this useful?” When I hear a song or take in a movie or go to a concert I’m constantly asking myself, is this useful? I study songs, environments, designs, films, all of it constantly looking for things I can apply to our services and events. Remember, so much of the creative process is simply learning to consistently ask the question “what if?”

Secondly, if inspiration was to strike, are you ready for it? Do you have a method or a format for capturing those ideas?

It seems simple, but it’s huge because if we want God to entrust us with great ideas we have to be ready to capture them when he gives them to us. Personally, I use an iPad and a Moleskine, for keeping track of all the ideas that rattle around in my head. But whatever you use, don’t forget that you’re responsible for what God has placed in our hands so carry a “capture” device wherever you go because you never know when creativity may strike.

http://vimeo.com/20039722

Think about it. Every bad church video you’ve ever seen started as a good idea to someone. Somebody, somewhere thought that singing that song or making that video was a good idea. The problem is that what often sounds like a good idea in a brainstorming meeting turns out to be a bad idea in execution, at which point it’s too late to make changes.

I’ve learned over the years to let even my best ideas sit for a while, because often when I allow myself time to review my ideas over and over again, I find glaring problems with my initial concept that must be adjusted to avoid a mediocre result.

Here’s how it works for us. When we arrive at what we think is a solid concept, unless it’s something really basic or something we’ve done before, we wait, we let it sit overnight at a bare minimum. On a really big project, like Easter or Christmas, we’ll have several (and by several I mean tons) of meetings over a period of days reviewing and evaluating the concept in microscopic detail, like it was the first time any of us have ever heard it.

Here’s why: the amount of time you spend on the details will have a great impact on the success or failure of your project. Mies Van Der Rohe, a German architect, famously said “God is in the details” and he was right. Your mind just isn’t equipped to see all the nuances of a creative project all at once, so you have to force yourself to focus on them to find success consistently.

So, in summation, if you’re regularly going with your first “good” idea, you’re either God or you’re not doing very good work. It just isn’t that easy for anyone.

You heard recently from one of our interns, DyAna Bush, about what she’s learned since she joined our team. I recently had a conversation with our other music intern, 19-year old Jordan Moore, about the things he’s learned since becoming a NEXT intern. Although he didn’t have as many specific points of reflection as DyAna, he did share something I felt was particularly interesting. He said that just by being here he’s become much more aware of what it means to be excellent in the area of ministry. Jordan leads worship now and then, but most of his time is relegated to changing guitar strings, hauling gear from one room to another, cleaning the dishes in the kitchen, driving to the music store, and anything else we can think for him to do. But even in the menial tasks he’s acquired a spirit of excellence. Just by being around our creative team day in and day out he’s picked up on the way we do things.

The Bible is clear that when we hang out with fools, we become like them. However, when we spend time with the wise we become wise. It’s a bit like osmosis – a gradual transference of substance from one place to another. The question is: Who is transferring wisdom, creativity, excellence, ideas, etc. into your life? As worship/creative leaders we must continue to surround ourselves with people who challenge our ideas, sharpen our instincts and dare us to move into new and different arenas.

In 20+ years in the music industry and in the ministry I’ve known too many musicians and worship pastors who believe that they can do all this on their own. Their ideas are the best ones, their way of doing things is paramount to the way anybody else does it. Shall we say that walking alone produces isolationism? I think we can. Isolationism then produces an unchecked ego. Ego produces failure. “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” says James 4:6.

A few suggestions for worship leaders:

• Build a diverse team. Allow them to challenge you (respectfully, of course). Welcome their input and allow their ideas to trump yours at times.

• Find “next generation” musicians to pour your wisdom into. You’ll be surprised how much they’ll end up pouring into you creatively.

• Step outside your comfort zone. Listen to different types of music and judge it for its creative spark, not on your personal taste. Do the same with movies, performance art, etc. Expand your horizons!

• Give it time. Osmosis is a gradual process – it does not happen overnight. Remember, we “walk with the wise”, we don’t sprint.

It’s difficult to become excellent or expand your creativity just by reading a blog post. You have to surround yourself with excellence and creativity day in and day out. I’m proud of Jordan and what he’s accomplished since he’s been an intern. I’ve benefited as well. He’s reminded me of what it is to be wide-eyed and excited, ready to do something big for God. I’m thankful every day to work with people who make me better, who allow me to do what I’m created to do on a high level. Do the same for yourself. Osmosis-ize your life!

I learned a long time ago that creating a great sound begins at the instrument, not at the mixing desk. So, if I wanted to improve the sound of my song I must begin with improving the individual sounds at the instrument.

In my experience most people approach it from the opposite end. They assume that they sound great and that the mix engineer is responsible for the vast majority of their sonic problems. To be clear, a great mix engineer is worth his/her weight in gold, but I firmly believe we could improve the sound of our worship experiences greatly just by diving into the sounds at the source.

To quote Butthead: “You can’t polish a turd, Beavis.”

I’m not trying to be crass, but I think that quote perfectly sums it up. Does your guitar player really know what a good guitar tone should sound like? Do you? How about the drums? How often are the heads changed? How often are the drums tuned? What sort of keyboard sounds are you using? Whatever random piano sound happens to be on the Korg the church owns? This stuff doesn’t have to be expensive, but I can promise you good sounds don’t happen by accident and if the sound is the song then those things matter.

If you’d like to see my interview with Sean you can check it out here.

Over the past five months I’ve been one of the first NEXT interns for COTM’s Performing Arts Department. Recently I was asked, “what have you learned so far?” Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about in response to that question.

It’s All In The Details
Creating an engaging worship experience for our church family is more than picking a few pretty songs, it’s about collaborating as a team to choose the right songs, the right worship leaders, the right transitions, and so forth. Each set is scrutinized to the N-th degree in an effort to allow our congregation to connect with our Heavenly Father. I’m constantly amazed at how the smallest detail can greatly make or break a worship set.

Last weekend’s Kid’s on the Move worship service is a great example. Kenneth Weston and I led the worship set in KOTM: Mighty to Save & We Exalt Thee. We played both songs in A - which worked great for the first tune. The kids were singing loudly and at the top of their range. It was a beautiful moment as 400 kids sang “OUR GOD CONQUERED THE GRAVE.” We Exalt Thee was a little different. The song is a favorite in our elementary kids’ services, so we were surprised when the kids just didn’t sing as confidently as usual. After a quick meeting with our team we realized that A was the wrong key. To sing along, the kids had to sing low for this song because the octave up - where they usually sing - was too high. In effect, they were singing, we just couldn’t hear them very well. It was an overlooked detail that affected the service.

Preparation Is Key
Our department stays busy. In a week, our bands can play up to 15 sets. This doesn’t include big events (Seeds Conference, Easter, CWF). When we plan a service on a Tuesday, the real work often begins right after the meetings break. Each musician and singer begins preparing on their own. Andy says, “Practice happens at home. Rehearsal is what we do when we come together.” If we aren’t individually prepared, it effects everyone!

In addition, confidence and excellence follows a significant amount of preparation. As I’ve taken on the habit of preparation, I’ve found God faithful to take my offering of preparation and use it for His success. I’ve heard many of our leaders here say that it’s preparation and structure that allows the Holy Spirit to move in our worship services, not the other way around. This truth is apparent, and I’m excited to see what more God will do with COTM as we continue to humble ourselves in preparation and see to the details.

Creativity Is A Group Effort
This is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned - there are no creative geniuses. There’s not one guy coming up with all the ideas. There’s not one person who can take credit for every great idea. It’s a team effort. Instead of chasing ideas, we chase people. We gather the right people together to talk out every idea. That’s where the real genius takes place.

I hope this helps anyone considering the NEXT internship. I’ve got more than 7 months left, so I’m sure I’ll have even more to write in the future.

We have a motto here in our creative department: “It’s not about getting it done, it’s about getting it right.” We repeat this to ourselves and to our teams before every rehearsal and before every worship set. But why is it important to be done at all? Silly question, I know. From time to time even the most skilled and well-prepared teams fail to see beyond the X’s and O’s. We must remember why we do what we do. Every time we open the doors of our church the seats are filled with hurting, stressed, and rejected people, men and women who desperately need to experience something real and positive.

I know I covered this briefly in my post “Sing, Play, Love” but I feel it’s worth expounding upon. Consider adding these elements to your pre-worship set routine:

Create some space.
If you hit the stage at 9:00am, start eliminating the distractions around 8:30. Avoid heavy or trivial conversations that will most likely invade your head space at the most critical times of worship. Ask God to calm your thoughts as you begin to focus on the task at hand. Encourage your band and singers to do the same.

Humble yourself.
Remember: “God is opposed to the proud, but shows favor to the humble.” We do not worship so that we can be glorified. If you want to be applauded, go be an artist. If you want to see lives changed and hearts turned to the Father, go out in humility. Prepare yourself to be a servant to the preacher of the Word and to the hearers of that Word.

We are all in this together.
I encourage all members of my team to lead out in prayer before we go on stage, letting them know that they have something to say. I also encourage them to share their needs so that we can pray for them. This is a powerful reminder of the wounded humanity that is in the auditorium. Whatever they are going through is a microcosm of what is happening in lives beyond the stage.

Shine the Light!
You’ve taken the time to get focused, humbled, and plugged in to the needs of your crowd, now remind your team why you are here: A great light has dawned! Sin and death have been defeated by the Hope of the world. Jesus! Go and proclaim it!

When I get the opportunity to meet production teams from other churches most of the questions revolve around how our design process is structured and what specific visual elements I’m responsible for. I’ve received questions like, “Who decides what goes on the onstage LEDs?”, “Who designs the scenic layout?”, and even this one: “Does Whit sit with you and write all the lighting cues?”

My job title is lighting designer but “design coordinator” might be more accurate. I don’t solely develop our scenic designs from conception to completion but rather build onto an agreed upon concept. These first concepts usually involve three people: Andrew, Whit, and myself. Occasionally we’ll include other members of Whit’s creative staff, most commonly Gary to discuss LED usage, but at this point in the process too much input can actually be a hindrance. These first meetings have been as simple as just a verbal discussion and as complex as a very detailed whiteboard layout with scaled cardboard cutouts and anywhere in between.

My job really begins after this initial concept is decided. The first thing I do is get the concept laid out on paper through a CAD program called Vectorworks (I’m horrible at drawing which gives Whit much to make fun of–I think it’s giving me a complex). We’ve had a few ideas completely fall apart at this point as I might find an overlooked design issue or something but most commonly it’s for a more practical reason. This is a good time to mention that just because it sounds good in a meeting and looks good on a whiteboard doesn’t mean it’s really going to work. Similar to the old architect saying, “You can use an eraser at the drafting table or a sledgehammer at the job site.” The two most common problems at this point are usually budget and equipment availability–believe it or not we don’t just get to pick what LED wall or lighting fixture we want. In actuality, most of these design decisions are based on what our trusted vendors have available and what they can cut us a good deal on. Getting these issues sorted out is an area where my production manager Andrew plays a major role.

Ok, so the concept is good, the design is feasible and the gear is available–now what? This time it’s a group discussion with myself and Andrew along with Whit and his creative staff. Even though I’ve usually got some drawings together by this point–my plan is for this meeting to be a complete waste of time. What’s that!? Hear me out–If the first meeting was productive; if I asked the right questions; if I was thorough in getting the info from Whit; if Andrew and I spent the next several weeks looking at the design from every angle–then there should be nothing come up that hasn’t been thought of. The truth is that it goes both ways–some meetings have brought up additional ideas that have totally made the design and other times we go full circle to end up at the same place we started. Either way we get there, it’s a win.

Up to this point the focus has been on the physical look of the stage–LED panels, curtains, scenic objects, etc. But at 4-6 weeks out I really begin to focus on the lighting aspects–this is really the only area of the design that’s not a collaborative effort. The decisions I make on fixture types and layout are largely based upon my knowledge of what type of look and feel Whit is expecting with the event.

It’s now 2-3 weeks out from our set change and two main things are happening: The first is that Gary, our graphic designer, is coming up with concepts for what will be on the LEDs. When we first began using LED onstage, Andrew and I were more involved in this process–In fact I believe for the first couple designs there was no outside involvement at all. This didn’t work out so well because if I’m busy finding videos for use on the LED wall, who’s designing the lighting? Since then, Gary has come on board and begun to develop some amazing custom content but is still open to input from us when needed. Developing video for use as a scenic element is different than developing it for use on a main screen–It’s vital to have a good relationship between the guys making the videos in an office somewhere and the guys implementing them into the event.

It seems appropriate here to explain why as the lighting designer I’m even talking about video at all. Once video breaks the plane of the stage and becomes a scenic element it needs to be controlled by the same person controlling all the other light emitting objects in the room. This allows it to be timed properly with all the other cues and integrated seamlessly with the overall look. Otherwise you end up with all these different elements lacking synergy and cohesiveness. Since my lighting console controls the Catalyst media server we use for the onstage media playback, I have to stay heavily involved…

The second thing that’s happening 2-3 weeks out is that I’m working to finish the CAD plots. Being able to convey my vision in an easy to understand manner is vital to a quick and relatively painless set change. No matter how small your operation is–PUT IT ON PAPER–Even if it’s done with notebook paper and a pencil. It let’s work happen without you having to be directly involved. It’s an art to provide just the right amount of information so things will run smoothly without providing so much that you cause confusion.

Click on the image to download the PDF.

Click on the image to download the PDF.

Ok, skip ahead to production week. The plots are printed, the gear is here, and it’s “go” time. I stay involved enough in the set change to make sure it goes smoothly but detached enough to not get tunnel vision on one specific area. I love this stage in the process and will never get tired of the rush that comes from building something from nothing. At some point this week I have to detach from the technical altogether. Since I’m not a naturally creative person, any artistic creativity I have has been hard fought for. Like many in the production field I got into it because I understood the gear; I grasped how to hang lights in the air and have them stay put safely–then how to send electricity to them so they would light up but the truss they were hanging on wouldn’t. To this day getting into a truly creative mode requires me to separate myself from thinking about the technical and focusing on relaxing into the artistic. This is where it pays off to have worked with my production manager Andrew for the past ten years as he recognizes when it’s time for me to slide into artistic mode and gives me the tools I need to to do the job. Having a trained, top notch lighting crew is invaluable at this point as they can continue to function while I’m consumed with these other design aspects.

What’s my creative director’s involvement at this point? As little as we can get by with. After a few years of working with Whit, I’ve gotten to know his taste pretty well–he might throw out general ideas about specific parts of the show but he leaves it to me to figure out how to implement those ideas and fill in the gaps in between. During the first rehearsals I’ll bring up the rough looks that I’m thinking about using and if I see him thrust a thumbs up into the air then I know I’m heading in the right direction. If I don’t feel like a part of the show is coming together the way we want I’ll ask him to step in to help me approach it from a different angle.

As in almost everything creative or production related–most of what we do is subjective but for our specific production designs and workflow, this is the basic formula we’ve found that seems to work best within the confines of our creative flow, our building capabilities and our staffing options.

All images are from the design process of the Celebrate With Family 2010 service.

I finally was able to sit back and watch Celebrate With Family 2010 yesterday from start to finish. I realized I hadn’t seen the entire show yet, only bits and pieces, and I was pleased at how the entire thing felt so cohesive. Nothing felt left-footed or out of place, there didn’t seem to be any weak moments. That was a great feeling.

I get to work with such talented people, but what’s awesome is that each of us helps make the others better. As we began to prepare for CWF, it was obvious that we would not succeed if we all worked separately – musicians creating the music, video producers creating videos, etc. There had to be a collusion of ideas, but even more a critique of each other’s work. In talking to so many worship leaders across the country I’m surprised to find that most of them work in a vacuum – void of any helpful criticism or direction as to how other service elements are being created. The reason our Christmas service felt so cohesive was that we all worked together.

To best illustrate this idea of collaboration and critique, I’ll share with you how pre-production laid the groundwork for our opening 3 songs for CWF 2010 – Little Drummer Boy, Deck The Halls, and The Grinch/Thriller. Six weeks or so before our first concert we nailed down the specific ideas for these songs referencing several songs by other artists, commercials, YouTube videos, and anything else that helped define the vision of where we wanted them to go.

LITTLE DRUMMER BOY influences
“Little Drummer Boy” by Jars of Clay from their project “Christmas Songs”
“Clap Hands” by Beck from his performance on the Sarah Kuttner Show via YouTube

DECK THE HALLS influences
“Deck the Rooftops” by GLEE cast from the project GLEE: The Music – The Christmas Album
“Play 60 Bus Commercial” by NFLRush.com via YouTube
“How Cute are These Boots” 2009 GAP Christmas commercial via YouTube
“Mickey” by Toni Basil (yes, seriously)

THE GRINCH/THRILLER
This one’s pretty obvious, although we did listen to a lot of Will Smith as we were writing the Grinch chorus. You gotta do what you gotta do…

Once we had that direction I took my staff musicians into the studio and we began to create. We spent several days tracking these songs as if we were making a record. We wanted to get as specific as possible with drum patterns, keyboard sounds, vocal parts, and even lead vocals. It was important to make sure our ideas worked now, not when we hit the stage for our first rehearsal. During this process we would send files back to our creative team to get their opinion. If what we had created didn’t match the initial vision of what we had discussed we would begin to make tweaks. Honestly, there were several times where we felt pretty good about what we had created, but when it was reviewed by our entire team we understood where we had fallen short. This process went on for at least 2 weeks, and slowly but surely our collective vision became reality.

The time spent in pre-production paid dividends immediately. On Tuesday, Dec. 14 we had our first on-stage rehearsal, just 4 days before our first performance, and it was apparent that we would not be holding up production while we made the music work. That saved time, wear, and tear on our crew and our volunteers. We made maybe 100 adjustments during rehearsals but the decisions we made during the pre-production phase were solid. And it translated into the most amazing production we’ve done here at COTM.

Since the audio on our Celebrate With Family service video uploads turned out pretty nice and the fact that we get queried often about it–let’s give our audio recording path a brief run-down, “nerd-speak” style. Enjoy!

By the way–if you have any interest in the house PA, check out this previous blog post for an in-depth look… Now here’s the down-low for the recording side:

AUDIENCE MICS
A pair of RODE NT1 mics hang from the center of the catwalk in a stereo pair positioned 90º off axis aimed towards the back of the room. This puts them almost exactly center of the room allowing them to pick up a fairly nice audience feel with a decent amount of rejection for what is coming out of the PA. Each of these mics hits one side of a Midas XL42 mic preamp where I’ve got a smidge of EQ and high-pass filtering going on. Hitting the Midas pre’s really does wonders for these mics as these completely make the difference in how the whole mix comes together…

ROOM MICS
This is a matched set of AKG 414’s in the back of the room that are positioned on the camera deck (we call it the lanai) directly in front of and slightly below the audio mix platform. These are set to pretty much duplicate what I hear while mixing; they are set to a cardioid pattern and aimed L/R towards the PA just a wee bit off-axis.

BOARD MIX
Stereo mix straight out of the primary Midas Heritage 3000. No magic potion here other than Midas awesomeness…

From here, the stereo board mix and the two audience mics hit their own individual inputs on a DBX 4800 where they are combined to a single pair of outputs–there is a small time correction done here that delays the board mix to match the audience mics. This newly combined output is now what becomes our “board mix” and is sent to all of the other parts of the facility including CCTV feeds, lobbies, overflow rooms, CD duplication, DVD recorders (for archive and backups) and is used for all of our radio show and podcast content. This is a really effective way to make sure that everywhere this mix goes receives a nice dose of ambience and audience levels which translates MUCH more dynamically and true than a typical dry board mix.

For our video capture, the board mix (now with the combined audience mics) is sent digitally from the 4800 directly to a Mac Pro running Final Cut. The room mics are converted to digital as well and hit Final Cut on two additional channels. So all of our video content has audio that is comprised of only these four inputs. Once an event is completed and any minor video editing is completed–an OMF is sent over for audio leveling and mastering in Pro Tools. The basic use of this step is so I can maximize the volume output of the overall mix prior to hitting the web and it gives me a chance to adjust the levels of all the segments–bringing the speaking segments up to match the music a bit more, limiting the mix as a whole, a bit of overall equalization and polish, etc. I also correct the time delay discrepancy between the board mix and the room mics (the audio information arrives LATER to the room mics and to Final Cut than the board mix so it requires a bit of time adjustment). This mastered stereo mix is sent back over to Final Cut where it’s combined with the video file and exported and uploaded.

So it’s a pretty basic setup–no multi-track recording or mumbo-jumbo going on here–just a simple capture setup that gives us a realistic version of what our room sounds like.

What makes this work so well is the quality of the house mix–plain and simple. We do get quizzed now and again about how we capture such a real sounding house mix and it really comes down to how it’s mixed when we’re in the event. Bottom line: if I blow it, that’s what we get and I have to live with it–so since that is unacceptable to me on about a billion different levels, I strive to make every mix stellar (mind you–this is a lofty goal for me somedays).

Here is the obligatory full disclosure: How I get a good board mix is derived a great deal from self-preservation… Yep, self-preservation for yours truly. Spending plenty of years on the road getting beat up nightly by the quality (or lack thereof) of my board mixes for whatever band du jour I was traveling with–I started trying to make my mixes a bit more representative of what I KNEW these rooms and bands sounded like. But you can’t really explain that to a rock band after the fact without coming across like a weenie… So I started adding the little extras like audience and room mics into the board mix on the sly but it really started making my mixes sound MUCH more dynamic and REAL. And you would be completely surprised at how few people caught on to why these mixes started sounding so much better all of a sudden…

We’ve spent the last few years exercising these principles to improve the mix captures at COTM with great results. As with anything audio or design related–everything is subjective and has to be adapted to each specific situation and scenario but for us this has been a fairly uncomplicated way to get a realistic representation of what’s happening for our live events.

Given that we were trying a bit of a different approach for this year’s Celebrate With Family service–here’s a closer look at the audio and sound design that was implemented.

Having maintained my love/hate relationship for quite some time regarding the use of Pro Tools for backing tracks–I will admit that they do have a place and can bring a lot to the table, but it’s sometimes a challenge to keep the live music and tracks proportionate to one another without letting the obvious perfection of the tracks takeover the mix. For this year we tried to keep things as live as possible–utilizing as many instruments and microphones as possible to pull it together. This line of thinking was carried further by how a few of the more esoteric numbers were musically built from the get-go. With me being an audio engineer that still loves to mix over just about anything else–this was a good place to start.

The band had gone to the studio and recorded most of the songs onto Pro Tools several weeks ahead of time giving them the opportunity to hone down the arrangements and get specific roadmaps built for each tune. Having things fleshed out ahead of time made it much easier for them to rehearse and as they started adding live parts, they just took out whatever Pro Tools track was being covered live. We actually ended up with most of the tracks going away but it served as an invaluable resource to help them get everything sorted out in advance. Although quite unnerving to me as the audio engineer (and due to our extremely tight production schedule), I didn’t have any kind of soundcheck or band rehearsal until a couple of days before the first dress rehearsal–but the band showed up ready to bring it. This serves as a testament to the awesome prep work these guys brought to the table and will be a process we duplicate in the future.

Having these remaining Pro Tools tracks in place not only helped me beef up some parts here and there but allowed us to tie together the flow of most of the major segments. Since I’m not just handling the house mix but managing the overall production at the same time–it’s a help to have the control of the Pro Tools cue-points in my lair so I can make sure we are a go with all of the other production elements before a track rolls. Occasionally, that extra second or two before cueing a track is all it takes to add a much needed breath to a stage move or a little more weight to a blackout.

The stage audio incorporated a fairly large and diverse package (read complicated) making it gratifying that everything worked according to plan. Here’s a copy of this year’s master audio input (download the full-quality PDF here) list for our analog consoles–HOLD it, did I say analog?? Can it be??!! Allow me to insert a brief yet shameless MIDAS plug: It may be a shock to some that we’ve stuck with analog but yes they are incredible to use, sound unbelievable and above all, they just LOVE to be mixed on… We do have to get a bit creative from time to time to get everything laid out sensibly but the sonic advantage is well worth the effort. Mixing without a mouse or trackball–say it isn’t so!!

As far as the audio onstage goes–there was quite a bit going on at once so getting organized on who and what went where was of key importance. The stage and audio crew did an outstanding job keeping the dense layout as clean and simple as possible–here’s a copy of the master band layout and a couple of pics that show the “controlled chaos” we had going on:

From an audio point of view, this was extremely gratifying to work on–check out the videos to hear how it came together. If interested, I go a little more in-depth into how we capture the audio for video in this blog post.

It’s been a good week recuperating from another hectic Christmas production season and nice to reflect a bit on the whirlwind.

From a production standpoint, this year’s Celebrate With Family was one of the more rewarding and professional events we’ve pulled together. Every team member from creative, production, and performance did their part to bring 100% to the table. Throughout my past years of touring, you start to recognize a common feeling near the end of a production–most of the time it’s a feeling of disgust and horror if you EVER think you’ll have to see it again, but then there are those other times, when you’ve really knocked it out of the park, that you’re genuinely sad it’s over–this was one of those events.

On the lighting side, the creative elements came together in a “controlled chaos” type of way and our LD Daniel did an amazing job pulling together some of the fantastic looks utilizing plenty of Barco MiTrix LED panels, quite a pile of pawn shop and vintage chandeliers, loads of Martin and conventional fixtures, and whatever else he could drag out from under the kitchen sink.

Capturing this for video ended up being quite a challenge since the creative vision called for some pretty low light levels onstage–this made for some amazing visuals but really kept our video crew on their toes to bring these same looks to life on screen.

We continued this “controlled chaos” vibe into the stage design utilizing a more elaborate riser layout than normal and a truly organic approach for the music and audio. Plenty of musicians, singers, actors, and dancers combined with a considerable amount of open mics and stage “clutter” scattered around helped us achieve a warm look and feel to the final product.

Check out the following photos to see a couple of these great looks–there are more photos and goodies on the Christmas 2010 Stage page in Resources and be sure to check out the videos to watch the event in its entirety.

http://vimeo.com/18156241

http://vimeo.com/18160286

http://vimeo.com/18160330

http://vimeo.com/18160340

http://vimeo.com/18160345

http://vimeo.com/18160763

Right now we’re in big time Christmas mode, so I’m going to blog quickly about a Christmas project we just finished in KOTM. Kids on the Move revolves around series (I Love My Bible, I Belong to God, etc) - those series revolve around weekly big answers (“My eyes belong to God, Jesus Rescues Right Now) - and those big answers revolve around one central truth or verse. For the last 5 weeks we’ve been in a series leading up to Christmas called “To the Rescue.” Our mission is to teach kids that WHEN YOU NEED HELP, JESUS COMES TO THE RESCUE.

One of the greatest ways we can help kids remember these themes is through our songs. Earlier this year we decided to do our best to write and record a song for each series we teach. If you haven’t heard any of these songs yet, you can check out I Love My Bible, Jesus Is Alive Right Now, or By Faith. Our series ”To the Rescue” is no different. For this we challenged ourselves to write a killer worship song - that song is You Are My Rescue and you can download it here on Seeds. We’ve been working pretty hard to refine our songwriting process and I get asked about it a lot, so here is that process in a nutshell.

STEP 1 - GET THE WORD OUT
COTM is blessed to have several musicians and singers (staff members and volunteers) who love songwriting. Once our theme was nailed down, I sent an email to this list of people, sort of an open call for demos. I included the series info, what sort of feel we were looking for, and the demo deadline. Demos submitted could be super polished or as raw as iPhone recordings.

STEP 2 - LISTEN AND GET OPINIONS
Stephen Posey, Andrew Dale and I listened to the demos. For this project, three were submitted. Honestly, we could have recorded any one of them and had a solid song, but we’re not in this just for fun. We want to get it right. We listened to each tune many times. We got opinions from other folks around. We asked questions of each song like: “Is it catchy? “Is it enjoyable to listen to? Does it communicate the theme? Is it the right song for the series?” After much deliberation, we chose to take the best of two songs and mesh them together.

STEP 3 - LAY OUT THE MAP
This is something we learned early on: DON’T WASTE THE CHURCH’S MONEY. God blesses our diligence to protect the tithe. As much as we can, we go in the recording studio with not only a game plan, but even a demo of our own. Andrew Dale will often record our final version in Logic before we step into the studio. Sometimes we’ll even use guitar, drum, or keyboard tracks that he’s recorded on his laptop. This saves us TONS of time! (Check out I Love My Bible and listen to the drums. They’re straight from Andrew’s laptop.)

STEP 4 - APPOINT A PRODUCER
For us, songwriting is a group effort. We want the opinions, but in the studio, you need someone to make the final call. The producer needs to be someone who specifically knows the heart of the series, after all why are we recording the song? Often in the studio it will be myself, Andrew Dale, Kenneth Weston and our audio engineer. Andrew’s working on instrumentation and Kenneth’s chiming in on vocal parts. 9 times out of 10 everyone will be on the same page with where the song should go. For that rare 1 out of 10 times, the producer can step in, listen to the opinions, and make the call. Assign a producer at the beginning. 

Let’s keep in mind, this four step process is not the Bible. You might hate working like this, but it worked for us on our last project. I’d love to hear about our songs being used in your kidmin services. If you’re using them, drop me a line on Twitter, by emailing me or just comment below. 

I hope this helps.

Although everyone manages to stay quite busy this time of year, it seemed a good time to introduce a few new entries on our Resource page. We’ve added a Production section so we can display some examples of our previous production sets and layouts that are referenced throughout these site.

At the moment we’ve put a few shots of our Christmas shows from the last few years as well as a stage plot for each. We’ll continue to add more production elements and I assure you that we’ll post the good and the bad… You can trust that there are some real gems to display when the time is right! Hopefully all these examples can be a valuable reference as you plan for upcoming set changes and events.

Walt Disney said in 1938 — “When we’re making a picture we don’t think of grown ups and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine clean un-spoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.”

I love that quote because it so beautifully describes what it is we do—tell stories, and great stories connect with us all regardless of age.

One of the more troubling trends I’ve seen in kid’s ministry in the last few years is the propensity to throw out mediums that have been effective at telling great stories for years because we believe that a particular medium is no longer effective. This is incredibly naive, and I say that with all due respect to those who chosen to serve our kids.

Recently I re-watched a documentary about the history of Pixar and I was struck by a remarkable comparison to kids ministry today. After Pixar had a real string of hits under its belt and the company really began to take off financially, an unfortunate thing began to happen. Many of the other animation studios started laying off their traditional 2D cell animators thinking that 2D animation was a thing of the past. They thought that Pixar was succeeding simply because they worked in a different medium.

When the leadership at Pixar heard about this troubling trend they were crushed. To think that in some way they had contributed to the destruction of a medium they cared so much about killed them. As it turned out they had learned so much of their craft from the people who had pioneered traditional 2D cell animation. In fact they love 2D animation because they understood what Walt had laid out so many years ago. That the medium is secondary to the story. Pixar’s movies work not because they’re made in a computer instead of by hand, but because they’re great stories.

So when Disney bought Pixar and they merged the leadership structure of the two studios what was the first thing they did? The Princess and the Frog. A 2D traditional cell animated film. And it was a success.

That brings me to this “great puppet debate.” What’s the debate? Puppets work when you know how to use them. They are a means to an end, not the end itself, and when you mix those two up you’re destined to do some really bad creative work (i.e. most DreamWorks movies).

Consider this: If you didn’t know how to use a shovel wouldn’t you look like a fool to throw it out claiming it had no purpose?

I realize not everyone in kid’s ministry has the capability of producing a great puppet performance. I get that. Video may be your strong suit just as computer animation is Pixar’s but don’t be so narrow-minded that you throw out an entire medium of beautiful art because you can’t figure out how to use it.

Creativity is not limited to the mediums that we deem worthy, story transcends medium and until that truth hits you like a ton of bricks, you’ll always make bad creative decisions because you’ll be focused on the wrong things.

Think I’m wrong? Ask Pixar.

In the download, there are 6 audio (.wav) files and the chord chart PDF. The audio breakdown is as follows:

• Click track with an audible count-off
• Bass line
• Choir
• Lead Background Vocals
• Background Vocals & Gang Vocals
• Sound FX (the “pop” heard near the end)

CLICK HERE to download.

All of these were bounced individually and at the same length so you can easily import them into either a Pro Tools or Logic session file and be good to go. You can even use in GarageBand also–you just won’t have many options on outputs to multiple channels, etc; Just make sure the beginning of all the tracks are time-aligned to each other. I usually pre-mix these tracks a bit inside Pro Tools so you may find a bit of volume automation written in here and there–this can can easily be removed if it’s not your cup of tea–I promise not to be offended.

Hope these files help make all your Christmas dreams come true. Or at least maybe your Christmas dreams will rock a little more than normal!

Quantity, Not Quality
Usually, we start planning Christmas in earnest around the middle of November and that’s usually because someone reminds us that Christmas is only 7 weeks away at which point we all freak out. The first step in the process is what we call a brain dump. Basically, we gather all the creative teams from around the church (Kids on the Move, Oneighty) and we start throwing out anything and everything that might work. The idea isn’t to “solve” the service, it’s more about stirring the creative pot.

So many times the best ideas come when you’re not actively engaged in brainstorming, but to get your mind working on a subconscious level you have to first exercise it on a conscious level. Most of my best ideas come in the shower because in the shower I let my mind drift and wander and that’s when I find solutions. So, don’t feel like you have to solve every problem and develop every idea each time you and your team sit down to brainstorm.

Find the Feeling
Once we have a few ideas on the board we start to think about the feelings that each song/sketch will evoke. This is HUGE! We want our Christmas service to be an emotional journey, but that doesn’t just happen by chance, you have to carefully craft that experience. Here are the feelings that we aim to evoke each Christmas in no particular order:

• Beauty – Christmas is a beautiful time of year so we definitely want our service to reflect that beauty.
• Humor – Laughter is such an essential part of any gathering because there’s no better way to gain your audience than to make them laugh.
• Family – For most of us, Christmastime is family time. We always try to include songs that make the audience feel warm towards those they care about most.
• Wow / Awe – You gotta make people say “Wow!” at least one time! This could be accomplished in a million different ways, but I think it’s important for people to experience something bigger than themselves.
• Worship – This is obviously the most important part. Our whole goal is to lead people toward worship - that’s why the reading of the Christmas story is always the pinnacle of our Christmas weekend.

What Is Necessary?
After we write these feelings on our board we try and assign them to each song/sketch in the service. The reason that we do that is to make sure we’re not repeating ourselves. An example would be “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”. Both are gorgeous songs but they evoke the same feelings – beauty & family – so it would be redundant to include them both. The goal is not to try and cram everything we can into the service, but rather to include only what is necessary.

Refine, Refine, Refine
From here we refine, refine, refine. We’ll talk through our service hundreds of times before it ever comes time to rehearse. Every song, every costume, every joke, it all gets talked through over and over and over again. It’s repititive and it’s exhausting, but it’s necessary because it’s through this process that you remove the parts of the service that aren’t working.

Remember this, the people who do the best work make it look easy, but it NEVER is! You and I see the finished product and it looks effortless but we don’t see the countless hours spent practicing in the gym/studio/office. Sometimes I think that because the work we do is primarily mental, we think we don’t have to practice in the same way we would if our jobs were physical. We all expect athletes to practice, and your mind works the same way as the rest of your body. It needs practice and refinement. These are the building blocks of a great creative work and without them, you’re toast. It would be arrogant to think that your first plan will be a home run. Don’t trust it, refine.

http://vimeo.com/17373882

Obviously, we’re not the only church who does this. We know that, like us, so many of you are working really hard right now to put together some incredible Christmas experiences for your communities and, like us, you’re sweating every song, every word, every video, and every detail. So here’s the deal. I thought it’d be fun to post our last five Christmas services in an effort to show the journey that we’ve been through the last five years and to hopefully spark some creative thinking for you and your team.

http://vimeo.com/17302431

2005
You’ll notice straight away that we’ve come a long way since 2005! You’ll also notice that some things worked really well and some… not so well, but I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything because they’ve been a great teacher. Really, this was our first attempt at anything like this and I’ll be honest, we were so proud of this service. We started planning this thing so late, we had no production budget, and the stage was made up of a giant REAL Christmas tree and fiber optic curtain.

http://vimeo.com/17329928

2006
This year we hired Daniel Connell as our lighting designer. We were so impressed with the job he did that we hired him! The opening sketch was heavily influenced by a Willow Creek sketch and watching it back it seems REALLY LONG! We went for a big band feel and it’s a little on the cheesy side, but the trade off is that the big band is always pretty warm.

http://vimeo.com/17330531

2007
This year was the first time we’d really jumped into the world of giant video screens and I’ll tell you, it was a lot harder to work with than what we ever anticipated. The challenge we ran into was making the stage feel warm. The giant video wall just felt a little soulless and we worked really hard to warm things up. We experimented with some cool ideas like putting the choir on video that worked pretty well. This set really had a pretty big wow factor and we got a lot of great feedback but putting it together was a nightmare (it weighed something like 30,000 pounds) for us and our production team.

http://vimeo.com/17333790

2008
For this year we really scaled back our Christmas production. We were just relaunching an outreach that we do at our camp (Dry Gulch U.S.A.) called The Christmas Train which reaches about 50,000 people a year. We hadn’t done the Christmas Train for the previous 3 years and so we went with a much more scaled back version knowing that much of our time would be spent getting the Christmas Train up and running.

http://vimeo.com/8559480

2009 Celebrate With Family
We had just finished remodeling our auditorium in October and we knew we really wanted to do something special. For the first time ever we really tried to combine our Christmas Train outreach and our Christmas services and we saw a huge impact. We were packed out in every service until a GIANT blizzard blew through on Christmas eve. All in all we were really happy with the way our first ever Celebrate With Family event turned out.

Like so many other churches, our Christmas services are a really big deal and like you, we put a TON of work into these services because the payoff is so worth it. We’ve seen so many people come to Christ through these services. So many people, who would normally never darken the door of a church, are willing to come to a Christmas event.

We know that putting together one of these services is a major chore and we’re always looking for new and fresh ideas to help us in our creative process so a few weeks back I had the idea to sit down with our team and do a commentary of our Christmas service from last year in the hopes that hearing some of our thought process would be helpful to those out there who are slaving over their Christmas services!

Enjoy!

P.S. I mentioned in the video that we’ll cut in some wide shots to give a wider perspective but after a few technical hangups we decided to just post the wide angle of the entire service. We’ll post it here very soon along with some other goodies. Stay tuned.

Just the other day I came across a video that definitely got it right. It’s by Adam Kring and the incredible team at Newspring. Love the work that Adam is doing and thought it’d be worth sharing here.

http://vimeo.com/16580993

Since I’ve been in band gear mode lately–here’s a look at a way we’ve been able to accomplish a vintage Rhodes look in a couple of our other auditoriums…

This may be old hat for some and even seem like cheating to others but who said there were any rules when it comes to slaying the musical beast? This is something I had flirted with in a couple of minor ways over the years with some different bands but this time was able to carry it a bit farther.

The quest for finding a decent vintage Rhodes is sometime a bit of a challenge not to mention dealing with the necessary “upkeep” to keep them happy once you do find one. So when our youth guys wanted some Rhodes love and were very much done with the “X-stand keyboard look” they had been saddled with–building some fake Rhodes shells seemed like good timing. This can be a real help in two ways: 1) Keeps the expense outlay to a minimum as compared to finding and paying for a vintage Rhodes (or one of their new ones for that matter) and 2) Lets you continue to use an existing keyboard that is familiar to the player and has a stable audio output (this can be hit or miss on a vintage model).

As a reference–here are a couple of photos of the vintage unit we use in our main auditorium. This one has had an obvious rough life but it supplies us with enough character to make Michael McDonald proud. Rest assured we have been through this thing several times to stabilize and clean the audio connections–additionally, it enjoys nice road-trips to the shop routinely to keep it maintained–check out these pics:

Using this authentic Rhodes as a grid–I laid out a plan on my trusty marker board so Chico could fabricate the rock–COTM style. A few years ago, I had run across this great web site from some fellows up in New Jersey (Vintage Vibe) that has a diverse inventory of hardware for all kinds of vintage gear–so we took advantage of some necessary parts to round out these custom Rhodes boxes and they turned out great… Here’s a few shots of these “fakes”:

Other than their cosmetic need to be beat up a bit (trust me it will happen over time)–these look like the real deal. As for the keyboards inside them–we made the fakes fit the keyboards we were already using in these rooms. As you can see below–they look like they were meant to be there all along.

Something cool to note (and a great example of how the little things matter) is how Chico made some color copies taken from a photo of the input/output panel on the real Rhodes and used them to finish out this same panel area on the fakes…

So here is the original panel again:

And these are the fake panels (go ahead and admit it–these rock.):

Since the fakes don’t have any speakers in the speaker cabinet portion–this is where we decided we could hide the gaggle of wall-warts, cabling, DI’s and such that seem to take over most key rigs these days:

Magnetic cabinet catches were used to hold the fabric speaker grills on to the cabinet so that the audio or backline guys can easily get into them to deal with cabling and power issues or just to stand back and marvel at the awesomeness (OK–so they probably don’t really do that, but it would be cool if they did…).

Hopefully this might spark an idea on how you can do something similar that applies to your specific situation. I’m quite proud of these rigs as they look great AND more importantly, didn’t cause a drain on our staff or finances to make them happen.

Where would we be without our B-3? Or perhaps our fake B-3 shell? At risk of beginning to look like a cheat and a liar–just remember, Seeds is full disclosure… Here’s a look at a fake B-3 shell we made and used for quite a while on our mainstage until our music director, Marcos, was able to unearth a beautiful real unit.

For this fake shell, Chico was able to pattern it identically to a real rental we were using at the time–it’s a simple unit in appearance and function but very much like the fake Rhodes shells we have built, it works great, looks good and serves us well.

Here are a few photos of the real deal we are using now:

And some assorted photos of the faker:

The top is hinged to open much like a real B-3 so you can gain access to all of the space behind and under the keyboard shelves so all of the associated power, cabling, and DI connections can stay hidden nicely.

Hopefully this can serve as another way to use a bit of creative thinking to improve your look and feel onstage without spending the coin on the real thing.

I leave you with a shot of musical-wizard Marcos using the faker at a recent Women’s Retreat–it looked great and served the stage design very well…

For the past 2 summers, my team has had the privilege of creating chapel services for our Dry Gulch summer camps. Our goal each year is to make camp chapel the most memorable experience of the summer for kids. So we take the best of what we do in Kids On The Move and migrate to Dry Gulch for the summer.

We brought our most energetic worship leaders, our best communicators, and our funniest characters to every service in every session. This was quite a commitment since there were a total of 12 sessions with 4 services each from June to August (with 4 weekly church services still happening back home). But knowing the potential impact the teaching would make on the lives of thousands of boys and girls from all across America, it was definitely worth it.

This video will give you a glimpse into what our services are like. This particular service was designed to wrap up each camp session. Our teaching theme this year was Jesus Is Alive, Right Now. My message was called “I Can Live For Jesus, Right Now”.

Enjoy.

Continuing on our foray of all that’s cool in the COTM world of guitar–here is the obligatory continuation of what happens after the world of the pedalboard… Woe to all who pass this point who are not prepped for nerd-speak…

We are currently using wired setups on our guitar rigs although we will switch to wireless on occasion as needed but for both reliability and improved audio, I will always opt for a wired rig. So from the pedalboard output, we convert from unbalanced 1/4” connection to an XLR cable. This allows us to utilize the balanced XLR line and pass the guitar signals to the amp via the audio snakes and patchbay… We have a very stable yet extensive audio patch system so “buzzes” and “gremlins” are not that prevalent but you can never be too careful…

From the patchbay, the signal gets routed to the farthest corner of our backstage area via some understage conduits. This is where we house four rolling isolation-boxes–each with its own dedicated power circuit (as you can see in the photo, our Stage Manager has discovered they also make a great out-of-the-way place to store all of our stage stools and tables). We do have several Radial interfaces that we use as needed as well–these Studio Guitar Interfaces do a nice job to keep the signal hot and clean for the 150’+ run to the amps. Although with these particular pedalboards, the guitar dudes have used some pretty high end gear and we haven’t had to utilize the buffers…

Here’s a couple of shots of how simple it is for the iso-box housings to be rolled out of the way:

Regarding the actual iso-boxes: Back in the touring days, I used to make good use of our large-frame console lids and utilize them as makeshift guitar deadening boxes that could be buried in the backstage hallway of some unsuspecting arena… The boxes pictured here are just a simple version of this same idea. We applied several layers of bed liner to the outsides of these boxes to deaden the resonance of the wood and fastened several layers of packing quilts to the interiors (leaving air gaps between each layer). These work great, are lightweight to deal with, and didn’t take a lot of time or coin to put together.

Next are the true winners of the beauty contest–the amps and Leslie that we are using at the moment. These do get switched around from time to time depending on what’s going on or what amp is getting serviced, etc., but this is the current lineup.

One thing to note is Chico (the magic man strikes again) installed a kill switch to each dedicated backline amp circuit–this made it possible for a stagehand, musician, or engineer to be able to quickly kill the power to any of the rigs without moving an isolation box.

On this first Dr. Z (MAZ 18 Jr.), the front mic at the moment is a Shure KSM32 and an Audio-Technica 4050 on the back–this has proven to be a nice combination of mics. I haven’t traditionally used something like a 4050 on the back of a guitar rig but I’ve never really been one to abide with too many rules in this area. Rather, I’d prefer to go with the flow of what seems to enhance the amp sound while still giving me the proper “flavour” I’m looking for out front without having to EQ the thing to death.

On the next Dr. Z (Stang Ray), the front is mic’d with one of my good friends, an AKG 414 and the back is a Shure Beta-56. Yes, I do understand the 56 is a bit unorthodox but you should hear what a good engineer I know can do with an SM-58 on a kick drum! This combination just seems to bring out the natural crunch of the front and the gentle warmth coming off the back–the performance has been solid.

And our go-to guitar 3 rig is just straight up awesomeness. A VOX AC-30 with a tried and true Shure SM-57 on the front and…wait for it…wait for it…wait for it…another 57 on the back! Yes! Shoot me or scoff, whatev. I don’t care as this combination sounds really slick for this particular amp and makes for a great all-around guitar sound.

For the #4 spot, we depart from guitar heaven and threw in the B-3 Leslie–this Leslie is one of the new speakers they’ve started building with all the funky mumbo-jumbo added for good measure–I don’t really know much about all the electronics on board this one but I will say this–it’s amazingly loud and sounds just rich, warm, and stud–exactly what you’d expect from our old wooden cabinet. I can go with just about anything to mic a Leslie cabinet–a pair of 58’s, 535’s, 414’s, even 81’s. I’ve had good luck with many of these over the years but for now, two more of the Audio-Technica 4050’s do a nice job. Instead of mic’ing the low end drum like a traditional Leslie–this one has a direct out that is hitting a Radial DI–since we don’t use a ton of low-end off of this–the DI works out great (you can see it winking at you a wee bit near the base of the mic stand in this photo).

There you have it, that’s it for the nerd-speak for awhile… As far as the real genius of the guitar tones and whatnot–that’s for the Muso’s to lay out but as far as the production and audio end of getting the guitar goods out to the people in the seats–we’ve been able to put a great system in place that allows us to “tame the beast” as bit as well as getting the artistry out front where it belongs…

In my estimation, there is no right and wrong way to capture a proper guitar tone as almost anything can get the job done to some degree. My thoughts on the subject do tend to ebb and flow as the music, players, or context changes but hopefully this demonstrates that you can tackle this from many different angles–all achieving a totally acceptable result. For those about to rock, I salute you.

For us here at Church on the Move, one of the HUGE benefits of the Seeds site has been getting to connect with people serving in their local churches all over the country. Just hearing how God is at work in other places really inspires and motivates us to keep on keeping on.

When we launched Seeds, one of the first people to sign up was Marty Taylor, one of the creative geniuses at Northland in Orlando. We hit it off right away and I’m now honored to call him a friend as well as a fellow presenter at Seeds Conference. Marty and the team at Northland are doing some of the best and most creative work I’ve seen in the church and If you’re not familiar with Northland you can check out their website here and if you’d like to follow Marty on Twitter (which I highly recommend) you can do that here.

Anyway, without further ado here’s a recent interview I did with Marty.

So, let’s just jump right in! Your official title at Northland is “Executive Director over Media Design.” What exactly does that mean?
The easy answer is, I lead the teams in charge of everything that is visible. Anything to do with video, print, web, user-level technology, branding, public relations, etc. If it’s visible, we typically have our hands in it.

I am a regular part of the creative process for worship services and I am part of the Executive Leadership Team for the church.

The unusual thing about my job from a typical media director at a church is that I do not lead the audio teams. The sonic audio experience is so closely connected to the music that the audio teams are part of the worship department.

The official name of your church is Northland, A Church Distributed. What does it mean to be “A Church Distributed?”
About 12 years ago, Northland’s name was changed from Northland Community Church to Northland, A Church Distributed simply meaning that church is not about gathering in a single building or a single community. The Distributed Church is all about people “being the church,” everywhere, every day. That, as the church, we gather to worship God and then respond to Him by distributing ourselves to serve others where they are so that God may be glorified.

It also means that, in recognition of how God distributes different gifts among different people (1 Corinthians 12:11), we connect with individuals and organizations outside our four walls for long-term support and effectiveness—without losing sight of our unique distinctions, we partner with others for the sake of others and the Kingdom.

Changing our name to something so unique has caused many people to ask what we are all about and opened doors for hundreds of local and global partnerships. The vision for being a church distributed drives everything we do from satellite venues to church online and beyond.

What’s your approach to planning a service at Northland?
Our approach is that everything we are and everything we are created to be begins in worship. When we look at who God is and what He has done, we can’t help but respond in worship to Him. So our planning process begins with looking at the message that Dr. Hunter is going to preach and extracting from that an attribute of God that becomes the focus of our worship for that weekend. The attribute may be God’s grace or His holiness or that He is the Creator.

Everything from beginning to end in our worship service is planned around that attribute of God. All the extensive amounts of production and technology that we use are there to help create an environment for worship centered around that attribute. We believe we are following God’s example from Genesis, when He created a beautiful environment in which for us to worship Him.

I’m a big proponent of churches merging their worship, production, and media teams because it really serves to unify the different groups of people who work on our weekend services. You guys don’t do that and yet you’re still really successful, how do you make that work?
Actually, I think you would be surprised how much we actually do the very thing you’re talking about. We do have the Media Design team separate from Worship as part of our corporate structure, but we are constantly working in tandem together. Our delineations only exist because of the sheer size of the teams and needing to delegate leadership based upon strengths. But the value of unified effort is a vital part of our DNA.

In fact, our worship planning meetings are attended not only by the worship and media staff, but we have people from all areas of the church (Local and Global Service, Equipping, Congregational Services, etc) there to bring their voice to the big picture planning as well.

I LOVE the way you guys incorporate scripture into your worship at Northland. Can you talk a bit about the concept and execution behind that?
We strive to blend the modern movement and style of worship with the foundations of the ancient church, so we incorporate a lot of scripture and creed into our modern worship service. The ancient and the future are part of our liturgy.

For many, the scripture and ancient creeds that we integrate are a means of connecting the dots between the song that they are singing and the truth of the Word. I think is also helps the worship service not just be an emotional experience (which I love) but also a deeply intellectual experience as well.

You guys are doing some pretty unique stuff with streaming your services, can you talk about that?
Northland has been a multi-site church for many years (our first site distributed site began in 2001). The unique thing about our other sites is that they are a fully real-time connection for the entire service. Everyone, at all locations, is participating in a unified worship service. We have local musicians and singers at each site. The music from our original location in Longwood is sub-mixed into to various parts (drums, guitars, keys, etc.) and mixed live at each site with the local musicians. We also change the origination point of the sermon from time to time to come from one of our other locations, not just our main campus.

We have been also been doing live online streaming of all our services (currently 5 each weekend) for several years as well. We have expanded that to a fully interactive community site with a live online minister each service and last year added the first ever live worship environment in Facebook. For us, this was a natural extension of being a distributed church by taking worship to a place where people were already gathering for community.

Many of our online worshipers have begun to form small communities together in homes around the country. We began looking for ways to make their connection better and easier. Just a couple of months ago, we launched a live channel on Roku, a small set-top box designed for on-demand streaming of Netflix, Hulu, and other content. This channel allows our home churches an easy, inexpensive means to connect to a high quality feed of the worship service, as well as several on-demand options like classes and Bible studies for their community.

Since the Roku channel is available to anyone, many people have added the Northland channel to their Roku channel line-up. So far, over 2000 people have made that connection. Our hope is that many people will discover Christ through discovering this channel.

There is definitely a world of global possibility for connection and evangelism through streaming technology and we continue to pursue how we can maximize that potential. We also hope to freely share all these technologies with any church who wishes to use them.

Describe for me a creative meeting at Northland. How long is it? Who’s involved? Who comes up with all the good ideas?
We are in a unique position at Northland that our pastor plans his messages several weeks in advance. This allows us to have several opportunities to review the goals of the service and shape what we hope will be the best means to connect our congregation to the attribute of God that we are focusing on in that weekend.

We begin by meeting with Dr. Hunter to get a summary of the message content about 3 weeks in advance. We initially walk away from that first meeting with a title, the core scripture, and a 2-3 paragraph summary. We determine from that our attribute focus for the weekend and begin meeting as a planning team. This team meets at least a couple times a week and focuses on 2-4 weeks at a time, with greater detail as the weekend gets closer. We continue to meet with our Pastor each week to get additional detail on the message and application as he refines where he is going.

The core planning team is about 7 people from the worship and media teams, but the discussion expands to the full team as we get closer to the weekend itself. The lighting, video, and audio teams take the order of service and create a visual and audio design for the environment of that service.

It all comes together in a full rehearsal each Wednesday where we continue to refine the plan before our first service on Saturday. Even following that service, we debrief and make changes as needed for the rest of the weekend.

One of the things that surprised me, when we visited on the phone, was that your day off is Sunday of all days! How do you make that work?
My being off on Sundays is the greatest testament to the quality of our team that I can imagine! So much work is put into the services in advance that by the time we debrief the service on Saturday, my job as the leader of the visual team is done. The rest of the weekend is then in the very capable hands of our technicians and volunteers to execute and they do a great job. I feel blessed to be able to attend service on Sunday night with my family without any worry about what is happening in the control rooms.

Besides that, the success of failure of all our planning is ultimately up to the work of the Holy Spirit anyway, so I just try to get out of the way.

Who’s inspiring the team at Northland these days?
Creatively, we draw inspiration from all around us. The world is full of story, both in what you can hear from others, or simply in what you experience or see in God’s creation. When you seek to see who God is and what He has done in the world around you, you can more easily find ways to lead people into worship around the story of God.

I can also say that our team is inspired by seeing much more collaboration between churches for the sake of the Kingdom of God as a whole. We are so much more affective when we stop guarding our ideas and plans and freely share and learn from one another. That’s one of the things I love so much about what Church on the Move is doing with Seeds. By giving away and sharing what you have freely with others, you are creating Kingdom impact beyond a venue in Tulsa. That is truly inspiring.

Northland is a BIG church, what would you say to leaders in smaller churches?
Simply…don’t get hung up on what you don’t have. The story of God and what He has done is all the inspiration you need to lead someone into meaningful worship and connection with Him. Everything else is simply a tool to help create an environment to do it…just like air conditioning or a comfortable chair. The philosophy of worship at Northland is the same as it was years ago when we met in a 50-year old roller skating rink and didn’t have a single video projector or moving light. Content and story are now and will always be the most important tool you have. Without it, your loud music, lights, and video are just disco.

Charts learned – check.
Guitars tuned – check.
Standing in the right spot on the stage – check.

And so it goes every weekend, Wednesday night, and every other time we lead our church in worship – we look good and we sound good. But do those 2 things alone equal effectiveness? Way too often we overlook the most basic concept of worship: LOVE. We don’t do it on purpose. We are here to serve, right? Nothing wrong with that. But service alone isn’t enough (remember the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10?). I like to challenge my team before we hit the stage to consider their motives – why are they here, why have they rehearsed, why have they sacrificed their time? Pulling off a great worship set is more than just making great music, it’s about LOVE – LOVE for our God and LOVE for His people.

Have you ever stood right beside a crash cymbal as the drummer beats the life out of it? If you are a musician you probably respect that crash cymbal and understand why it was created, but more than a few seconds of that crash cymbal next to your head and you’ll move to another location far away. That’s the mental picture I get from 1 Corinthians 13:1. If what we do as a worship team is not motivated by LOVE, then we will eventually become nothing more than that crash cymbal, no matter how good we sound and look.

Here are a few ways we can help our teams focus on more than just the nuts and bolts of the worship set:

KNOW THE PEOPLE YOU’RE LEADING
It’s important to take a few minutes before we hit the stage and think about whom we’re leading in worship. The men and women who enter the auditorium for each service have jobs and families, needs and burdens, questions and doubts. Church is a refuge for them – a place where they can make a joyful noise and connect with the God that loves them. They don’t need a group of musicians in front of them going through the motions – they need honest worshippers reminding them of the hope they have in Christ. With that in mind it’s important for us to tear down the wall between the chairs and the stage. They need to feel as though they can reach out and connect with us as we sing and play; that we truly desire to lead them before the throne of God. That alone will make the difference between a “worship set” and a “time of corporate worship.” And how do you tear down the walls? Here are a few things to try:

• Smile – You’d be surprised how many people don’t smile when they lead worship. It should be the most natural facial expression given the subject of our songs: “GOD LOVES US!!!” And a smiling face goes a long way towards putting the audience at ease, ready to hear what you have to say.
• Make eye contact – Show them that you know they are there and that we are on this journey together! Closing our eyes or looking up to the ceiling all the time gives the impression that we are closing ourselves off, we’re unapproachable. Pick a few people out every service and invite them to sing with you.
• Memorize the lyrics – I’ll be the first to confess that I blow the lyrics at least once a weekend, but I refuse to keep my head down, looking at the lyrics monitor. This gives the crowd a sense that you haven’t cared enough to prepare for the worship service. They want to know the words are coming from your heart, not from a screen or a sheet of paper.
• Let them take the lead – My favorite part of a worship set is when I can back away from the mic and let the congregation take it. Those are awesome moments! And those are moments that are about them, not about you.

PRAY FOR THE PEOPLE YOU’RE LEADING
Take a few moments before you hit the stage and pray for those whom you will be leading in worship. Better yet, ask God to lay specific people and/or situations on your heart. That way you’ll be more in tune with how the words and messages of your songs will impact those in the room.

RESPECT THE PEOPLE YOU’RE LEADING
Ok, answer honestly – how tired are you of the same old songs week after week after week? If we do “Mighty to Save” one more time I’m gonna scream! It seems like we’ve done that song 4,000 times. Funny thing, though, is that when we do it the 4,001st time our congregation still brings down the house with their voices! To them it’s a song they can relate to; they can close their eyes and sing without looking at the lyrics on the screen; it’s a no-brainer. As musicians we want to continually introduce new songs, to change it up, and keep what we do feeling fresh. And we should. At COTM we introduce 1 or 2 new songs a month. But at some point you have to give those who came to worship a break and allow them to sing songs that are near and dear to them. Don’t disrespect your audience by taking away precious worship time and forcing them to learn new songs every week. And if a song isn’t connecting with them after the 2nd or 3rd time you’ve tried it, chunk it and move on, no matter how much you may love the song.

DON’T CONFUSE THE PEOPLE YOU’RE LEADING
It is important that the worship leaders are on the same page with the senior pastor. You know and I know that not every worship song out there is Biblically accurate nor do they line up with the convictions of your pastor (which should be your convictions, by the way). Do not sing these songs! Songs are powerful memorization tools that will stick in the worshipper’s heart long after they leave the building. On that thought, carefully measure what you say between songs and exhort during songs. LOVE the people you serve enough to line up everything you do on stage with the heart of your pastor.

Those are just a few thoughts on leading worship not only with excellence, but with LOVE. I look forward to hearing your thoughts…

As I’ve mentioned before, pretty much anything I can draw, my man Chico can build, so I sketched out a simple layout for a pedalboard dolly that would look as if it was floating and could easily glide on and off stage with very little effort. This is a top view of the dolly with and without the pedalboard…

He built these with the casters recessed enough to keep the dolly ground clearance low enough to “push” any cables out of the way rather than rolling over them as that could become quite a problem during a scene change… Here are some pics of the underside:

Then I had Jesse, one of our wizard Audio Engineers, build up a nice pigtail for the signal and power so a stagehand could easily disconnect the loom from the entire contraption quickly if need be, but if just rolling from one position to another, these vital connections would stay connected via locking connectors. From getting burned many times over the years, I didn’t want to take any chances on something “accidentally” getting unplugged during a move or transition… This photo shows the whole thing ready to rock:

I was a bit concerned that the boards may “drift” a bit when the guys are changing pedal presets or riding the volume pedals but we’ve had no issues as of yet and these have been in use for about 8 months or so. The guitar players love them and it certainly hasn’t held them back from slaying us with guitar glory as shown in these two shots:

I’m sure there are a zillion different ways to accomplish this same thing on many different levels but if you happen to be on a never-ending quest to make things more functional yet cooler at the same time–maybe this will give you some good ideas…

Well this has been a long time coming, but today, we’re super excited to announce our first ever Seeds Conference! It’s all going down March 2-4, 2011 and we can’t wait! Seeds Conference is for people who are just as passionate about reaching the next generation as we are. It’s for youth pastors, children’s pastors, and creative leaders in the church.

The idea behind the conference is that it’s really 3 conferences in 1. We’ll have 3 streams. One for youth ministry, one for kid’s ministry, and one for creative leaders. 3 conferences for 1 purpose: Reaching the next generation.

Each of those streams will be packed with workshops full of practical info. In fact there are over 40 different workshops you and your team will have the opportunity to attend. But here’s the coolest part - you can bounce between the streams as much as you like. So if you want to hear about “Secrets to Success in Your Junior High Program” in one session and “Making Killer Videos On The Cheap” in the next session, you’ll be able to. Our goal is to make this thing super flexible so you can use it however you like.

The other idea that makes Seeds Conference pretty unique is that everything we make for the conference, from the audio of the sessions to videos we produce will be absolutely free. Our goal is to equip the church so if you come to the conference we’re going to load you up with stuff you can use, for free.

Now, to be fair, we will have some speakers and vendors who will no doubt be bringing in some of their books and materials that you can buy if you like, but all of our stuff will be completely free and I can tell you the stuff we’ll be giving away won’t be small.

Last but not least we’re opening up registration for the Seeds Conference in just 9 days on October 15th, and for the first two weeks of registration (until Nov. 1) we’re going to be reducing the price of the conference by $60. So if you want to come you’ll be able to save a ton of money if you register early.

We’re really looking forward to this conference. We’ve been talking about it in house for years now and it feels good to finally launch it. We’d love your help spreading the word so tweet about it, blog about it, Facebook your friends because this thing is going to be a blast. Hope to see all of you there!

8am, Sunday morning. It’s the worst possible time for singers to belt out strong, high notes in an effort to encourage the congregation to sing and get their hearts ready to hear the Word taught by their favorite pastor.

This has been an issue for decades for worship teams who try to bring their best vocal effort 4 or 5 hours before their voices will be naturally warm. The result in most churches is that non-professional singers will strain their vocal chords as they struggle to stay on pitch. I have more than 5000 concerts under my belt, plus 100’s of hours in the studio and it’s still a process to get my voice warm to sing that first service on Sunday morning. Through the years I’ve made a list of “do’s” and “dont’s” that have been a big help not only for me but also for the singers in my worship teams.

Sleep.
It’s important to get plenty of rest the night before you sing. I tell my singers all the time, “Sleep plus water = the only cure for tired voices.” Saturday nights bring the temptation to stay up late. Fight that temptation and go to bed early. Not only will a good night’s rest keep your voice in good shape, but it will also keep you mentally sharp.

Wake up at least 2 hours before you sing a note.
Especially on cold mornings it takes quite a bit of time for our muscles to acclimate to the weather. Waking up early gives the muscles in your throat time to naturally warm up and get adjusted to the new day. Your musicians who are constantly running late because they are getting up at the last minute are usually the ones who are not going to be their best vocally.

Prepare mentally.
It’s not enough to think about what you are going to be doing in the service moments before you walk on stage. I encourage our singers from the moment our first rehearsal ends on Thursday to continue to think about the songs they will be singing, where the notes sit in their voices, and what the song means to them. If they care about the song they are singing they are more apt to make sure they sacrifice to get it right.

Save your energy.
I encourage my singers not to talk loudly or run around too much doing other things before that first service starts at 9am. We have 20-30 minutes in each service in which to use up our mental, emotional, and physical energy. After a worship set, I expect our singers to be spent due to their concentration and use of air (I’ll cover that at the end of this blog), so it’s important that they save their energy for the stage.

Know your limits.
If you are singing for 20-30 minutes during the service, understand that your vocal chords have a limit. Blowing it out in the first couple of songs will more than likely leave you with zilch by the end of the service, at a time when you should be reaching a crescendo of energy and passion. Learn to pace yourself.

Don’t drink caffeine before a performance.
Coffee and caffeinated teas will dry out your vocal chords. We keep herbal caffeine-free teas on hand in our musicians’ hospitality area all weekend long. A mixture of tea, honey, and lemon is perfect for clearing out the junk in the throat. Gross, I know, but it works. Keep these ingredients on hand and encourage your singers to drink it every Sunday morning.

Don’t walk on stage without warming up.
Check out this book for a great way to help your singers warm up and strengthen their voices. Everyone on our team keeps this book with them at all time.

Don’t drink cold water.
You’ve just warmed up your voice and now you’re pouring cold water into it? That doesn’t make any sense at all! Room-temperature water is best for your throat and vocal chords to keep them relaxed and hydrated.

Don’t assume your singers understand what’s about to happen.
With all the planning, rehearsing, sound checking, and warming up, we can, as leaders, sometimes assume that those who follow us onto the stage have a grasp on what the entire service is all about. We’ve only gone over the music with them and told them what we expect them to do when they pick up the mic. As leaders we see the entire picture of the service and if we can let our musicians in on the spirit of the service beyond what they are responsible for, then they will tend to be more enthusiastic.

Give your singers the “ok” to let their emotions out.
I’ve seen it so many times: a singer is concentrating so hard on pitch and phrasing that they forget what they are singing about. Just before we hit the stage I remind them that it’s “ok” to get lost in the moment sometimes. We are approaching God’s throne through worship, and we’re asking the congregation to follow us there. If we are not moved by the presence of God through our worship then there’s no way the audience will be either. Perfection is an unattainable goal, but passion is always achievable. We just have to let it out…

I mentioned breathing earlier and I just want to touch on that for a moment. Air is the key to every singer’s success. A lack of air will cause pitch problems and will result in poor phrasing. I regularly teach my singers to “sing on the breath”, which basically consists of pushing air out of your lungs as much as possible through each phrase. Listen to great singers and you’ll hear not only the notes they sing but the air they ride on as well. Using more air as you sing will also give your song a sense of urgency, just as a an actor would deliver their lines in a passionate way. Check out this blog for more on this subject.

Hope this stuff helps. Let me know how you prepare your team to be its best on Sunday mornings…

In keeping with our “behind the announcements” vibe here, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on how the writing comes together.

Announcements are typically made up of one thing: information. The problem is, information alone can be really boring. So when we decided to try our hand at video announcements a couple months back, I started looking for a way to wrap my head around what it is specifically that makes an announcement effective. Over time, I realized that a really good pitch, one that stands out, always has three key elements to it: the story, the info, and the ask.

THE STORY
The story is the heart behind the event. It’s the answer to the question WHY? Why are we doing this event? Why does it even exist? If you don’t know the answer to this question then you need to find out because when you answer this question, it casts vision and inspires people to take action. This is probably the easiest thing to overlook but I spend most of my writing time right here. If you fail to find the story, you won’t connect with people.

THE INFO
Information is important but you have to learn how to determine which bits and pieces are necessary. We try to keep the nitty gritty details to a bare minimum in our announcements. We say ONLY what’s needed, let graphics say what can be read on the screen, and point people to the website or Guest Services in the lobby for the rest. Info is great but it doesn’t inspire people and too much of it always gets lost in the shuffle.

THE ASK
The Ask is the part of the announcement where you change gears from storytelling and info in order to call people to action. This is no time to be shy! When I deliver the ask myself, I try to think about changing gears in every way I can. I may change my body language with a specific movement or adjust the tone of my voice slightly. This may sound a little silly, but your eyes have a lot to do with how boldly the ask comes across on video. I genuinely try to look deeper into the camera lens during the ask. I want to connect. I want to grab the audience and ask them to DO something. It’s not enough to just inspire and inform them, you must call them to action and that’s what the ask is all about.

Now that you know how we approach the writing on our announcement videos, I thought I’d include a few pieces for you to browse through along with the original text. Just for kicks, see if you can identify the story, the info, and the ask in each one.

I’d love to hear about your victories and struggles when it comes to video announcements! Drop me an email anytime!

http://vimeo.com/15254392

Mother’s Day 2010 Promo
Well, next weekend is Mother’s Day, and moms, I gotta tell you, what we have planned for you is more than your average Mother’s Day service with carnations and a round of applause for all the moms. If you are a mom, you deserve a fantastic day and that’s exactly what we have planned for you! Right when you walk through the doors, you’re going to be so glad you came because every moment of our time together next weekend has been thought through with you in mind! Plus Joe McGee is going to be here and we’re going to have a lot of fun!

So call your mom, call all of your friends who are moms! This is a perfect weekend for you to invite them to be with us at Church on the Move. We want to pack out that parking lot with nothing but mini-vans and it won’t be the same if you’re not here to celebrate with us. Oh, and don’t be late! You cannot miss what we have for you at the very top of the service. In fact, husbands, why don’t you help your wives get the kids ready for church next weekend so you can be here on… wait, nope… that’ll make you late. Moms, do what you gotta do. We’ll see you next weekend!

http://vimeo.com/15254258

Bus Drivers
We are getting ready for some of the biggest outreaches we do as a church and one of the teams that we’re working to build right now is our Transportation Team! I’m talking about Bus Drivers, folks! Oneighty buses in students every Wednesday from around the city and Christmas Train will be here before you know it and it takes a lot of bus drivers to help all of our volunteers get to Dry Gulch every night!

Our bus drivers have a great time together and this is an awesome way for you to be a part of the work that God is doing in our church! If you are somebody who is interested in driving for us, we have a table set up in the lobby this weekend. We can help you earn your CDL if you don’t have one and get you all the training you need! So swing by and meet us today after service! You will love being a part of the transportation team!

http://vimeo.com/15254349

Service Etiquette
At COTM it’s important to us that everyone who comes through our doors has a great worship experience and our goal is to eliminate as many distractions during our service as possible.

When you get up and leave early, it does create a distraction at a time in the service when people are considering a relationship with Christ.

We ask that you would be considerate of the people around you and not leave the auditorium until service has been dismissed. Thank you for helping us make COTM a great place to worship!

http://vimeo.com/15254193

Girls Get Away
Girls Get Away is an event for all the ladies of Church on the Move. These weekends are about getting away from the norm and taking some time to relax with the girls and here’s what’s great, if you don’t know a lot of women at Church on the Move yet, this is a perfect way to connect with some amazing COTM ladies!

In fact, guys, if you are sitting next to your wife or girlfriend who has been wanting to meet some new friends at church, you need to elbow her right now…and then get her registered online! Ladies, don’t be shy, don’t be scared! We’re going to have a blast!

We are going to be sipping espresso, toasting s’mores over the fire, stopping in for manicures at the Dry Gulch Spa and enjoying an outdoor chick flick by the lake, just to name a few!

It doesn’t matter if you are married or single, a student or career woman, a super model or a super mom! We believe something amazing happens when women gather to worship, gro,w and spend time together. So go online and get registered! And if you have some questions about the event, you can stop by the Girls Get Away table in the lobby today!

http://vimeo.com/15232666

Before I begin it needs to be said that we wouldn’t be where we are as church without the people that came before us. None of this “old school” footage is intended to mock or laugh at any of the people who have served here over the years. I merely post it to show the process and the journey of change.

http://vimeo.com/15057819

1987 - 2002
This is what our church was like before we made the decision to change things up. Basically, we were on autopilot. We’d show up to church every weekend with no real plan other than to follow the same format we’d been using for 15 years. We didn’t teach in series, it was just everybody show up and do what you do and then go home.

http://vimeo.com/15057965

October 2003
In the fall of 2003, my dad and I visited Fellowship Church in Dallas and were blown away. I don’t think either one of us ever thought church could be anything other than the same old same old. When we came back we made some changes. We adjusted our stage lighting and darkened the house lights during worship (I know, I know, we were CRAZY!!! The next thing you know we’ll be running with scissors!). We relaxed our dress code on the stage just a little. I’m not sure what we were thinking having everyone wear black - it looks like we’re all headed to a funeral!

At this point, our worship & audio department was still separated from our media department and there wasn’t much coordination between the two. We gave some much needed visual polish to the service by adding some pre-service slides, a service countdown, a worship guide, and a few dramas here and there but we were a long way off from where we would eventually end up.

http://vimeo.com/15062033

Fall 2005
After the big changes in 2003 we spent the next two years pretty much on cruise control. Honestly, I thought that we had made all the changes we were gonna make as a church but in the summer of 2005 my dad surprised me by making some pretty big organizational shifts within the church. He hired a new worship pastor in Andy Chrisman and new audio/production guy in Andrew Stone and created a new department that he wanted me to head up called Performing Arts. I was thrilled. For the first time the visual artists, musicians, and production people were all under the same roof, so to speak, and this really set the wheels of change in motion.

If you look closely at the videos you’ll notice the subtle shifts in stage décor and lighting design. We were learning, testing, and changing all the time. This was really where the whole “culture of change” thing began. Now that I had control of everything in our services, we were free to adjust it as we saw fit, within certain parameters of course, but that freedom allowed us to try some new things and it really was huge in the development of our team.

http://vimeo.com/15062870

Fall 2006
At some point in 2006 a few of our people started to get mad about the changes we had made. I guess in their minds they had tolerated it for long enough and it was time to let us know about it. Oh well, you can’t please everybody. Got to keep moving forward.

http://vimeo.com/15068115

Fall 2007
The last four years had seen a lot of positive changes and things were going well but so much of what we wanted to do was limited by the room we were in. We were improving things, but there was only so much we could do. Our IMAG setup was awful. We had a couple of old boardroom quality projectors and the screens they projected on were 50 feet above the audience’s head. It was a bad setup, but we tried our best.

http://vimeo.com/3443328

Spring 2009
After years of making improvements little by little it seemed like it was time to shift things again. In February of 2009 I went to the C3 conference at Fellowship Church, and in visiting with some of the guys down there it became so clear to me that we didn’t involve enough younger people in what we were doing - everyone on our stage was 35+. There’s nothing wrong with being 35+ (I’m 34 myself!) but I knew that it would be so easy for all of us on the creative team to just sort of get older together without adding in any new blood. I knew we had to change again.

I started getting involved in our music pretty heavily around this time. We totally revamped our arsenal of songs and started incorporating as many young people as we had access to. Rehearsals were brutal. We would spend 7-8 hours on a Thursday night/evening just dialing in our songs and sounds for the weekend. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect overnight but we knew we had to do it. It’s paid off in a big way.

http://vimeo.com/14977150

2010
When we moved into our new room things took such a HUGE step forward for us. We finally had a setup that could accommodate all of our biggest ideas. No more crummy video screens, no more PA on the fritz, things just work like they’re supposed to.

We now live in a place where change is celebrated and our church loves it. We’re obviously not perfect but I’m so happy with the strides we’ve made as a church and you can really see just how far we’ve come when you look back through the years. God is good.

Our original stage was built with a fully enclosed drum room complete with carpet, sound absorption panels, and a dedicated air system. It was truly an audio engineer’s dream but not very usable from a creative or lighting standpoint. Even though we have a large auditorium, once the drums were brought out of this controlled environment, numerous negatives were brought to the table.

Fast-forward a bit to a few years ago when we started changing the musical style with more focus being put on the drums, guitars, lighting, and design. Although it would’ve sounded awesome to isolate the drums again back in their dedicated room, it still wouldn’t have worked from a creative or design standpoint, let alone the vibe and energy it would rob from the band. We knew that just shielding the drums wasn’t going to do it–the sound was still obliterating the front rows and adding a mushy sound to the audio mix since you heard a lot of the drum sound emanating from the stage rather than the PA.

So we started building our own “drum room” out of regular plexiglass drum shields available on the market. We would combine a few sets of these together so they would go all the around the kit (leaving a small gap for an entrance and fresh air). By the way–don’t ignore the “awesomeness” of the stage set in this first pic…more on that at another time.

Eventually, I had a local custom plastics manufacturer build us various clear “lids” that would lay onto our contraption instead of the “insulated” panels included in most of these systems.

Over the years, we went through several renditions of this type of setup and dealing with the lighting and design eyesore it created. As we progressed, I ended up having a local plastic company custom fabricate a virtually seamless box. It was in several sections that all attached with clear fittings and it had no 90º seams–all the corners were rounded corners so you never really saw a hard edge. This idea worked pretty cool and it was definitely the best solution we had used to date–the flat pieces were so wide and without seams that to a great extent, it disappeared on video.

I should take a moment here to mention a few notes about drums mics… I have used about every conceivable combination of microphones and techniques out there but being a drummer myself for many years, I have become extremely picky about this subject… For the most part, I quit using overhead drum mics for live applications years ago–I just got tired of not hearing enough cymbals and clarity of the kit in the mix. This has really given me more control over each specific cymbal on the kit just the way you would deal with the kick, snare, hat, and toms… As for the cymbals themselves, I usually mic them from underneath (unless the bleed from another drum or something is too much)–right now, something like the Shure SM98 seems to work quite nicely… Dumping overhead mics is about the only way you can get away with a drum shield–having close mics on everything allows you, for the most part, to “ignore” the zillion percent increase in reflections within a plastic box…

So all that was great–band sounds awesome, drums are controlled, everything was perfect EXCEPT…it still looked like an aquarium onstage, the band hated it, the drummers loathed it, and our lighting designer had pictures of it on his dartboard. I don’t know where it became my fault, but I think somehow I became the “COTM drum shield guy” although in most of my previous experiences, I had never really liked or even used shields unless I was with a band doing a TV appearance or an awards show or something–but I must admit that it did sound amazing to have that kind of drum containment in our auditorium.

At the conclusion of our auditorium remodel and overhaul about a year ago, we were analyzing everything and really wanting to make good decisions on our band sounds and setup and it came up just how hard a time the band and drummers were having with the aquarium–the sound inside the various contraptions was just out of control (a whole drum kit surrounded by 5 sides of highly reflective surfaces–ugggg). Even though I had never been married to a drum shield I was still pretty much a jerk when I first heard the band discussing the possibilities of ditching it. I mean, this was my mix at stake–the whole world might stop spinning or something… Um, yeah, whatever man. When I realized how negative it was for the guys onstage, it was apparent that I needed to relax and keep an open mind and remember the years of awesome concerts I had mixed over the years with no plexiglass in sight… So we ventured out into the nakedness of going “au naturel” on the drums and just throwing them out there. Since the new PA had considerably more presence, body, and low-end–it seemed like it would work.

So can you hear the drums acoustically coming from the stage? Certainly. Is it out of control? Not as much as you might think–although for awhile I don’t know if I would’ve wanted the seat right down front on the drum side of the stage… So we have gradually worked on several different things–paying a lot more attention to how the drums sound and are tuned without microphones (so it still sounds good for the adjacent seating) and the volume the drummers play at (not just killing it every time we play). And most recently, we started using extremely thin cymbals–specifically the Bliss line made by Dream–which have been a huge step forward and it wasn’t very expensive. This has been a huge, huge factor in minimizing the “white noise” elements of the crash-rides used in a lot of the current worship songs. We are also experimenting with smaller and lighter drumsticks and are currently trying out Vic Firth 55A sticks. If you’re interested in knowing more about our drum heads, size of cymbals, etc., drop an email to our Band Director, Marcos Cruz.

The overall result has been incredible–we also added a short piece of drum glass on the side of the kit closest to the seats to help shield the snare volume a bit and it works like a charm. The acoustic volume has changed enough that you really only hear the drums from the PA and it really sounds fantastic, earthy, and live.

These types of changes prove that all of these ideas had merit and worked fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with using a drum shield or drum isolation room, but for us right now and in the creative flow we are working in at the moment–this works best. Only by everyone working together and being willing to experiment a bit were we able to discover a solution that made sense, served both the musicians and the production staff, but most importantly, serves the people in our seats.

Kids on the Move loves puppets. How could we not, when we have an amazing puppeteer like my good friend, Mr. Tim Cox?! (pictured below)

If you haven’t seen his work, check out a sample from our Celebrate with Family service below. Deputy Dugan has a great little duet with one Mr. Andy Chrisman (not pictured below) starting at 24:10.

http://vimeo.com/8559480

As we continued to develop our puppet sketches for Kids on the Move, we began to run into the same problem: location of the puppet stage. Because the KOTM auditorium is a multi-purpose room, every stage set we design must be able to be hidden behind the closed curtain. Our stage is pretty deep. Any puppet stage we built into the set was up to 75 feet away from a student, depending on where they were sitting. What was our solution? Make it mobile! For us, building a mobile puppet stage met so many of our needs. We could obviously place the stage anywhere we wanted and moving it on and off during segment bumpers was a huge help. The great thing about this was we didn’t need any sort of specialized fabricator to make this. We just needed a regular carpenter. Here are a few things we did to insure this worked for us:

1) We made it sturdy.
This is not a few pieces of plywood slapped together. We’re talking an extremely strong wooden box as its interior.

2) We made it fit the décor of our room.
Many of our puppets are animals. Why shouldn’t they be shipped to us in a crate? The idea could be pulled off easily by tearing apart a few pallets.

3) We built it specific to our needs.
It’s just big enough for two puppeteers. We designed it so that the puppets would be at eye level with the host, who is usually me (I stand at an enormous 5’ 5” height). We attached a few inexpensive lights inside so our puppeteers can easily see, no matter what the stage lighting is.

4) We built it as small as possible.
Granted, a 5’ tall x 6’ wide x 3.5’ deep box isn’t the smallest item to store, but as far as puppet stages go, it’s not too bad.

This has served us well. If you build one, I’d love to hear about it. What’d you do differently? Shoot me a comment!

All that said, I’ve finally got around to reading/listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink. It’s an amazing book and I can’t recommend it enough, and in listening to it I came across an idea that has been kicking around in my head for quite some time.

In the book, Gladwell tells the story of two women who do nothing but taste test food for a living, and they’ve become so good at it that they can taste a bit of cookie and tell you what factory that cookie came from! It’s pretty unbelievable.

They can do this, not because they’re freaks of nature, although I’m sure that they have some sort of natural gift to do what they do, but they can do it because over the years they’ve trained their minds and their tongues to look for things in food that you and I would never consider looking for. Why would we? But for these ladies, this is their job.

As it turns out, there’s a whole vocabulary of terms and categories that have been developed to describe the foods they’re tasting. For instance, when they’re taste testing mayonnaise they grade it across 6 dimensions of color, 10 dimensions of texture, and 14 dimensions of flavor. And each of those 30 different dimensions are evaluated on a 15-point scale.

When you and I taste mayonnaise we may rate it across only a couple of unconscious categories because we haven’t trained our minds to look for these things. But, with some training and practice, I’m sure we could begin to rapidly improve our ability to taste.

Creativity works the same way.

I can do what I do at Church on the Move not because I’m some super-creative dude, although I have no doubt that to some degree I’m naturally gifted to do what I do, but I believe that I can see and hear things in our services that most people don’t see or hear primarily because I’ve trained my mind to do it over the last 15 years.

Your mind is a muscle and you can train it.

That’s why simply making time to be creative is SO IMPORTANT! You’re giving your mind a workout and the more you work it out with creative thought, the more creative you will become.

You can do this by brainstorming with friends, but brainstorming by itself isn’t enough - you also need to start evaluating your services regularly. And don’t just be general in your evaluations, look at the nitty gritty details.

When most people take in a service at Church on the Move, they don’t see what I see. The average person may lump a service into one of three categories: Great, Average and Bad. But, I see so much more than they do because I’ve trained myself to look for things that most people don’t see.

When we evaluate a service we look at every single detail, from the tone of voice that each presenter on stage used, to each camera shot and everything in between. We look at all of it in great detail because the details matter! The difference between good and great isn’t 50%, it’s 5%, so we put a lot of effort into that last 5% and we’ve found that it’s worth it.

A famous architect once said “God is in the details” and I believe that wholeheartedly. The more you look at the details, the more your mind becomes adept at taking them all in and processing them, and the more your mind processes them, the faster it becomes, thus making you better at what you do.

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Thanks and I look forward to connecting with you guys!

In production circles, being labeled a control freak doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation–most production teams require someone who must maintain the control of each situation that arises and similarly exude that control to provide the direction. I contend that in the production business, those who are not control freaks at some level and have not become successful at controlling situations are the same ones who do not play consistently at the top of their game.

So in the spirit of full disclosure, I have a confession… I am a control freak. I’ll state it again–I am a control freak… but I don’t care. I spent many years on the road watching people, bands, and management operating out of control (and with no control in sight, mind you). No one at the helm, no one to take control of the situation, no one to make the hard decision or at worst, even throw out a guess as to what direction to head in. These experiences have proven to be the largest elements of learning in my professional life. All of the negatives that arose from these particular situations only proved that someone, anyone, had to take control–and over time, this control freak mindset was birthed.

So using this as a basis in managing our production crew, I attempt to make qualified decisions as to how we operate within our constraints while still serving the church in the most excellent manner available to us.

Most people might assume that the most important thing to making our team a success is how much experience each person brings to the table or how much cool gear we know how to operate, etc, but herein lies the secret… In my humble opinion, the best way to be successful in production and team management is simple: MAINTAIN YOUR FOCUS. That’s it–a very simple strategy that allows everyone on the team to work to their maximum potential. Freeing them up from the doldrums of unnecessary interruptions and concerns allows them to direct all of their focus towards the goal (that sounds like I copied it from a self-help book but that was all me).

Maintaining the focus is largely based around time management. Once a creative plan is in place, our time is largely controlled by the “literal”–logistics, timeframes, deadlines, rehearsals, schedules, load-in times, etc. Is there still time enough to “do it” or was all the time taken up on the planning and talking points and now you’re behind the 8-ball with not quite enough time to pull it off? Don’t get me wrong–spending time developing a plan, set, or design is huge but does everyone have to be a part of this? Can the team be split up with some people planning while others remain focused on the “doing”? I devote a great deal of energy in planning out the time our crew will be spending doing each event or project. The result is that I maintain the control of what is to be done now and what can be accomplished at another time.

A key element of this is making sure others outside of our team understand how we function. The production office is the hub–everything hits me first, then I can disseminate information as needed and at my discretion according to whatever else we are involved in. If the crew is getting barraged with calls or interruptions from other departments that need something done, built, repaired, or dealt with, the tendency would be for the production crew to make it happen. That’s just how they roll–they want to serve and help solve issues. BUT it doesn’t mean that their current project load has to be dropped or put on hold. Actually, our deadlines really don’t permit that very often, so we strive as a crew to make sure that the control stays in my court. I spend the time necessary to work through the unplanned projects that inevitably come up and determine when, how, and if they will come into play.

Oftentimes, it might just be that someone didn’t know who to call and I can simply assist in getting the right person or company hooked up on the phone with them. No big deal–problem solved, the other department is happy and satisfied and my team kept their eyes on the ball. I will also slide this gem in here–managing a production of any size is largely based on what contacts you have at your disposal AND how slick you are at pulling the right people in on a project. For teams built on logistics and multi-tasking environments, there has to be a point person who possesses the skill set to solve the issue at hand OR has the knowledge of who to call to get it done.

The result of all this is that even with all the services, events, rebuilds, adapting, and maintenance that the production team is responsible for week in and week out, we manage to stay on top of things. Peter Drucker says in his book, The Effective Executive, “A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place… Similarly a well-managed organization is a ‘dull’ organization. The ‘dramatic’ things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday.” I can’t have my team running all over the place playing “catch-up” bouncing between their must-do projects to the “emergencies” that have popped up. We’ve got big projects that require our attention first and foremost with very little time to maneuver in between. If I effectively manage the distractions, everybody can stay on task and get it done right.

Admittedly, maintaining the focus is tough–it’s something I have to constantly be mindful of… and constantly work at–but it’s worth it. The well-being of my crew demands it, the people who make up COTM deserve it, and in my opinion, it’s just the right way to do it.

Thoughts? Hit the Comments button below.

In my time here, I’ve had to make several decisions that were…let’s just say…less than popular. The reason? It wasn’t the best thing for our kids. If there is one thing I’ve learned from my Dad over the years, it’s that making choices based on principle will always serve you better than those based on popularity. I tell my team this all the time – I have to. It’s amazing how many things come up on a week-to-week basis that challenge this belief. Let me give you an example.

When I first came on, the vast majority of our 4 year old – 6th grade classes were taught by our volunteers. And although they were good, faithful people who had been teaching our kids for years, we knew it was time for a change. You see, it would have been impossible for us to achieve the level of ministry we were shooting for while relying on people who worked 40 hours a week somewhere else. I wish I could tell you that every volunteer gladly received this news and wholeheartedly bought into the vision we had laid out before them but that wasn’t the case. Although many of them stuck and are a tremendous help to us today, several got offended and quit. Even though it was the right decision and has proven out over the course of time, it was not a popular one. As children’s ministers, we are called by God to teach kids His Word and the best thing for our kids is that we start engaging them in the classroom and assume the role of pastor and shepherd, not just oversee or administrate.

Even though this decision wasn’t the most popular at the time, we knew it was right because it was based on a principle: Is this the best thing for our kids? When the answer to that question is yes, we know we are on the right track.

Now there have been other times we have made decisions based on this very same principle and the outcome was quite popular. Last October I was meeting with Stephen Posey, our Elementary Pastor, about the upcoming schedule for Kids on the Move. We got talking on the subject of kids bringing their Bibles to church and how it seemed they were using them more as seat holders than for following along with the message. As we discussed how to fix this problem, it occurred to me that the kids weren’t following along because they had no idea how to navigate through their Bible. It was time to put our principle to use. The best thing for our kids was that they learn the value of God’s Word, as well as memorize all the books of the Bible, so we began an 8-week series called “I Love My Bible”. As part of this series we gave each child a CD with a catchy song we wrote to help them remember all 66 books. The disc also included a message from Pastor Stephen explaining its purpose as well as asking parents to encourage their kids to commit the books to memory. (Click here to download the series)

Our kids absolutely loved it and so did their parents. At the end of the series, we gave kids the opportunity to earn a certificate for memorizing all the books of Bible. We handed out over 200 of them in one weekend (there were some interesting interpretations given by some of our younger kids, i.e. the book of Jonicles – Chronicles, The Very Kiss – Leviticus, and also Have A Cake – Habakkuk). I must say, we’ve received more pats on the back and recognition from that series than any other series we’ve done but honestly, that never entered my mind when we came up with the idea. We didn’t create this series for people to tell us what a great job we were doing. We didn’t write a song and give out a CD to gain popularity throughout our church. We did it because it was the best thing for our kids.

You see, there are times when choosing to do what’s best for your kids brings great recognition and praise but that can’t be what you aim for. There are other times when your decision isn’t popular, but you can’t let that hinder you. Either way, making choices based on principle will always serve you better than those based on popularity. In John 21:15, Jesus said to Peter, “Feed My lambs.” Making that your #1 priority will always be the best thing for your kids.

First, can you tell me just a little bit about yourself? How you got into the position you’re in now?
Wow… long, long story that I’m not sure anyone is interested in! The short version is that I hated school, so when I graduated in 1994 I knew college wasn’t for me and I went to work for my dad [pastor of COTM]. I started at the VERY bottom laying sod around the campus for minimum wage which lasted for all of about two weeks, at which point my dad transferred me into our TV/Media department.

Again, I started at the bottom. Sweeping the studio, running camera. I had minimal creative input but I really loved what I was doing. From there I started doing graphic design. I had no formal training in it so I taught myself and with a little help from some friends I got pretty good at it. I won a few advertising awards here locally and was promoted to leading a team of graphic designers here at the church.

Somewhere around 2003, me and my dad visited Fellowship Church in Dallas and we came back bursting with creative ideas about how we could update what we were doing in our church. We didn’t exactly know how we would pull it all off but we knew we had to do something so it was decided that we would merge our TV and graphics departments into a new department called creative arts and that I would lead it. After a few twists and turns, including me doing a short stint as the youth pastor up at Oneighty, our department has finally evolved over the years to what it is today, the Performing Arts department, which basically includes worship, video, graphic design, drama, marketing, audio, lighting, production, and a bit more here and there.

So, what is a creative director anyway (if that’s what you call yourself)? What do you do in the church? Are you a pastor? A deacon? An in-between?
We have a saying around here that “it’s not about getting it done, it’s about getting it right.” For us, being a creative director means taking whatever project that you’re working on, whether it’s a ladies event or weekend service or a simple promo, and making sure that it’s done right. So that’s what I do. I oversee all the meetings, all the brainstorming, all the planning that goes into the events, brochures, promos, etc. and to make sure that they’re not just done, but that they’re done right.

As for the church, I am a pastor and I also serve on the church’s executive leadership team.

Creative. That’s a big word. What do you focus on? If you have help or assistance, what do your helpers/assistants do?
The funny thing is I don’t “do” much. I don’t create the videos, I don’t sing the songs, I don’t write the scripts, I don’t stage the interviews. I’m not really a doer. I guess my job is sort of like that of a conductor. I set the tempo and provide guidance. Honestly, we have a lot of talented and creative people around here and my job isn’t to tell them how to do what they do, my job is to bring focus to what they’re already doing. Sometimes I start the creative ball rolling, sometimes I don’t, but I’m always the guy to steer the ship.

As for assistants, I really only have one. He just helps me to keep up with all the crazy stuff going on around the church. He’s a detail guy, I’m definitely not! Other than that I would consider the people on my team to be more like partners than assistants. I don’t think the creative genius surrounded by his minions is really an approach that works anymore.

Where do you find creative inspiration to do what you do?
I guess I’m just like everyone else in that I find inspiration in good creative work, whether that be another church or something I found online or on TV or whatever, but ideally I’m inspired by the very work that I’m doing. In other words, I try to find inspiration in the core of the project we’re working on. An example would be Dad Life. We were inspired by the very notion of Father’s Day. I mean when you boil it down, we’re honoring guys who have chosen their family over their image, so that right there is pretty inspiring. From there you just look for a vehicle to carry your idea and having recently seen Swagger Wagon we were pretty sure that a rap video would work. You never sit down with the idea to just “make something cool” that your message will fit into, you always start with your core message and let the idea and inspiration come from that.

Do you see any exciting trends in church media or arts today? Any not-so-exciting trends?
I’m not really someone who follows a lot of global church trends. Honestly, for me it just leads to comparisons and I’m not interested in that. I’m glad that the church has embraced the power of the arts and I see a lot of great work being done out there.

What’s one of the most common misconceptions about your job?
I say this as humbly as I know how, but I think the most common misconception is that to do what I do, you have to be some sort of genius. I’m not a genius, I’m just called. If you’re called, then you’re also graced and equipped to do what God has called you to do. Trust in your call, serve the church, don’t promote yourself, and you’ll be fine.

Talk to us about relevance, especially as it relates to your role.
Relevance isn’t really a word I spend a lot of time thinking about. I just try to serve the message in a way that moves me. I’m pretty cynical so if I’m moved, then I feel good about how it’ll impact our congregation. The only other thing I would add to that is that I avoid being cheesy. Our message isn’t a cute one full of nice sayings that would go nicely on a motivational poster. It’s real and it’s raw and it’s powerful and I don’t think we do it any favors by making it cute.

Can you briefly describe a normal day (if there is one) in your life as a creative director?
I’m pretty much meeting with different people all day every day. Often we’ll start the day with one big brainstorming meeting and then from there I’ll meet with smaller groups of people about specific parts of specific projects.

How do you do the cool stuff? The cool graphics, videos, etc.?
I don’t! Gary Hornstien, our motion designer, does all that stuff. You can read his two blog posts on our resource site, Seeds, about the equipment that we use.

How should other churches, especially churches with a teeny budget or limited resources, get involved in media–if at all?
I like to think of creativity like a muscle, when you exercise it, it gets stronger. So make time every week, every day, to intentionally be creative. Involve other people if possible. Even if they’re not “creative” you never know what the accountant or secretary might be able to contribute, plus, I hate working alone so I think building a team, whether they’re staff or volunteers, is essential. I guess it depends on the church. This is our calling so it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, but I wouldn’t presume that everybody everywhere should do things just exactly like we do. If you were wanting to transition your church into this kind of thing, you could start just by making time to be creative on purpose. If you don’t create on purpose you’ll also never create by accident. It’s a practice, a habit, that you have to develop.

What is one of the best ways of using art in the church? (Besides, obviously, using a sound system to make sure people hear the speaker?)
Well I think art really allows us to connect people to God on an emotional level which I think is important. I can’t think of a better place to be “moved” than church. We have the greatest message and I think we have an opportunity every week to create moments where people can feel God even on an emotional level. Additionally, art is a perfect medium for telling stories and I think that’s a huge part of our calling as creative directors in our churches. We are charged with the great responsibility of taking the stories of what God has done and what He is doing across our communities and making those stories come to life.

What is one thing that every creative director needs besides a good cup of coffee?
You have to know what you want. If you constantly waffle and question yourself, chances are you’re not a creative leader. You may be a great contributor, but you’re not the leader and these are very different roles. The leader HAS to know what direction the team needs to head in. It isn’t that you can never allow yourself to be challenged or questioned, but there comes a point where you have to have a certain sense, a certain knowing that the group must head in a particular direction. If you don’t know where you’re headed, your team will either be hijacked by someone else or you’ll waffle around in no man’s land never really accomplishing anything.

What advice would you give to small churches regarding creative arts, media, etc.?
I would say recognize your advantages. I may be in a position where I have a larger team and a larger budget but larger doesn’t always equal better. Our size affords us some awesome opportunities but it also presents us with some disadvantages too. We can’t be as relational or intimate in our creative approach as a smaller church can be. When I saw U2 in Arrowhead stadium in 1997 for their Popmart tour it was HUGE in every way. That tour cost a fortune and it was amazing to see, but just as awesome as that was seeing Sigur Ros play a small venue with 1% of the budget of U2. So recognize your strengths and play off those instead of dwelling on what you don’t have and you’ll go a lot further.

We have two edit rooms. Really these rooms are just me and Chris’ offices, but for the sake of sounding professional, let’s go with Edit Room for the remainder of this post. Each of our rooms are about identical in hardware and software. Here’s my not-too-technical rundown:

HARDWARE

• Mac Pro with 4TB eSata external drive for Time Machine backups
• M-Audio Studiophile CX5 monitors connected by an M-Audio USB FastTrack
• Two comfy chairs and a lamp

We shoot everything on P2 cards so we have no tape back up. It’s very important to have a backup of all our current projects in case a drive goes down or I hit the “delete important files” shortcut on my keyboard. We have a few 1TB internal drives (which means three I just found out) inside our Mac Pro. One is used as the OS X System and the other two are RAID 0, which means they are connected and files are split between the two drives for extra performance. Do not ever do this unless you have a constant backup of that drive. That’s what our 4TB drive does - backs up all of our current work.

SOFTWARE

• Apple Final Cut Suite (all that we use in the suite is Final Cut, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro)
• Adobe Production Premium (we only use After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop)

FINAL CUT PLUG-INS

• Magic Bullet Looks. We color grade everything with this. They’re great presets that we usually use as a starting place and make tweaks to the exact feel we’re going after.
• The Foundry: Furnace Core. The frame blending for slow-motion in Final Cut is terrible to say the least. This plugin allows us to dramatically change the speed of clips while maintaining smoothness between frames.

AFTER EFFECTS PLUG-INS

• Magic Bullet Looks. Same as what we use in Final Cut.
• Trapcode Particular. Very cool particle generator and simple to use. If you’ve ever seen stars or flying Christmas ornaments in our services, this has been its creator.
• Videocopilot Optical Flares. We got this when we started working on this years easter service opener. Very simple to use and creates lens flares JJ Abrams would be proud of.
• AEScripts.com. Click here for a few time-saving scripts. Specifically LayerChain and Magnum. I use LayerChain for parenting a ton of layers to the layer right above itself when creating that faux 3D look. Magnum - The Edit Detector is used when I bring in the edited video announcements. It analyzes the video and separates it into layers automatically.

If you’re using something you love that’s not on my list, I’d like to hear about it and maybe add it to my list. Just drop it in the comment box.

Having time to reflect on the 12 hours or so that they were here, I have a few observations that I believe can help all of us as worship leaders who desire to do something meaningful with our music and teams. So here are 4 quick thoughts:

MAKE OLDER SONGS FRESH AGAIN
They were here promoting their new project, “Beautiful Exchange”, but they did several of their older songs as well. Instead of rehashing old arrangements they took songs they have been doing for years and made them sound fresh. I’ll be honest, their version of “Mighty to Save” was my favorite moment of the night. They made it interesting and moving, even though I’ve heard and sung that song 1,000 times. It’s motivated us to rethink older songs that we know our congregation loves to sing, but that we have grown tired of as a worship team.

TAKE TIME TO BUILD A MOMENT
Hillsong definitely knows how to “idle” in a worship moment, allowing time for the Spirit in the room to go to another level. Obviously, for most church services, we don’t have 2 hours set aside for worship – 20 or 30 minutes is more likely. But we can always find time to build personal worship moments where our congregation can close their eyes and worship in their own way, without someone telling them what to do.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THEM, OR US
It was refreshing to see artists not being artists. They were here to lead us in worship, not necessarily to sell the “Hillsong” brand. Yeah, they sold cd’s, dvd’s and t-shirts, but I never got the sense, on stage and off, that we were just another stop on the tour. They were kind to our staff and crew, always taking time to compliment our facilities and show genuine interest in our church. They never seemed to put themselves above us. Sometimes as worship leaders we can get caught up in the performance and execution of our sets (and don’t get me wrong – performance and execution are extremely important!), causing us to lose perspective. Why do we do what we do? Ultimately, our worship service is exactly that – service to our church and our pastor. Hillsong modeled this beautifully.

WE ARE NOT HILLSONG
Although we do a lot of their music, we are not them! It’s a good thing to emulate what moves you – vocals, guitar sounds, drum patterns, etc. We spend a lot of time breaking down songs to find out why they work musically and emotionally, and it definitely makes us better at what we do. But at some point we have to realize that we are unique. So many people have emailed us to let us know that although the loved the Hillsong concert, they love what we do here at COTM more. Why? Because we take the best of what we see around us and make it our own, which, honestly, makes it better. It is a constant struggle to stay current by introducing the most exciting new music every week, and yet be sensitive to what music will encourage our people to drop their guard and worship with all they have. To become Hillsong Tulsa is a mistake; to let Hillsong and their music influence us to be better at what we do is more appropriate. And we are better for having met them and having worshipped with them.

Food for thought.

As I noted in a previous blog, my experience prior to taking this position was through many years of touring where renting was commonplace and in most situations, the only way to get the job done. It seems to make the most practical sense from the fiscal and cash-flow side of a church. Whether you are a small operation or a big one, the same financial responsibility and stewardship is a common denominator–we all still have to spend money in a practical manner that can work within a budget.

Over time, we have discovered what items it made sense to own vs. rent. By renting for awhile, you are able to try out different gear in your particular setting–the piece of gear you thought would change your life may not be as cool as you thought once you immerse it into your current setup.

LIGHTING
For our moving lights, with the exception of a handful of fixtures, we rent everything. We’ve used several different vendors over the years depending on what we needed and who had the inventory at the time but as of our most recent set change we were able to consolidate our lighting rental down to one local vendor, Integrity Lighting. These guys not only have a huge inventory of lighting but have a large selection of LED products that have come in really handy in our various lighting and scenic designs. Using a local vendor is a major plus as well in that they can provide assistance with skilled maintenance for the equipment and added labor when our gear and design needs change.

In the conventional lighting world, we own and maintain a fairly large inventory of conventional instruments including Source4 pars, Strand SL lekos (ranging from 10º to 50º), an assortment of 1K and 2K Fresnels, and the normal array of dimmers, cabling, and utility items you would expect.

VIDEO
We made a decision several years ago to upgrade our camera package as our current cameras had served the ministry well but had reached the end of their lifespan. I reached out to a longtime touring associate, Evan French with Big Picture Productions, for a solution. We pulled in one of their 3-camera fly-pack systems using Hitachi Standard-Definition cameras with an EchoLab switcher and the typical but simple complement of outboard gear to get us going. We still tapped into our existing projectors and screens as they were a built-in part of the stage at that time.

Over time, we figured out the best way to implement this monthly rental and are still renting a video package from BPP consisting of (5) Hitachi SD cameras and a new Barco FSN-150 switcher. One of the reasons we have been able to stick with Standard Definition cameras is that during the recent remodel of our main auditorium, we made the jump to Barco I-6 LED walls instead of projection. Once we saw the incredible difference in the display quality, our SD cameras looked amazing. We do use one of our own P-2 HD cameras as a wide-shot, so it gives us a 6-camera shoot that serves our needs quite well. If interested, you can check out this link which goes a little more in depth of some the Barco gear we use.

By establishing a long-term monthly rental situation on these high dollar items, it allowed us to build up a fantastic control room with all the bells and whistles but we did it a little bit at a time over a couple of years, so again, this didn’t create a massive cash outlay that would cause any kind of a financial drain for the church.

AUDIO
It’s safe to say that the audio equipment gets the heaviest usage at all of our facilities. This is one of those areas where owning vs. renting will in almost all cases prove to be more cost-effective to purchase rather than rent. It is very sensible to rent and hang a speaker system to help give you an idea of what you may want to purchase. Same with an audio console–if you’re thinking of a purchase or upgrade, rent something first and give it a test drive.

I already had a lot of experience using most large PA systems, so we didn’t necessarily have to rent something for our main auditorium prior to a purchase but in our secondary auditorium (built as the original auditorium on this campus), I rented a new small line-array that I had never used–this allowed me several months of trial and error based on our specific usage and need before we settled on what exactly we were going to purchase.

You can rent almost anything that’s out there, not just the main items like the lighting, video and audio I’ve mentioned above but you can rent stage sets, band risers, backdrops, curtains, carpeting, chandeliers, pipe and draping, wireless mics, ear monitor systems (great way to gear up for a large holiday event) etc, etc. The list is almost endless as to what vendors will rent to you and most of it comes with delivery and setup assistance included. It is rare that we’ve done an event in which there is not some level of rental involved–it has become something that we can budget for easily and it’s a huge plus that we are not left with a massive storage situation when the project is concluded.

• Who’s hosting?
• Who’s preaching?
• What songs are we doing?
• Will we have a band or just tracks?
• How many dancers will be on stage?
• Who needs a handheld / headset?
• What are our lighting cues?
• What’s the “moment” of the service?
• What are our transitions?
• How do we get props / puppets on stage?

So how do we make the jigsaw pieces fall into place? Sitting down with our production guys is really just the beginning. There are singers, dancers, speakers, CG operators, lighting guys, musicians, puppeteers, the list goes on. So, what’s the key? Andrew Stone once told me, “If you have a mistake happen in your service, it’s not because of what’s happening right then, it’s because of the lack of preparation leading up to that point.” It’s very true. So, how do we make sure we’re ready? It’s in one word: REHEARSAL.

Nearly every time we’ve had a mess up on stage, it was because someone didn’t know the information they needed, information that would have been covered in rehearsal.

After we create the concept, here is our plan of communication and rehearsal:

THURSDAY

5:00 PM // Meeting with production to go over our service schedule

6:15 PM // Dancers’ rehearsal

SATURDAY

1:30 PM // Meeting (all hosts, production manager, band leader)

2:00 PM // Band rehearsal (if we’re doing a live band) and sketch read through with hosts / actors

3:15 PM // Dancers’ call time

4:00 PM // Full service run-through (all songs, sketches, misc. cues)

5:30 PM // Doors open

After our Saturday service, we’ll meet. If we need to, we’ll make tweaks or cut parts of the service. Our goal is to produce a fluid service that communicates a story and the truth of God’s Word. There’s not too much we consider sacred. If a segment doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. We return on Sunday for another full run-through, with any changes.

SUNDAY

7:15 AM // Hosts and band arrive

7:30 AM // Call time and full service run-through

I’m convinced that you can’t over communicate service details to the team. You can’t assume that everyone will know what’s happening, even if you planned a similar service to last week’s. Send emails as ideas are being conceived. Shoot a text after a meeting. Communication is a must! That’ll keep the jigsaw falling into place.

So there you have it. I’d love to hear any feedback!

First off, let me say, I love the church. Not just our church, but THE Church, at large, and I know that our way of doing things isn’t always THE way to do things for every church. I get that. I also get that no two churches are alike and so we shouldn’t be inbreeding with each other, but we should be different and diverse. That’s a good thing.

That said, when I browse the web I spend a lot time checking out other churches. I watch service videos of big churches and small churches to pick up ideas and see how different churches do different things. And one thing I see across a lot of different churches, both big and small, that drives me is NUTS is people getting on the stage and just “wingin’ it.”

I’m not just talking about the pastor who’s giving the message, I’m talking about the announcement guy/girl, the person who’s doing the offering, the worship leader, basically, anybody who’s on the stage.

If you look at the scripture you can’t help but see a plan, a design. Every word has meaning, every verse has a purpose. In the Jewish tradition it was said that God gave Moses the Torah not just verse by verse, or even word by word, but letter by letter. That’s God being VERY intentional, and yet for many of us, when we address our church families, we’ve put little to no thought into what we might say. Sure, it may only be an announcement or a welcome, but when there’s no purpose or design we tend to ramble on and throw out tons of corny Christian phrases that really have no meaning and only serve to alienate those who aren’t familiar with our christianese.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you don’t speak from your heart. I’m not suggesting that you memorize every word or that the Spirit doesn’t prompt you to say certain things from time to time when the moment arises but I’m simply suggesting that you spend a little time crafting your words so that when you hit the stage you are concise and purposeful.

You only have so much time with your church family every week so every second counts. Let’s stop wasting it with aimless speech.

“Say it clearly and you make it beautiful no matter what.” — Bruce Weigl

Here are some classic church time wasters that we could all stand to eliminate from our services.

• Constantly asking the crowd “how many of you know… (fill in the blank)” looking for a response from your congregation.
• Using Amen as a question frequently.
• Using Amen / Hallelujah / Glory to God / Praise God, etc. as punctuation to every sentence.
• Telling people to “turn to their neighbor and (insert a corny joke here).”
• Constantly asking to people to repeat every other phrase you say.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and some the time-wasters you deal with in your church.

The crux of our permanent video install is the BARCO I-6 XP LED product. These are configured on either side of the stage in true 16:9 ratio–we made it easy to calculate and made these appx 16’w x 9’h. There was a great deal of engineering put into the mechanics of how these are mounted since each wall weighs roughly two tons and at the same time, much care was given as to how they would be kept accessible for maintenance and repair. This photo is taken from the backside of the stage right LED wall.

The I-6 was something we rented for a special event prior to our auditorium remodel and it was such a vast improvement over the standard screen and projection fare that we literally built our remodel production budget around it. These panels have a 6mm pixel resolution giving it very intense contrast and color reproduction. They’ve been great so far and will be something we’ll look forward to using for quite some time.

The ground row of LED walls forming a short wall across the back of the stage is another Barco product, the BARCO S-LITE 10XP. These are more of an outdoor LED product but we’ve had them in and out of here quite a few times over the last 3 or 4 years and they seem to like being in the air conditioning. These don’t have quite the resolution of the I-6’s but work REALLY well for B-roll footage, jumpbacks, and graphics. The major thing about the S-lite is the weight–they are extremely heavy so we try and utilize ground-stacking whenever possible. One example of how we implemented them as both a rigged and a ground-stacked element is shown here. To say that it was challenging to figure out the load balance hanging from our grid is an understatement…

The final element of this set’s LED is what we hung above the band to assist with tying the lyrics in a bit more to the actual stage set. This is the BARCO O-LITE 510. These have a 10mm pixel resolution so it was a perfect solution to display lyrics on as the edges of the lettering would still appear smooth–this has a bit of an issue on some other products that have lower resolutions. We are using an auxiliary bus on our switcher to route lyrics only to these O-Lites so any lyric our CG operator puts on the main video walls will be mirrored on these and it has really been a nice addition. The following rehearsal photo is a bit rough but you can see the O-Lite wall suspended above the stud guitarist in the white shirt…

There is another product that we fell in love with during our previous Easter services: the WINVISION-8. We used these to add a center video image with a similar resolution to the existing I-6 walls but something that would still hang easily in our venue. We did a few tricks with the Winvision for these events but we’ll leave that for another entry coming soon! The Winvision just rocked–check out these photos:

We made a conscious decision a while back to embrace these and other LED products and incorporate them into our designs as the impact and clarity available is second to none. It has forced us to think outside of the box to continue to come up with creative ways to not only implement them creatively but how to use them as an enhancement to the event rather than the focus.

Stay tuned for more “nerd-speak” (proper credit given to Dave Rat for coining that phrase)!

On a practical note, we tweaked a couple of our camera positions and slightly adjusted our approach to shooting each service and I think it made a huge impact. If you watch our stuff regularly you’ll notice the difference. Would love your thoughts.

http://vimeo.com/14032992

Another side of that coin however is the process of developing talented people. Clearly, not everyone can be involved in everything, but I firmly believe that people are our GREATEST resource and if that’s true, then a great deal of my time should be invested in developing people. We’re doing a reasonable job of that now but we could do better.

Jim Collins said in his book “Good to Great” that great companies “get the wrong people off the bus, the right people on the bus, and the right people in the right seats BEFORE deciding which way the bus should go.” If you haven’t taken the time to read his book, you really should, it’s shaped a lot of our thinking around here.

If that whole wrong people off the bus, right people on the bus thing is true, and if that process is necessary to successfully determining which direction you should go then developing the right people becomes HUGE!

One of our challenges and I suspect it’s the same for many of you as well, is making time for developing people. I recently heard Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar talk about his job, which is essentially managing the health and chemistry of the many different teams working at Pixar. You can watch that interview here.

Jack Welch said this, “My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull up some weeds too.”

I love this because time and time again we have seen this to be true. Surrounding yourself with the right people is paramount to finding success in whatever field you work in. So people really are our greatest resource. The challenge is lifting up your head long enough from the “doing” of church work to begin developing the up and comers around you.

I’ve got much to chew on.

This became really clear a couple of weeks ago during a special women’s event we did here called Romance. Angie said it like this:

Romance 20:10
For God so loved the woman, that He tortured the creative team…

Don’t get me wrong, the event came off great and everyone was pleased. The trouble was that this was one of the more stressful events we’ve done recently and honestly, it wasn’t very much fun for us (the people who put it together) to experience. We were on edge because we were working on it right up until the very last minute and we weren’t exactly sure that it was all going to connect or even work and that’s not a fun place to be in. We felt unsatisfied with what we had created because it was unfinished and untested. When the event was over we all said to each other, let’s not do that again!

BTW, If you haven’t seen our Romance event you can watch it here:

http://vimeo.com/13732048

http://vimeo.com/13732440

Now to be clear, I realize that these events aren’t all about us, and I also know that many challenges we face are stressful and that’s just part of life, but I also believe in being prepared and doing all that you can do to eliminate stressful situations because we do our best work when we’re relaxed and enjoying ourselves.

So how do you pull this off? How do you work toward HUGE events in the future (Christmas, Easter, Conferences, etc) and still put the desired emphasis into every weekend? That’s our big question right now.

Here are the solutions we’ve arrived at.

1) Hire a bunch of new people to work the weekend so we can concentrate on the future.
Hahaha yeah right. Let’s hear option #2.

2) Slightly pull back on the weekend and use volunteers and other contract laborers within the church to maintain the weekly status quo, while we work to get ahead.
So far this is our best idea. We figure that if we can take a slight step back we can shuffle some weekend projects to other people. If we don’t have to be as involved this will at least allow us to create a plan for Christmas and then conferences so that we can take a look at the work required to pull those events off at which point we’ll find a way to get it done.

One of the principles we live by around here is that God doesn’t always provide all the details, but He always provides a way, and if we’ll just trust Him enough to take that first step, then the next step will become clear. If you wait for all the details to come into focus before you make your move, you’ll be waiting forever. It’s a ready, shoot, aim, approach. So for us, solution #2 is a good first step. We’ll know how we’re gonna cross the Red Sea when we get there, and when we do, I’ll blog about it.

This church has recently completed the largest phase of a massive campus-wide renovation project. The decision to preserve both our physical plant and secondary spaces was not an easy one when it came to the main auditorium–it meant that the auditorium would have to be gutted and redesigned while maintaining the current floor slope, exterior walls, and roof design all the while keeping the attached building spaces open so church activities could continue uninterrupted in all adjacent spaces. This gave us the “box” for the new auditorium design and gave us a starting point as to what could be reused and what would be reworked. In the end, every production area was either torn out and rebuilt or completely overhauled to accommodate the level of production we were in need of.

When this auditorium was built, it was relevant for where the church was at the time but it didn’t allow the production much room to grow or change for the future. This remodel would need to not only be comprehensive but allow for future changes and adaptations farther down the line. Now don’t get me wrong–we were having some really great events over the last few years but there were several big-ticket production systems that were on their last legs and massive problems were on the horizon.

We had made the decision a few years ago to go without any large-scale church consulting firm. These companies can be great for some situations but with the level of experience found within COTM’s own production staff–it became apparent that we could save the money on consultants and put it into the gear. We reached out to COTM’s long-time associate Brant Doell and Strategic Connections (formerly One Source Building Technologies) to assist in integrating our new design into this existing building and to help strategize on how best to make all of this come together on this rather short 18-week timeline. Brant and the Strategic Connections team were assisted throughout the install by our own paid technical staff–this not only helped COTM realize a significant savings on labor but it gave us a great working knowledge of how this very complicated system was put together and decreased our learning curve when it came time to make it all work.

VIDEO

The decision to go with two large 16’x9’ Barco I-6 walls instead of projectors was made pretty simple once we experienced them in the old auditorium. We had rented them for an Easter production and knew immediately we could never go back to conventional projection. Our video supplier Evan French and his company Big Picture Productions hammered out a deal and this became our new building block for the video side of the renovation.

COTM has had a fairly extensive background in television and movie production, some may have heard of The Gospel Bill Show–Willie George (i.e.: Gospel Bill) is the Founder and Pastor of COTM, so we were already used to video being a major part of our events. We had been renting our camera package from Big Picture for quite some time with the thought of going to a High Definition platform in the future but after seeing the massive change in the video quality just from the LED screens we opted to stay with our conventional Hitachi cameras instead of making the jump to all HD heads. I know this is not “cool” by some, but we have no broadcast other then Vimeo uploads and archiving, so the investment required for HD cameras just didn’t make any sense although we did install the necessary groundwork to accommodate HD cameras in the future if needed.

Along with the LED walls and the camera rental, Big Picture provided us with a new Barco FSN-150 switcher. This was one of the few switcher products we found that had the onboard effects we wanted and would keep our latency to a minimum. We added a nice supplement of video front-end devices that gave us an all HD signal path in the control room, HD feeds to all closed circuit televisions and fiber-optic feeds to the LED walls.

We rounded this out by adding our complement of existing Mac Pro towers to the mix, maintaining ProPresenter as our computer graphics platform and Final Cut for all live service captures.

Overall, the video looks absolutely fantastic, is easy to operate and has been able to accommodate everything we have thrown at it. Our live captures look good and every seat in the house has a great view.

AUDIO

Given the focus that COTM has always placed on great sound reinforcement, there was no choice but to go with a line array–but making that happen and staying within budget was the challenge. It became obvious that Harman International had the goods to make this a reality.

The final speaker system is comprised of (38) JBL Vertec 4088 modules flown in (4) arrays with (16) JBL ASB6128V subs, (10) flown and (6) under-stage; Front-fills are (7) JBL AC28/95’s housed behind the finish work around the perimeter of the stage.

Amplifiers are (49) Crown MA5000i amps and (10) CT 2000 and CT 3000 amps. All control and routing is handled with (8) BSS Soundweb London’s and (2) DBX 4800’s.

All of our wireless systems had to be reworked in light of the 700MHz issues and to salvage any useable systems we currently owned. Wireless is a challenge here as our geographical location puts us in a frequency hotbed and most of church events utilize about 50 wireless channels between microphones and in-ear monitors–not to mention all the wireless com belt-packs and 2-way radios floating around. Needless to say, our Intermodulation Analysis software from Professional Wireless Systems gets quite a workout… Everything has worked great utilizing all Shure products for microphones and a combination of both Shure and Sennheiser products for all in-ear systems.

The existing conduit lines under the original slab had become waterlogged and were compromised over the years–and it didn’t necessarily fill me with confidence to splice onto the existing copper to reach the new patch-bay location. So we made the decision to replace all of our existing snake lines with a Whirlwind SPC83P 3-way splitter system which utilized all new IJIS cable runs along with some CAT6 runs for any future audio, video or lighting growth we might encounter. This snake system is coupled to several Whirlwind Patchmasters located backstage so all input and output patching remains flexible but extremely simple to deal with.

The FOH position is made up of (2) MIDAS Heritage 3000 consoles. Yeah, I know this is where everyone groans and says “Why not digital?”. Well, we already had an H3000 in pristine condition–and adding an additional H3000 back in my touring days was always an easy deal–so it seemed to be an easy solution for this application. One of the wizards at Strategic Connections made me a cross-connect cable to link the console electronics and Whirlwind built a harness to link up the outputs–done deal. I will say this, it really feels good to have this many analog inputs that sound this great–I am never buried in layers or submenus and to be honest, it feels like I can still be an audio engineer instead of a computer genius when “in the moment”. Every “A” console has it own list of pros and cons–but for this particular situation, sticking with this version of Midas “awesomeness” serves us great. The outboard gear list is fairly simple: a complement of Klark-Teknik Square-Ones for compressors and gates, several effect units from Eventide, TC Electronic and Lexicon and a few DBX and UA tube preamps.

The coolest thing about this particular audio rig is that Jim Brawley did the EASE modeling for this room AND took a week out of his very busy schedule to traverse to Tulsa and really dial in all of the PA components. I knew of Mr. Brawley by reputation only and was blown away that Strategic Connections worked it out to incorporate him in to the mix. Aside from being a gentlemen, I felt he did his homework by watching some of our services on Vimeo allowing him to become familiar with both my mixing style and our high-energy service content.

The audio package is outstanding–everything sounds perfect and sweet–it gives back exactly what I put into it–transparent, in your face, adaptable…All the adjectives you would want to use to describe it are applicable. In short–being the audio engineer in this room is the best seat in the house.

LIGHTING

A few years ago I was able to convince my good friend Daniel Connell to leave the comfort and predictability of his tour bus bunk and move out here to serve as our Lighting Designer. Due to the many lighting changes we had implemented after his arrival on staff, the lighting system didn’t require a complete overhaul.

We currently maintain a large inventory of Vari-lite, Martin and conventional fixtures, control by GrandMA and Pathport, ETC dimming throughout and all necessary infrastructure you would expect in a system of this size but the majority of our moving light package is rented based on each specific design. This gives Daniel the creative freedom to swap out gear and switch things around as needed. “Gearing-up” for larger events and designs or scaling things down when needed has proven to be great option for us.

Since much of our stage lighting was already sorted, we devoted some time to coming up with a better data distribution plan. The original auditorium had incorporated only two DMX universes and we had been getting by thus far by using extra lines from FOH to stage and occasionally renting a GrandMA NSP for larger events. As part of this project we were able to integrate a network of Pathport nodes throughout the room. This provided data to our built-in lighting elements such as dimmer racks and architectural LED’s using a combination of Pathport DMX Manager Plus 4-point nodes and Pathport UNO nodes. To accommodate the frequent redesign of our components onstage, we went with the Pathport Touring Edition nodes for a more flexible solution. The seamless integration of the MA Lighting GrandMA control console and these Pathport nodes allows a total of eight universes to be distributed anywhere in the room.

Although most of the lighting changes were centered around infrastructure, the most obvious change was a complete overhaul of the house lighting. Prior to the remodel, the houselights were comprised of numerous 8’ fluorescent fixtures. Several years ago the church had begun to integrate a few various dimmable lighting fixtures here and there to try and create a warmer atmosphere but it did not allow for the proper coverage to light the room evenly. After going through several types of fixtures trying to find the proper “warmth” for the room, the ETC Source 4 Par ended up providing a quality of light that was warmer and more friendly than any of the architectural fixtures we had tested. The final result in the house is a warm atmosphere with extremely even coverage that greatly accents the color palette of the room.

The design also allowed us to focus on how to consolidate the dimming, power distribution and data which helped make our moving light integration and motor control a much simpler process. To be forward-thinking on what the future holds within our lighting system, we devoted considerable thought to cable management, cable drops, and floor access panels. Not only do our light and set designs look current and stay relevant, the lighting control areas throughout stay neat and organized. Although it involves a great deal of cabling and gear, everything has a home.

The final result of the lighting system is a room that is extremely comfortable and warm for the audience, a stage that is flexible and accommodating for our lighting designs while maintaining a sophisticated control system that has lightened the load considerably for our technical staff.

STAGE, RIGGING, & BACKSTAGE

Hands down, the most labor intensive part of this remodel was the stage–between the demolition and removal of the old stage altogether, the backstage wall, and removing the overhead facade that housed a small lighting grid and outdated video projection and screens. The build-back gave us a massive flat stage with plenty of backstage space. I was desiring enough room backstage to be able to build and dress band risers and backline gear quickly and we got it with room to grow. The architectural team from Selser Schaefer Architects led by Hank Spieker really nailed it with this space. They married a creative plan of repurposing old rooms and hallways in a non-conventional manner with the practical production needs we were desperate for. We now have a stage level loading dock with a 10’ wide overhead door opening into our backstage space–directly above this on the 2nd floor is another 10’ door that opens to the scene shop. This allows us to use the same loading dock with a forklift or jib crane to transfer equipment and materials to the shop. There is another 10’ door that opens from the shop onto the stage so that large pieces can be lowered directly onto the upstage area. The support structure for the stage allows for 15,000 lbs/sq foot which gives us the ability to use large equipment on stage such as scissor-lifts, boom-lifts, cars, elephants and just about anything the creative team can come up with.

With such a large stage space, we needed to be able to handle a large overhead lighting and video rig not to mention the weight of the audio system so we designed a rigging grid that used I-beams spaced every 5’ from upstage to downstage separated by the main support beams running front to back every 25’. The engineers put their pencils to it and allowed us a dynamic load limit of 3000 lbs per beam per 25’ bay which supplies us with an extremely agile rigging solution for almost anything we would need to hang.

By opening up our space, it has breathed new life into our creative and design process (not to mention how good it feels to not build set pieces out in the hallway). Also, I think our Facilities team is happier not repairing doorways, sheetrock, carpet and tile since we’re no longer using the front door to load and unload trucks.

SYSTEM CONTROL
To tie everything together and provide some type of system control, we went with a full-blown AMX system. From one of several touch-screens, we have the ability to control the power procedures on all major systems as well as control for all pertinent facets of the main video and closed-circuit television system. It also provides on and off continuity to the houselights for either cleaning, rehearsals or events, and gives us instant control of the audio to the lobby and common areas. Going this route for system control gives us a nice advantage as we continue to renovate other parts of the facility which will incorporate more control and flexibility into the system. Oh yeah…it’s also kind of nice to monitor the A/V system components from home.

IN CLOSING
As we’ve been using this room for several months now, we haven’t really had to change anything of consequence. This comes as quite a surprise to some of us since you always seem to hear of the myriad of punch-lists, follow-up details, and nightmare stories after a project of this scope. The lack of problems only serves as a perfect example of what can be done with the proper amount of planning married with communication between the install teams, contractors, designers, architects and house staff. Everyone I had the privilege to work with on this remodel had an outstanding work ethic with every company and individual bringing nothing but the best to the table.

From the viewpoint of a church production guy, I am humbled at the opportunity to serve this church and community with such a tremendous auditorium and look forward to what the future holds.

Here are a few things that we do to help prevent burn-out:

WE MAKE SURE WE ARE PREPARED FOR EACH REHEARSAL
It’s important that our team is not burdened with our lack of preparation. When they walk in the door they should be greeted with enthusiasm and direction. We know what we’re doing, what we expect of them and how long we will be rehearsing that day. We load all of our songs onto Planning Center well ahead of time to make sure everyone is familiar with the feels, keys, and arrangements. As the worship pastor I need to be extremely confident in our vision for the service/event. That alone will relieve stress for our team members.

WE ACCOMMODATE OUR TEAM’S SCHEDULE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
We come up against scheduling obstacles all the time, especially when we need to add rehearsals for a special event. If my drummer’s work schedule changes, I will consider changing rehearsal times so that he doesn’t feel the pressure of making a decision between job and church. If we need an extra vocal rehearsal we may do it on a Sunday after church or Wednesday night before service when I know our singers will be there anyway. In other words, make it as easy as possible for your team to make rehearsal and not feel like they are putting the rest of their life on hold.

WE GET DEEPER
I understand that for small churches it is difficult to have multiple drummers and bass players, or more than 3 or 4 quality vocalists. But that’s no excuse for not seeking more talented people who can help you (read my earlier blog post on ideas on how to develop new talent). We deal with this issue every summer when we send music teams out to Dry Gulch to lead summer camp worship. We dealt with it last year when we had to split up our services between buildings when we remodeled our sanctuary. Motto: you can never have a deep enough roster. Being deeper also allows you to not have to lean on the same people every week. Giving one of your key players or singers a couple weeks off will keep them fresh!

WE LET THEM SEE BEHIND THE CURTAIN
I think it’s important to let our team in on why we do what we do, to help them understand the creative process that got us to this point. When they can buy in to the big picture they are more apt to shrug off tired voices and heavy work schedules. We share our victories with them, letting them know about the lives that have been changed because of the service/event that they were a part of. Nothing will motivate someone more than knowing they are making a difference.

WE HELP EACH ONE GET BETTER AT WHAT THEY DO
By letting our players and singers know that we will do whatever we can to help them get better, we motivate them to stay connected. I will offer vocal and performance instruction to any of my singers who desire to get better. In the past we have set up our players with private teachers. We want everyone to feel as though they are on a journey and we are going to help them any way we can.

WE FELLOWSHIP
We have a nice, comfortable and spacious area each week where our team can relax and have fun between services. We provide food, drinks, WiFi, etc. in an effort to help them relax. We build in fun events for our team several times a year to say “thank you” for all of their hard work. We’ll cater in a nice meal, play games, and give away prizes, letting them know how much we appreciate their hard work throughout the year.

As leaders we need to continually be aware of the “condition of our flock”. Make sure that as you motivate and push your team to do bigger and better things that you don’t lose sight of the gift that your volunteers are giving you: their time.

Comments or questions? Would love to hear them…

http://vimeo.com/13344082

For us, often times what we develop in a creative meeting doesn’t get realized in a service but on this particular weekend things worked out just about like we had planned. So here’s the video of the weekend that we planned the Tuesday before. Enjoy and if you have any questions, fire away!

http://vimeo.com/13521523

On a road crew, most of the teams remain fairly departmentalized primarily from an organizational standpoint. Although I’ve emulated a road crew from a practical standpoint where each member of our team has a specific role, it is commonplace for us to forget our specific jobs and work on the same facet of a project so we can accomplish a task more efficiently. This not only creates and maintains a feeling of teamwork but helps build general production knowledge in areas that may not be in one’s daily purview. I’ve never been a fan of the someone saying “That’s not my job, man”, so around here it’s definitely all for one whenever the need arises…

Keeping that in mind, here is a breakdown and description of our production crew:

YOURS TRULY // Production Manager & Audio Director

I expend most of my energy planning and implementing how all of our production areas ministry-wide have to come together to accomplish the final result laid out by the creative team and church leadership. This includes long-range planning, logistics, budgets, scheduling, assisting on scenic and staging designs, and an occasional nap.

On the audio side–I head up our audio team and make sure that we are staffed on all events, keep our auditory direction focused and in check, mix all of our main service events, and mix some Pro Tools stuff here and there as needed.

DANIEL CONNELL // Lighting Designer

Daniel designs all of the lighting for everything we do on campus and oversees the lighting crew as they program and staff all of our events. It’s a daunting job as we not only have our main auditorium but several auxiliary auditoriums that have sizable systems with equally high equipment and design needs. I’ve worked and been close friends with Daniel going on close to 10 years now and his knowledge of the craft is impressive. He not only knows what to do to make things fit into the creative vision of what we’ve been given but how to get it there quickly and professionally. As the leader of a production team, you always want a person who not only can deliver the goods but manages to have quality problem-solving solutions on the way–Daniel is that guy. Oh, and he has a cool Jeep.

CHICO TORREZ // Operations Manager & Set Carpenter

Chico has done everything–from all facets of video to audio to working on oil rigs, lighting, some random Bigfoot sightings, you name it–this guy has done it. Chico manages all of our backstage areas and our stage crew and he can build or fabricate just about anything. If I draw it on a napkin or a marker board or even in the dirt–Chico will figure out a way to build it and make it look like a million bucks when all I gave him was $10.

TOM DOERNER // Live Video Director

Tom is an enigma–while I don’t think there is a place in the 48 states in which he has not eaten (and remembers a story about it), he oversees our video department and directs the video for all of our live services. Our weekly video teams are predominantly volunteers, so he spends a great deal of time keeping our teams trained and up to speed.

ANDREW SWAN // Video Engineer

With the recent addition of some large LED video walls, Andrew has his weekly work cut out for him. In addition to the video engineering of all our live services and grilling the best meat in the midwest, he maintains all of our video equipment. To say that video is finicky would be an understatement but he manages to keep all of these complicated systems in fine working order.

JESSE BURR // Audio Systems Engineer

In addition to being a terrific Audio Engineer, Pro Tools guy, and wireless frequency nerd, he implements the audio plan I come up with for each event and keeps a watchful eye on all of our audio components on campus. There are several large PA systems and many secondary systems scattered all over–he must have an awesome cheat sheet hidden around here somewhere…

KENDALL SELF // Audio Engineer

Kendall’s primary job is to manage the production for our Children’s Education department. They have numerous complex and busy events in multiple rooms that occur simultaneously so it’s great to have a pro who can mix audio superbly but can also keep all rooms staffed and running. Kendall has a real heart for the younger generation so he stays in sync quite well for their production needs. Maybe it’s because he has 4 or 9 kids–I’ve lost count.

TODD YANDELL // Computer & Programming Genius

Yes, that is his title–at least it’s what I call him. Todd writes Mac software (you gotta like that) as his day-job and helps us sort out many of our more complicated computer/video integration issues in the wee hours of the night. As I mentioned already–video is finicky but Todd helps us keep the gremlins at bay. He’s also pretty good at writing programs that can run our switcher mainframe from his iPad 10 minutes before a service as a “backup”. My head hurts.

So in addition to these key positions, we have several part-time guys that round us out and are scheduled according to our event and activity load. These guys comprise the remainder of our lighting, audio, and stage crew–hands down, our part-time guys rock, are dedicated to the task at hand and above all, are teachable. We couldn’t get it done without them.

As for our volunteer participation–we have a large contingency of volunteers that we staff in almost all of our departments, such as spotlight operators (as needed), camera operators, live video switchers, live video computer graphics, stage crew, runners, carpentry, audio mix engineers, and lighting board ops. We are blessed to have many industry pros that volunteer for us quite a bit allowing us to maintain a high level of excellence and consistency throughout all of our productions.

Overall, we’ve developed a production team that works well in our specific situation but we have continued to adapt as need be according to the pace and changing variables we encounter. Being able to change midstream has been a hard thing to do sometimes, but as we serve one another, we strive to embrace these changes and keep our focus on maintaining an adaptable attitude.

You totally can.

Every week in Kids on the Move we are very intentional about making our praise and worship BIG…like, concert big. If you haven’t seen our services before, check out this recap…

http://vimeo.com/10089560

It might seem like we spend countless hours finding the right musicians and rehearsing. We really don’t. Before I get into talking about how we make it happen, let me say we do perform some songs with a live band, but it’s not the norm.

We use tracks. They’re tried and true. They sound great. They make rehearsal a snap and are virtually plug and play. We just add our own twist. Check out the photo below.

This was taken during one of our weekend services. The band is performing Tell the World by Hillsong Kids, which you can get on DVD. There’s one lead singer, two guitar players, and six dancers. Our two guitar players are not plugged in. They’re just rockin’ out. They do know what parts to play, so they don’t totally give the gig away, but our main objective with them is energy. Then comes the dancers, my favorite part. They bring enormous amounts of energy to the stage. Our dance team is comprised of aspiring singers, musicians, and young people who love to serve. Every song we do has moves that are easy to follow, and we teach the dance team these moves every Thursday evening.

The key is energy. Do everything you can to put bodies on the stage. Don’t have a great singer to lead? Just let them sing along to a track that has lead vocals on it. Don’t have great musicians? Invite younger players who want experience on the stage to play fake guitar and jump around. Make them watch their favorite bands and mimic them.

Start by downloading I Love My Bible, then run to your local Christian Bookstore and get all the Hillsong Kids DVDs. Pick the songs you want to do for this weekend and teach the moves to the dancers on your team. Tell them to wear brightly colored shirts, bandanas around their heads, and bring their guitars. You’re on your way!

Questions? Comments? Let’s talk about how you’re making it work at your church! You can leave a comment below.

I’m not so much saying that YOU personally have to make all the decisions, but rather that each decision must be carefully thought through. 

We have a saying around here that goes: It’s not about getting it done, it’s about getting it right.

Getting it right means focusing on the small decisions that come together to have a big impact. 

Here’s a practical application. In our weekend worship experience we’ve made a decision that getting it right is the most important thing behind Godly character. Therefore we cannot include everyone who wants to be a part of the worship team. That doesn’t mean they can’t be involved anywhere, it just means they can’t be involved in this area. High quality = high control. Everybody can’t be good at everything but conversely there’s something everyone is good at and our goal is to get them into that area. 

Let me be clear, we don’t pick people because they’re young or beautiful or because they’re really cool, we pick people who love God and love our church and who are gifted to do what they do.

The key here is understanding that you can’t have both. You have to decide, what’s most important to us? Is it having EVERYONE involved, or is it having a high level of quality? The trap is shooting for both. Again, let me stress this doesn’t mean you don’t involve new people or develop people, it just means that some people, no matter how much they try, will ever be able to be a part of THIS particular team. (think American Idol auditions)

This is really just the principle of focus. It’s physically impossible for your eyes to focus on everything at once, so in order to focus on one thing you must by definition eliminate other things from your view. You can’t have both.

So what we’re looking for in a musician or a singer is not someone who wants to show the world their style and talent but rather someone who gets the mission of the whole. People who get their feelings hurt easily or act like divas don’t last long with us because to get better we have to critique everything we do. And that means critiquing you! 

Sometimes we’ll try a certain singer on a song and they just can’t pull it together. They may have practiced it for hours but if they can’t do it, we make a change. We’ve pulled musicians right out of rehearsal before because they didn’t come prepared. If that happens more than once we don’t have them back because for us, quality comes before involvement. 

We’re not mean about it, we’re serious about it. 

Another way we upped our quality was to control the instruments that are used on stage each week. We made a decision some time ago to purchase all the guitars, amps, pedal boards, drums, & keyboard equipment that we use on stage. This may sound excessive but it’s been a great way for us to ensure a consistent sound each week. Players change from time to time but the instruments do not and in the end we save time and sound better.

We were spending so much time trying to dial in a guy’s guitar rig that rehearsals for a weekend lasted 7-8 hours. Now they last 2-4 hours and the quality level has greatly risen.

I would say more here but I’m tired of typing this on my iPhone!

High quality = high control. Thoughts?

My job as a Production Manager is largely based on balancing many circumstances and situations (many of them quite negative) and using knowledge, assertiveness, delegation, organization, and a great crew that I respect tremendously to turn it into something that enhances the message that is to be imparted to our congregation.

Sounds cool, but where the rubber really meets the road is that we have 48 hours to tear out and stow the old set and lighting setup, load-in, rig and build the new set, dial in different LED video elements, sort out a completely new lighting rig and fixtures, and deal with a new band layout–and I suppose we need some rehearsal in there somewhere so the band and crew can get everything in sync together before the first weekend service.

Oftentimes when we put together these designs and work out all of the logistics and planning beforehand, it still comes up to be nothing more than a house of cards…….UNTIL we get it completed–then everything is in its proper place and it’s all locked down, tied up, smoothed out, and cleaned up. At this point it becomes the backbone of our system–one that you can trust even in the most crazy situation.

BUT–how and why did we get there between the tight turnaround time, the balancing act of keeping our other campus events (i.e., clients) happy, staying under budget, keeping overtime in check, hoping to keep my crew healthy and safe (not to mention happy), dealing with the bits of gear that somehow shows up broken, making the set piece work that looked great on paper but won’t fit through the loading dock door, etc, etc, etc…

Over time, I will delve into these questions of “how’d we do that” and the even more intense “why’d we do that?”, but for now it can be demonstrated quite nicely through a small portion of a conversation I had with our Lighting Designer, Daniel Connell. He and I come from the same grid of working for many years on the road and getting to use our talent now in a church setting. I became associated with Daniel while Tour Managing and handling Production for a major Christian act some years back–and we have become great friends through years of traveling together and now with him working on our production team here at COTM–he is a class act who is not happy until the job is done right–which to me, means he fits in perfectly.

So we were resting on our laurels for a few brief moments admiring how our latest stage incarnation was coming together and he recounted a sentiment something like this, “You know what’s still cool after all these years? None of this was here 24 hours ago… We still take nothing and make it into something.” It made me reflect for a moment about the adrenaline rush that we still get to this day when a plan or idea starts to take tangible shape and you know that it will succeed. Somewhere in this part of the process, the teeter-totter passes the fulcrum of “card-house” to “solid rock”.

Watching the team start to catch on to the vision as the excitement increases is something I will never take for granted–this is where I thrive, it is what I was born to do and is what I was called to be a part of.

As for how we did it? How’s this for simple: we took tons of gear and coupled it with a definitive creative vision.

As to the why–equally as simple: God gave us the talent to sort out how this creative vision can pass from the virtual to the literal. All we did was run with it.

So this last Tuesday we decided to set up a camera and record one of our meetings. The service that we’re planning in this meeting is for this weekend (July 17-18). As of right now we’re working to implement the ideas that we discussed in this video and I guess we’ll all get to see how they come together this weekend! Fingers crossed.

I’ll warn you, this video is pretty long and pretty boring in some places but we wanted to keep it as raw as possible. I should also point out that the “Romance” event we discuss in the meeting is a women’s event that we’re currently promoting here at Church on the Move.

With all that said, enjoy. Hope it’s helpful.

http://vimeo.com/13344082

In regards to our Dry Gulch chapels, here’s a run down of all our house music, service music, praise and worship sets and where you can locate it all, if it’s available for purchase.

House Music (all available on iTunes)
Boomin’ - Toby Mac
Bounce - Manafest
Forever - Edison Glass
Superstar - Stephanie Smith
All Day - Hillsong United
Outrage - Capital Lights
Spotlight - Mutemath
A Thousand Winters Melting - The Myriad
One World - Toby Mac
Nothing Left to Lose - Mat Kearney
One Way - Hillsong United
Leave You Now - House of Heroes
Church Music - David Crowder Band
Hey - Leeland
Lone Ranger - Nate Sallie
He Did That - KJ52
Innocent - Stellar Kart
Feelin’ So Fly - Toby Mac
Closer to Love - Mat Kearney
Tightly Wound - MXPX

Night 1 (Praise & Worship Set)
Jesus Is Alive Right Now - Kids on the Move Band (coming soon on Seeds)

Night 2 (Praise & Worship Set)
Bounce - Manafest (we recorded our own instrumental track)
Tell the World - Hillsong Kids / Tell the World album (available on iTunes)
I’m So Glad - Hillsong Kids (available on iTunes)
Hallelujah - Hillsong United / The Stand (we recorded our own track)
Jesus Is Alive Right Now - KidsontheMove

Night 3 (Praise & Worship Set)
Jesus, What A Friend - Kids on the Move
Take It All - Hillsong United (iTunes)
I Will Exalt You - Hillsong (we recorded our own version)
Jesus Is Alive Right Now - KidsontheMove

Night 4 (Praise & Worship Set)
Tell the World - Hillsong Kids / Tell the World album (available on iTunes)
How Great Is Our God - Chris Tomlin (we recorded our own track)
Hallelujah - Hillsong United / The Stand (we recorded our own track)
Jesus Is Alive Right Now - Kids on the Move

Segment Music
We subscribe to an online music library called APM. Producers of television shows, commercials, movies, and video games use this site for royalty free music. Of course, there are fees associated with subscribing to this site. The majority of these tracks are instrumental and include all genres.

As Seeds continues to grow, Kids on the Move will be uploading more and more music that we create. If you have any more questions regarding this, feel free to email me at adam@kidsonthemove.com.

In years past, I have been hired for a tour or project solely on the fact that I was more focused on the details than someone else…now don’t get me wrong–there are plenty of great Production Managers and Technical Directors out there but sometimes one small overlooked detail or item is all it takes for an event to have a hiccup, or in some cases, a failure big enough to affect an audience or congregation negatively. As far as I’m concerned, any time that our production gets in the way of the message coming from the stage, rather than enhancing it–we have failed. More often than not, paying extra attention to the numerous details that surround a production of any size just pays off in the long run…

You may wonder what I’m referring to exactly? One of the biggest ways our production team can blow it is not sorting out how to navigate the many transitions during a service–songs, videos, bumpers, offering, message, invitation segments, prop moves, microphones in the right person’s hand, ear-packs operational, etc. When are we going to a lighting or video blackout? Where is the bumper music coming from–the CG playback computer in the control room or a CD player at the audio booth? How and when are the band and singers exiting the stage? Is it the same time that Pastor is entering? What about the potential traffic jam of the band exiting and Pastor George entering and then what happens if he isn’t set before the 45 second message opener ends?

If I assume or take it for granted that they all will figure it out (after all–it’s common sense right?…wrong answer!) that will be exactly how the problems will occur and the lights and video coming up on an empty podium is something that not only looks bad and causes an awkward moment for the audience but could potentially set our Pastor up to lose by breaking his concentration at a pivotal transition point.

Details have become a key to the production success of the majority of our events and when we do have an “off” night, it’s usually not a massive failure but rather a detail or combination of several details that were overlooked or assumed.

FIVEVILLE (4 weekly services for our 4 & 5 year olds)
3 singers 3 dancers

KIDS ON THE MOVE (4 weekly services for 6 yr olds – 5th grade)
5 singers 15 dancers 5 band (1 drummer, 1 keys, 2 elec gtr, 1 bass)

180 JV SERVICE (1 Wed. night service for 6th-10th graders)
2 singers 5 band (1 drummer, 1 keys, 2 elec gtr, 1 bass)

VARSITY SERVICE (1 Wed. night service for HS juniors – 22 yrs old)
1 singer 4 band (1 drummer, 1 keys, 1 elec gtr, 1 bass)

WEDNESDAY MAIN (1 main stage adult service)
4 singers 6 band (1 drummer, 2 keys, 2 elec gtr, 1 bass)

WEEKEND MAIN (3 main stage adult services)
6 singers 6 band (1 drummer, 2 keys, 2 elec gtr, 1 bass)

So as you can see we have a lot of positions to fill. Now let’s go ahead and admit it – as worship pastors we can get comfortable with the teams we have in place. We know their strengths, their work schedules and we develop a rapport with the people we rehearse with and lead services with week in and week out. And thank God for that! It takes a lot of diligence and patience to come up with effective lineups that we can count on to pull off service after service. But the trap is that we can lean too heavily on volunteers whose lives are transitioning, whose jobs are changing, who are getting married and moving across the country, who, honestly, may not be a part of our church six months from now. In that light we are constantly on the lookout for more talent. Here’s how we continually develop musicians and singers at Church On The Move:

WE START THEM YOUNG
We get kids and teens involved as early as we can. We’ll start them singing and dancing in Fiveville and Kids On The Move. The first thing they’ll learn is how to be energetic and engaging. We’ll also tutor our younger singers and players so that in a few years many of them will easily make the jump to the next level.

WE KEEP THEM ENGAGED
We make sure the music they are singing and leading is age appropriate for them, music that they are genuinely interested in. It’s difficult to get a 16 year old excited about singing a worship song that was popular 10 years ago. Conversely, a 40 year old won’t relate to music that seems too young for them. Musicians need music they can relate to – therefore it’s a necessity to match singers and players with music that motivates them and keeps them wanting to come back and serve each week.

WE SET THEM UP TO SUCCEED
Nothing’s more frustrating than being asked to do something you have no gifting for. We carefully match up singers and players with music they can easily wrap their heads around. If someone’s not ready to lead a song vocally, they sing back-up vocals. The same goes for musicians (ever ask a young drummer to play a shuffle?). We find what their strengths and weaknesses are and make sure they are given songs that they can easily nail. Once they have confidence that they can successfully do what we ask them to do, then we let them branch out from there.

WE CREATE A COMMUNITY
The only distinct difference in our 6 different worship teams is the ages of the worshippers we lead each week. Otherwise, all of our teams operate with the same principles of character, preparation and devotion to the church. Our team members understand that it’s just as important to give your all whether your leading 5 year olds in worship or leading songs on the main adult stage. My most accomplished musicians and singers who regularly sing on the main adult stage realize that I could send them to Kids on the Move or any other service at any time so that they don’t lose sight of what our church is all about. And in that we create community – all of us giving our time and talents for a common purpose: to make great music, to become better musicians and to serve the people of Church on the Move.

We believe that purpose breeds enthusiasm, and enthusiasm attracts more people to want to be a part of what we’re doing.

Here’s an example of a recent story we did.

http://vimeo.com/11662663

We’re always looking for an opportunity to tell a story at COTM. Here are some guiding principles when we sit down with someone to tell their story.

1) Pre-production is huge.
We always have a pre-interview over the phone and sometimes in person. It’s important that the person who’s going to be conducting the interview also do the pre-interview. This matters because it gets the interviewee relaxed and comfortable talking with the staff member who’s doing the interview and it gets them accustomed to telling their story, which is super useful when you go to shoot it.

In addition, it lets you know if you actually have a story. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve received a lead from someone in the church on a particular story only to sit down with them and find out their story isn’t that great or more often, they can’t speak well enough to deliver it. Don’t feel badly if you have to pull the plug on a story at ANY stage in its development. It’s part of the process and it happens to everybody.

2) Don’t have them rehearse some speech, actually “interview” them.
One of our mistakes early on is that we really tried working with these people to be able to tell their story in big pieces rather than just interviewing them. This was a mistake. People have a hard enough time talking in front of a camera and trying to get them to share their story in chronological sequence only adds to that nervousness. It leads to awkward moments and the video comes off as forced and disingenuous.

I would recommend shooting the video interview style. Ask them pre scripted questions. Have the interviewer sit RIGHT BESIDE the camera so that the interviewee’s eye line is close to the camera but not looking directly into it, that just feels awkward. The only time we ever have anyone look into the camera is when we’re wanting to address the audience. Most of the time, that’s not the case with interviews.

3) Frame your questions to get at the heart of the issue.
Ask them questions like: How did you feel when you were diagnosed with cancer? What was your life like before you met Christ? What was the breaking point that brought you to Christ? How did you feel after you gave your heart to Christ?

Many times details of the story are not as important as the emotions of the story. The audience wants to know how they felt, because many of them, at one point or another, have felt the exact same way. Look for the emotion.

Another trick to helping them frame their responses in a way that helps the audience understand what the heck is going on, is to have the interviewee repeat the question back when giving their answers. For example, answers to the questions above might look like this:

When I was diagnosed with cancer I was devastated. Life before Christ was an endless search for something I could never find. The breaking point in my life was… you get the idea.

4) If possible shoot the interview with more than 1 camera. It’s always best to shoot the interview with at least 2 cameras. This will help you avoid having to use “white flashes” or jump cuts to go between pieces of their story. With only one camera you’re really limited in how you can piece their story together. If you only have one camera you could rent one for the days that you’re shooting. This is a pretty cheap way to get 2 cameras working.

In addition, really mind your framing. Study other videos for how much room they allow over the subjects head and mimic their style until it starts to make sense to you.

5) Shoot your B-Roll (this is the footage of interview done when they’re not talking) after the interview is over. Have them give you looks of happiness and looks of sadness. These will come in really handy in edit. We may shoot 2 hours of an interview to get enough footage for 3 minutes, that means we will cut their story up A LOT! So having B-Roll allows you to cover awkward edits. Some sentences are things we crafted in the edit. In the interview the original sentence may have been 30 seconds long, but we’ll cut out the parts that were unnecessary and focus it. B-Roll is essential to making this possible otherwise the footage just jumps around and looks really weird.

6) Begin with the story. Don’t try to edit in all the B-Roll and stuff right away. Just start by piecing the story together. Don’t worry about how it looks just listen to the story, you’ll clean it up later. Start with a long version of the story and then make it shorter and shorter. The goal of any creative project is not to add until their is nothing left to add, the goal is to cut until you can’t afford to cut any more, so try to arrive at a version where the only thing the audience sees and hears is what is essential.

http://vimeo.com/13104761

I’ll start with the most important thing - the idea. We spend almost as much time thinking through our ideas as we do shooting them. If you know why you’re making the video and where it falls in your service, you might save yourself some time during the production. Talk it through and second guess yourself until someone tells you to stop.

Next: our mics. You can make bad video look pretty good (see Ronette’s story on Vimeo), but you’re stuck if you have crummy audio. Make it a priority to capture clean audio. We mostly use a Schoeps shotgun mic for studio shoots and a Sennheiser 416 shotgun mic for locations. We use a Lectrosonic wireless pack with a Tram lav and a Senneheiser ew G2 when we need to go wireless.

This is my favorite part: our camera. We use a Panasonic HPX170 and it’s awesome for the price. We also attach a Letus extreme lens adapter with a 50mm Zeiss lens. That dude will wear you out if you try going handheld, but it looks amazing. Is it too obvious to mention a lens cleaning kit?

To visually take your video to the next level you need some proper lighting equipment. We use a couple 5-in-1 reflector/diffusers anytime we light. If you have a few of those, you can get away with using your dad’s work lights.

Those are just the must-haves when we head out on a shoot. If all you have is a mobile phone and a cassette recorder to work with, focus on the idea and make it work for your setup.

I’ll be back with a note on our post-production gear and software soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions about how we did something or want to know what it was like to write this on an iPhone 4 retina display, email me at gary@churchonthemove.com.

So, I thought a good first blog from me would be to answer that question. At COTM, I head up what we call the Performing Arts department. What that basically covers is everything that happens in our weekend services: worship, lighting, audio, production, videos, graphic design, and probably more stuff that I’m forgetting. The bottom line is, if it happens in a weekend service, I’m responsible for it.

Our department is broken up into two pieces: the creative side and the production side. Our production side is led by Andrew Stone, who you’ll be hearing from on this blog in the near future. For the sake of keeping this post slightly shorter than the Bible, I’ll only talk about the creative side.

I’ll warn you, we don’t have job descriptions or job titles. We all do a little bit of everything so it’s hard to draw distinct line between who does what around here, but I’ll try.

Angie Woods // @angiewittywoods

Angie’s been with me for almost 6 years now. I love working with her because she thinks like I do and she gets things done. She’s basically a producer. We pass her projects and she develops them. She finds and interviews candidates for testimony videos. This is a real art and she’s learned it well.

Chris Munch // @cmunch78

Chris has been at COTM for an eternity. He started as a writer for us but has learned to be a really good editor. His best quality is that he’s a storyteller, so we put him on all our videos that require a story to be told, like interviews. He’s also an AMAZING actor. If you haven’t seen his work in Dad Life, you need to check it out.

Gary Hornstien // @ghornstien

Gary is our motion graphics guru. He takes the projects we work on and makes them look good. He’s the guy who shoots just about everything we do and he’s also the only technically savvy guy we have, so when we have problems we go to Gary.

Jesse Andersen // @jra3086

Jesse is the guy who makes things happen. He’s basically a project manager. He’s the checklist guy. The rest of us are pretty bad with details, but Jesse thrives on them so we hand him projects like creating a website or having some a banner printed and he gets it done.

Andy Chrisman // @andychrisman

Andy is our worship pastor so he oversees everybody that works on our worship team. A lot of his time is spent in rehearsals prepping for the weekends and other events that we do. When he’s not in rehearsal, he’s usually brainstorming with us about an upcoming event.

Marcos Cruz // @marcokeys1

Marcos has been at COTM longer than any of us. He’s the band director. He makes sure that musicians are scheduled and ready to play. He creates charts for all of our music and keeps our musicians sounding great.

Kenneth Weston // @kennethjweston

Kenneth has been at COTM since he was a kid. Now he’s a huge part of our team. He’s a co-leader with Andy on the weekends and he also writes music for our children’s environments.

Daniel Chrisman // @echoflyer

Daniel’s our lead guitar player for the weekends and he also leads worship in our Varsity services on Wednesday. He keeps our guitars sounding good by constantly tweaking sounds and adjusting pedals. In addition, he’s our go-to guy for new song arrangements.

Alright, so that’s most of us. We also have 3 current interns who help with various projects here and there, and we’ll have a couple more via NEXT. Hope this was helpful! If you have a more specific question about our team or how we work, just email me.

At COTM, we are always tweaking our rehearsal times. We’ve found that it’s prudent to take a hard look at those times now and then and make adjustments as our personnel changes. What worked well for one group of players and singers six months ago may not be the best setup for the current roster. Right now we have several of our musicians on staff in our Performing Arts department, and most everyone else has a fairly flexible work schedule. So, our weekly rehearsal schedule for our main weekend worship services looks like this:

THURSDAY

1:30 PM // Weekend walkthrough with production team

This is a very important first step. Communication of all our ideas with our production team allows us to all start on the same page. They need to know how many singers and players we want on stage, if there will be any dramas or videos, and what the overall tone of the service will be. Our production director, Andrew Stone, spends 20–30 minutes with us as we walk out the service piece by piece.

2:30 PM // Band walkthrough of charts and arrangements (in rehearsal room)

We have a separate rehearsal space that includes a basic drum kit, keys and smaller guitar amps. In this “pre-rehearsal” we make sure everyone understands the charts and direction of each song.

3:15 PM // Electric guitars work on sounds (on stage)

Trying to find the right guitar tones can bring a rehearsal to a grinding halt, yet those sounds can make or break a song. We use this time to get our tones just right so we don’t use up valuable rehearsal time.

4:00 PM // Band rehearsal (on stage)

We’ve now moved everyone to the stage in the main auditorium. Our production team has the stage set to our specifications (as per our earlier meeting at 1:30). There are stage plots, lyrics, run sheets and extra charts at each position so that no one is left in the dark.

5:00 PM // Vocal rehearsal

I’ll take the vocalists to a separate room while the band continues to rehearse. We encourage our singers to get there as early as possible so that they can get a feel for how each song sounds live before they grab their mics.

5:30 PM // Full rehearsal with band and singers

We record this rehearsal and load it onto Planning Center so our team can review before the weekend services.

SATURDAY

3:30 PM // Full rehearsal with band and singers

We expect each worship team member to to have reviewed the rehearsal online and come prepared to play through the set at least 2 full times before the 4:45 full service run-through. We also use this time to pay close attention to the transitions between songs, to make sure we have a good flow for worship.

4:45 PM // Full service run-through

This rehearsal is all hands on deck. We rehearse every detail – songs, welcomes, offering, communion, announcements, dramas, videos, transitions – to make sure everything works well together before our first service on Saturday night.

SUNDAY

8:00 AM // Worship service run-through

This rehearsal’s not really for the worship team (by this time we’ve run the set at least a half dozen times), but for the new set of volunteers who are running cameras or working backstage who were not there the night before.

We’ve had success with this schedule as it allows us time to review our music and it gives our production team time to develop their lighting, sound, and staging cues. It gives us confidence to know we have put together a service that is effective, fun, and meaningful.

We’ve been hard at work on this site for the past few months and we’re super excited to finally get it launched. On the site you’ll find some of the best creative work from the team here at Church on the Move and the coolest part is, it’s all absolutely free. Our goal is that the resources we’ve created for Church on the Move will be a big help to you. The files are fully editable so take them, change them, and make them whatever you want them to be. Our hope is that these will be a jumping off point for your creativity.

We’re also starting this blog as a way of sharing the methods and practices that we use every day in our church, so stay tuned for a lot more content here.

Please feel free to email us any questions and check back often because we’re updating the site rapidly!