Every church wants to pull off their services without a hitch, glitch or hiccup. We see perfection in every concert we see on television or in person, and most music pastors foam at the mouth wishing their Sunday morning experience could be that seamless. The only difference is that all of those concerts and shows have a ridiculous numbers of full-time, professional staff members, all the latest gear, and insane budgets. Unfortunately, the situation at your church may be full of people who didn't really want to volunteer because they had never even used a Mac before. Sometimes we look at television and see the apex of what we wished Sunday could be. We compare that to our home church situation, and we get frustrated.
But I do have good news. There is a way create a service with consisitent, seamless video and lighting without the brilliant professionals. No more hitches, glitches or hiccups.
Here are some tips to make this happen:
To Click or not to Click, this is the question.
One of the first things that must be done if you are going to try and automate your lighting to a song is getting your band on a click. Why? Because neither the lights, nor the video can be preprogramed unless the computer knows where you are in the song. So you must be willing to get your band to start playing with a click. The second transition is to get them to play with a track. The difference between a click and a track is that a click just gives the speed of the song, but a click track tells the band the speed, when to play the verses, choruses, bridge, and solos. The track allows the band to play the song in the same form every time so you can save the same lighting and video automation for the next time you use the song in a service. It's important to generate your click track in a software program that generates a MIDI sequence. Music production software programs like Logic, ProTools, Ableton Live, Cubase, Presonus Studio One and many others can do this. Of course, if you want to get fancy, you can lay down some synth, percussion and/or backing vocals to beef up your sound. However, that is a different article. Once the band is used to using a MIDI-based click track, you can begin to automate your worship service.
Begin with the lights.
Now that you have a click track setup through MIDI, you can use the MIDI controller to program the lights. While there are different ways to do this type of work I personally recommend playing your click tracks through Ableton Live. It has a really simple interface that makes it easy to automate almost everything. You can control when your lights come on and off, what colors they are, and where they move (if you have moving lights) all by using MIDI cues. You can learn the details on how to use Ableton by going to Youtube and watching “how to” videos. However, you will need: the music production software, a midi interface, and a lighting console that takes midi input.
What about video?
Do you have a hard time getting words to pop up on the screen at just the right time? Maybe you want to incorporate video throughout worship but don't have the team that can lock in fast enough? Well, presentation software programs like Propresenter and others can be controlled by MIDI. They can control when the lyrics project on the screen via MIDI, along with changes in your lighting cues.
In short, you may need one person to sit down in front of Ableton during your services, just to make sure nothing goes wrong. And, of course, you'll still need to have a sound guy. In reality, that could be your whole technical department to run your weekend services.
Why automate the service instead of using real people?
The truth is, we sometimes recruit people into the tech team even though it's not where they're gifted. We will teach someone how to run slides who really would be glad to serve almost anywhere, but they serve in the tech booth because that's where they're needed. If you get to a place where your tech booth is primarily automated, except for audio mixing, you can free up your other volunteers to do what they are most gifted to do.
However, if you have a highly gifted and passionate tech team, automating your tasks may not be right for your church. Or you may consider automating only your secondary (Wednesday night) or video venue services.
But, if you are constantly short-staffed, or simply don't have a reliable set of gifted technical volunteers, it's good to know you have options --- and those options can help you reallocate faithful volunteers to other key positions in your church.
