Sunday Summary – Music: March 29, 2008

First, a big shout out to our Long Island guests! (You know who you are… )

Sunday was a fun day. Sometimes the mood on stage and off is just a little brighter and perkier than others – this was one of those days.

No real reason why, other than the fact that everyone was glad that 5 straight days of rain was over.

That, and the fact that we did some fun tunes…

Sunday was our “Strategic Service” day – the day we honor our existing volunteers, and push for new ones.

So we opened with a highlight video – a montage of photos from every area that volunteers serve, underscored by each side’s live band doing Jack Johnson’s “Better Together“.

It’s a happy little tune, just like most of Jack’s repertoire. Danny Dukes sang it on East and Eddie Kirkland did it on West.

And I got to use a vibraphone patch, so that alone made my day… .

Worship was, at least for me, more fun than usual. I played on East with Chrystina Fincher leading. If you don’t know Chrys, she’s a firecracker rock-chick. I mean, this is the mother of 3 that sang Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” at DRIVE and Catalyst conferences!

So a win for Chrys is a set of “up” tunes that have a lot of energy and really allow her to show off her dynamic personalty and lead a crowd in worship.

Plus, Eddie was leading on the West, and he can sing the phone book, so no worries!

We started with Chris Tomlin’s “Let God Arise“. Now if you don’t dig this tune for worship, chances are you’ve not heard the right person lead it.

Tomlin’s recorded version lacks something, and you don’t realize what that is until you hear someone with a stronger, more aggressive voice sing it. It’s a great tune, but a smooth, tender voice like Tomlin’s doesn’t do the song justice. But when you put someone on it that has some grit, the song takes on a whole new persona!

Next was Marvelous Light, a fave by Charlie Hall, but one that is nearing it’s last days and will soon be put out to pasture. So enjoy it while it’s still around!

We concluded worship with a new song by Todd Fields that he co-wrote with Eddie called “Jesus Reigns“. It’s got a great mid-tempo groove ad is a blast to play. The verse is a little wordy and with some odd syncopation, but it certainly learnable over time. The chorus, however, is fantastic – a great hook that’s super easy to pick up and repeats a bunch.

We’ll be singing this one for a while! It’ll be on Todd’s new project due in May.

There you go!

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East Band – Chrystina Fincher, Danny Dukes, Ryan Stuart, Steve Thomason, Ben Snider, Ashley Appling, Richard Meeder, Me

West Band – Eddie Kirkland, Danny Grady, Brad Avery, Jennifer Young, Mike Bielenberg, Pat Malone, Wayne Viar

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Sunday Summary – Music: March 15th, 2008

Well, I was away this past weekend, so I’ll give you the 2nd hand reports…

We didn’t do any openers or closers – which usually makes for a simplified week, and this was no different. However, a couple of the tunes were newer, which means that not all the musicians had played them yet.

That brings up an observation. With our musician and Worship Leader schedules – like ‘em or not – it can often mean that at a Wednesday night rehearsal there are guys in that week’s band that have played a tune a bunch, and sometimes others have not played it at all.

And what makes our musicians great is that the guys that are more experienced with a tune are quick to aid the ones that haven’t played it. They’ll kindly offer notes or suggestions based on their own past experiences. Pretty cool.

Alrighty, so here’s what we did – nothing elaborate or crazy, just a good, effective time of worship…

Salvation’s Chorus by Todd Fields

Hands of the Healer by Eddie Kirkland

Everything by Tim Hughes

I’m really digging that Everything tune. I’m a big Tim Hughes fan. Have I said that before? Not sure…

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East Band – Mike Gleason, Trey McKnight, Earl South, Scott Meeder, Jeremy Moyers, Mike Hines, Chris Arias

West Band – Todd Fields, Ryan Stuart, Pat Malone, Ashley Appling, Danny Grady, Bill DeLoach

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Who are you a big fan of?

Sunday Summary – Music: March 1st, 2009

Well, I was in Nashville this past weekend enjoying a great weekend.

BUT, as far as things around North Point were concerned…

We did another one of our abnormal instrumentation weeks. Another chance to refresh the sonic palate, and to engage the audience.

And after what I heard after this week’s rehearsals, I knew it was going to be a week I was going to be sad to miss.

We didn’t do any specials – just worship. But we changed up the instrumentation as follows:

East:

Todd Fields leading from acoustic

Jen Carrozza – BGV

Pat Malone – Bass

Ashley Appling – scaled-down kit (kick, snare, hats, floor tom, ride, 1 thin crash), accented by the use of Hot Rods and brushes

West:

Cori Moon leading (think a cross between Sarah McLaughlin, Christy Nockles and Alison Krauss)

Mike Gleason – acoustic and BGV

John Carrozza – piano

Scott Meeder – scaled-down kit (like above)

Steve Florzykowski – upright acoustic bass

So yeah, the vibe was certainly different, but as many folks have commented: Very nice and quite refreshing.

For me, personally, it was exciting to witness (at rehearsals) the sheer musicianship of players and singers I admire so much. Very inspiring!

But, alas, the toughest thing for us was song selection. Todd and Cori lead very differently, especially on an opening, more energetic song of a worship set. So, after lots of emails and phone calls, we decided on:

Everlasting God (bumped up to 108 bpm)

Glory To God Forever

Lead Me to the Cross

While Cori lead all 3 in West, Jen Carrozza lead the 3rd tune in the East (Lead Me…). That is such a great song for girls to lead. It somehow seems to fit a female voice so well…

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Do you remember a month or so ago when we tried a quasi-acoustic Sunday that kinda backfired? (WE do!) Well, from all accounts, this made up for it. The key was to go farther in the effort to strip down the instrumentation, as well as really work with the Front of House guys to mix accordingly.

Song selection and player choice are also key issues. Songs can be batted around all day, and a win will be a series of songs that your leader leads well in that type of setting, along with highly skilled instrumentalists that really “get” the overall vision of the stripped-down vibe. Their playing becomes far more exposed and the room and P.A. become far less forgiving, so choose your players wisely!

Sunday Summary – Music: February 22, 2009

OK, we’ve recovered from last week…

We learned a lesson about song selection from last Sunday, and had an incredible Night of Worship on Thursday night.

FYI – in case you weren’t able to attend Thursday night, here was our set list…

Night of Worship – Feb 19.pdf

(50 points if you can spot my typo on the set list…)

Anyhooooo….

On Sunday morning we had some cool stuff, as well as an interesting scenario.

First off, Andy was speaking here live, which meant that the content before the message needed to be shorter in order to broadcast the message feed to the other campuses.

Sooo, we did something we haven’t done before: We cut one of the worship tunes, but only for the first service! Meaning 2 worship tunes at the 9:00 AM service and 3 tunes at the 11:00 and 12:45.

This is because in the second service (11:00 AM) we use the recorded video of Andy from the first service. So everyone – East, West, Browns Bridge and Buckhead – are all watching the recorded 9:00 message while Andy rests his voice (and body and mind) off stage.

He’s then back live for the 12:45 service when he’s speaking at North Point, even though it’s not being broadcast to another campus. Browns Bridge uses the recorded video for their 12:45 service and Buckhead uses it for their 6:00 service.

Confused yet? Hold on…

This also means that we didn’t have to cut the top-of-the-service content for our 11:00 (video) and 12:45 (live but not broadcast) services, meaning we could add in that 3rd worship tune for those 2 services.

Now try getting that through to a group of Pavlovian Worship Leaders, musicians and production personnel who have already rehearsed and done one whole worship set and service a different way!

But they did it, and did it great!

Here’s the worship set:

God Is Alive (this was the one we cut for the first service)

Wonderful The Love

Lift High

After the worship set (in all 3 services) we did something we have hardly ever done here at North Point – an Offertory song!

Now if you grew up anything like I did, nary a week went by without an offertory song. Whether it was the choir or a soloist, or what – there was always an offertory! And, on a few occasions when I was a teenager, the offertory was me playing a newly learned classical piece.

One time, at the church back in Canada I grew up in, Jennie (my then girlfriend, now wife) and I did Great is Thy Faithfulness, with her on violin. That’s when our pastor said to my mom, “She’s the one, isn’t she?” That was a fond memory.

A not-so-fond memory was when I was about 15 and massacred a piano solo of “El Shaddai”. Butchered it. I put chords in there that don’t even exist.

That was the day I learned (the hard way) that I must practice something past the point of nausea, all the way to a healthy hatred for the song. True internalization. Muscle memory. Ability to play the song with your hands while having a conversation with your mouth and brain.

Otherwise, you’ll look like a fool. Trust me.

Alrighty then…

Nowadays, we only do an offertory if it’s a song that sets up the message, usually with tension or a question that the message will then address and possibly answer. They are a songs that might describe an imperfect scenario or situation. Basically not a song that would fit as a closer that would leave an audience with an answer, or basic sense or closure or hope. Now that’s not set in stone, but it’s a good rule of thumb…

So we did a tune called “Storm” by Lifehouse. A neat, moody song that is really quite haunting. Ryan Stuart‘s incredible vocal matched with the East band’s ability to master the song’s subtlety (plus some cool ethereal programming I did ) made for a really unique, cool experience.

Give the song a listen and you’ll see just how polar it is to our usual Sunday AM content…

The song set up Andy’s first message in the series “He’s Still Got The Whole World In His Hands“. And it was a GOOOOD one!

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East Band – Eddie Kirkland, Ryan Stuart, Danny Grady, Ben Snider, Scott Meeder, Earl South, Mike Bielenberg

West Band – Mike Gleason, Steve Thomason, Matt Melton, Pat Malone, Joe Lee, John Carrozza, Karen Bitzer

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Ohh, a little Digidesign Venue console action…

What song made you learn how to practice the hard way?

Sunday Summary – Music: Feb 8, 2009

This past Sunday was great, at least for me…

It was a Married Life Live weekend in the West Auditorium, meaning I got to hang out Friday, Saturday and Sunday and play great music with great friends, who happen to be incredible musicians…

Talk about a treat!

Are we exhausted? Sure.

Worth it? You betcha!

And we had a great time on Sunday morning, as well. It was relatively straight forward, musically speaking, with a little twist at the end.

For worship we brought back a new song introduced a few weeks ago – “Let God Arise”. This is a newer Tomlin tune that might be old hat for some of you, but we just introduced it this year. I actually like it – it’s kinda fun, and real easy to grab hold of. But don’t be afraid to make it rock!!

After that we transitioned into Blessed Be Your Name, the Matt Redman tune. We wanted something older that was real familiar and also supported our current “Balanced” sermon series. We don’t normally program worship to go with a sermon, but in this instance it worked.

We also pepped it up a bit last year, doing it at 120 bpm with a pretty driving loop, almost verging on a dance or techno vibe. That helped it go seamlessly from the high energy of the first song.

We ended the set with a new song, “Everything” by Tim Hughes. I won’t lie, this might be my new fave… And no, not just because it’s piano-driven

I spent a couple hours last week programming the strings on it, so got deeply imbeded into my brain. So that might have had something to do with it…

But the chords are simple yet tasty, and the melody of the verse and chorus is super easy, which always makes for a good tune for the crowd to pick up on quick.

The only downfall, I’d say, are the 1 million different verbs in the verses. That’s a lot of lyric to remember! Weeping, crying, laughing, waking, walking, gnashing, screaming, running, falling, slapping, whimpering, typing, watching, driving, voting, procrastinating….

We then brought it back in a shortened form as the closer, but only doing 1 verse and the out choruses, and in a more mellow tone – taking out the loop and tambourine, and having the band keep a more meditative, contemplative groove.

We’ll definitely be bringing that one back!

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East Band – Kristian Stanfill, Alex Nifong, Danny Grady, Joe Thibodeau, Chris Arias, Brad Gage, Rosie Pinkerman

West Band – Mike Gleason, Steve Thomason, Daryl Lecroy, Pat Malone, Ashley Appling, Chrystina Fincher, and me!

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Here’s East at the 12:45 service:

What’s YOUR favorite new song?