and music, but saw those interests in my life
as very separate things. As an acoustic guitar-
driven worship leader, I didn’t know that the two
could intersect until a mentor of mine showed
me Ableton Live. I think he was literally the very
first person to use Ableton Live in worship. This
was long before there were companies that
sold tracks for worship or tutorial videos on
YouTube about Ableton in worship. He had an
old mac computer on stage and used a foot
controller to trigger loops and tracks on the fly
with his feet. It completely blew my mind. It tied
in everything I was passionate about – worship
and technology. I knew immediately that tracks
/ loops (whatever you want to call them) would
become a very important part of my worship
leading. I started using Ableton Live and tracks
the very next weekend and haven’t looked back
since. Tracks and click are the most important
tools in my worship leading tool belt. I believe
it’s the easiest way to immediately raise the bar
of your worship sound.
[WM] As you first started using tracks, was
that a trial and error approach? Were there any
train wrecks along the way?
[Matt] When I first started using tracks, I
remember feeling very worried that I would
never get the hang of it, or that it would distract
me and the congregation from worship if things
went wrong. Up until that point, I had never
used in-ear monitors or played along with a
metronome. It was scary, but I knew that I had
to step out of my comfort zone to embrace
this new world of technology in worship. I
could see the potential it had for enhancing our
worship sound and bringing us to a new level
of musical excellence. Learning to play with a
click is a bit like learning to ride a bike. You fall
off sometimes, but once you gain momentum
and understand how it should feel, it becomes
second-nature and you don’t even think about
it anymore. When I first started implementing
tracks, there were definitely quite a few times
the technology went wrong – some were
user-error and others were strange glitches.
As a perfectionist, it really bothered me at
first but then I realized that most people in the
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