doubt that their congregation would struggle to connect. Find themselves unable to easily sing as an expression of worship.
You’ re probably familiar with“ Great Things.” A few years old now, but a great song and still in my repertoire. Remind yourself of Phil Wickham’ s hit version of the song here and, as you do, listen for the song’ s dynamic changes.
Phil Wickham- Great Things( Official Lyric Video)
Wonderful song and a wonderful, version of the song, right? Did you notice the dynamic changes? I hope so!
Now, let me be clear: Our amateur volunteers’ teams should not feel the need to reproduce every element of the professional sound recording. No way! Typically, that won’ t be possible anyway. We’ re not pros! We must be ourselves and work within our limitations.
But we ought to be able to reproduce the main dynamic rises and falls! We may not be able to achieve them in exactly the same ways as the pros, but we should be able to reproduce them in our ways.
To( hopefully) help explain what I mean, I’ ve made a visual aid for this. A graph! Like most songs, dynamic changes for“ Great Things” happen with each new section of the song. I’ ve labelled each song section along the bottom“ x” axis and given each a dynamic score out of ten on the“ y” axis. I encourage you to listen again to Phil Wickham’ s version of“ Great Things” as you allow your eyes to follow my graph from left to right. If you can, … please do it now.
Did you listen and hear the dynamics? Did the graph help? I hope so.
Good listeners will ask themselves,“ What dynamic changes occur in the original artist’ s version of the song? Why do these help the song work so well? And how can my team and I reproduce the same, main changes?”
If we can do that, we’ re well on the way to becoming a team who are more musical and more effective as we warmly invite our
congregation to worship Almighty God through our songs.
Grant Norsworthy Grant is the founder of More Than Music Mentor- providing online & onsite training for the heart & the art of worshipping singers, instrumentalists & technicians. Grant’ a passion is to IMPROVE musicality, INCREASE participation, INSTILL unity & INSPIRE worship in The Church worldwide. An Aussie who also lived in Nashville, TN, USA for 17 years as a pro CCM muso, today Grant lives and works from his Nelson New Zealand home base.
MoreThanMusicMentor. com Facebook. com / GrantNorsworthy
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