Worship Musician Magazine November 2021 | Page 22

AM , where our congregation comes . We sing songs , we have a speaker that gives a short word , and then we have independent prayer . As a part of that , our church offers a church booklet or guide that has most of the important prayers in the Bible , the Tabernacle Prayer , the prayer of Jabez etc .
And we wanted to digitize that for our congregation and for others . And so , we created an app called the Pray First app , and it ' s gone gangbusters for us . It ' s been amazing . As part of that app , what we didn ' t have was music that was specifically designed for prayer . And so , the team wrote an entire album that was a very meditative , contemplative type experience .
And that ' s called , the Prayers to the King album , that the song , “ Control ”, comes out of . And so , that ' s been an amazing experience for us . If you could imagine , oh , I don ' t know , a Norah Jones prayer album , it might be something like this . It ' s been great . It ' s done very well for us . I highly recommend it . But the song , “ Control ”, came out of that . We had some amazing vocalists that participated on that . And we did some very interesting vocal techniques to make sure that , that album had this vibe all way through .
There were no sharp edges . And so , you might enjoy this , all the drums were performed , either with brushes or hot sticks , all the kick patterns were very feathered . There were no guitar picks used on the album . Everything was with the fingers . The vocalist , we wouldn ' t let them put
Control on headphones or in-ears . We made them sit and you would put the music extremely quietly through the speakers . And they had to sing in a very low hushed voice . And it gave you this magical quality .
[ WM ] Tell us about your guitars of choice , both for recording and leading worship .
[ Chris ] Oh my goodness . Man , you ' ve got some great questions today . So , we ' ll pivot . For live recording we ' ve been blessed to do a lot of experimentation with acoustic guitars . I guess that ' s what you ' re referring to . With acoustic guitars , we found that a guitar that has a darker wood , the darkest wood possible , and a guitar that if you were just playing it , unamplified … you want the quietest , most compressed , dullest sounding guitar … is usually going to sound the best when you plug it up through a large PA system and you ' ve got a million tracks and all the other things happening . We ' re always
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