Where music, culture and worship meet.

This blog examines, reviews and discusses how worship is being lived out in culture and in the church. We tackle everything from songwriting techniques in corporate worship, to interviewing worship leaders and pastors, to reviewing the last big rock concert.

March 25 2008

Working “Reason” into worship, drum loops, synths and other crazy things

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Reason 4I have for quite some time been hoping for a Abelton Live/Reason/synth/jack of all trades musician to come to our church. I love working with it in the studio but I’ve always wanted to get it integrated into our live worship sets. Sadly that person has not walked through the door yet so I got myself  a midi controller(M-Audio Oxygen 8), installed Reason and started hacking away.

I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that.  So it’s just Reason for now.

This Easter we tried out our first go at playing with a Reason track. We did a stripped down acoustic version of Mighty Is the Power of the Cross by Chris Tomlin and integrated a reason track I recorded. I think we’ve been reasonably well paced in the progression of musical style in our church and I hope we haven’t left many behind. This was another leap forward and I must admit, my first try at it so it wasn’t all that great but it was a start. For the first time in a long time I was nervous. I was panicking that my computer would shut down or the track would pause or something funky. Thank God it went smoothly, giving me a bit more confidence using this live going forward.

So here’s a 2 minute cut from what we used on the outro. This of course had live vocals as well as an acoustic guitar.

 

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October 08 2007

Continuous Worship conference at Mars Hill Church

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A small group of us recently went to the Continuous Worship conference at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. I’ve read much of Mark Driscoll, subscribed to his podcast and I love what he’s doing so I was really excited about this conference. I knew very little of their worship music theology or style. I think I had heard one or 2 tracks that I thought were very strange but couldn’t quite remember why I thought so. I would be reminded why shortly.

They opened up the conference with their style of worship and it was such an interesting dichotomy of current, cutting edge music set to hymnals. I found myself loving the music, and really they play exactly the style of music that I love to write and love to play, but being lost in the words. Despite being raised in the church, I didn’t know hyms because I was raised in the Vineyard and we didn’t sing hymns. So I didn’t know really any of the lyrics and the things about hymns is there are 5 verses and none of them repeat. So I found it very tough to sing although I really wanted to. From the looks of it a lot of people were in the same position as I. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they played at all, they are powerful songs, I just didn’t know them. I’ve never attended a regular Sunday morning service at Mars Hill but I’d imagine the congregation doesn’t have trouble since they’ve heard the songs numerous times. For us non-hymn knowing visitors it was a challenge.

Since then I’ve downloaded a ton of their songs from their music RSS feed and the songs have really grown on me. I admire their creativity, their maturity in arrangement and how much they value theologically sound worship music. My taste doesn’t line up exactly by any means, it’s hit and miss for me, but that’s not unique at all. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone that I like every tune from(not even Jeff Buckley). One of my favorites is the arrangement of Come Thou Fount by E-Pop. The leader of E-Pop, by the way, is in a band called Barcelona who’s recent album is amazing. Checkout Come Thou Fount below:

E-Pop: Come Thou Fount

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