as posted at www.worshipsource.com/markroach
Ok, so it was the weekend after Easter… if your church is anything like our church, the staff is all in recovery mode for most of the week, trying to catch up on sleep, time with family, and anything else that was virtually ignored during the weeks prior to Easter. We were no different, and while Saturday seemed much like a normal service, when we all arrived Sunday morning it was easy to see that we hadn’t quite recovered yet. :) Setlist was as follows:
Filled With Your Glory - Jon Neufeld, Tim Neufeld
Everlasting God - Brenton Brown, Ken Riley
Here I Am, Lord - Dan Schutte
The Least I Can Do - M. Roach
feature tune: The Motions (Matthew West)
You Never Let Go - Matt & Beth Redman
I love ‘Filled With Your Glory’ … I think that’s a sleeper among up-tempo worship tunes. We don’t do the melodic variations on the record in the 2nd verse, just to keep in consistent for congregational purposes… I think it’s a great song. ‘Everlasting God’ has been big for us ever since we started. We do kind of a blend between the Tomlin and the Brenton Brown versions. We do the alt. time signatures in the pre-chorus—I love those. I’d love to hear what version you all lean toward… anyone lean toward the Lincoln Brewster version in church?
‘Here I Am, Lord’ is one of those tunes I grew up with in the Catholic church. Being at a Protestant church, it’s not often I run across older hymns and choruses that I actually know, but this one crossed the divide. Anyway, we change it up quite a bit, put it in 6/8 and change the pronouns so that it’s vertical rather than singing from God’s perspective.
‘The Least I Can Do’ was a fun tune of mine to do on the week after Easter, especially with our theme. The message was called "Now What?" and it dealt with our response to the good news of the Easter story the week before. I led the prayer after the song set, which I don’t do very much any more, and it was an easy transition since the song culminates in a down-verse about the Easter story and really deals itself with the fact that the least we can do is worship. I led the prayer from the piano, right before the tag, and asked God to help us all realize that the least we could do was worship in song right then… then asked if He could help us make that a starting point—that we could follow it with a life of worship from this point forward.
Anyway, it was a strong service overall, except for my brilliant transposing error on Saturday night. I led two songs from the piano, one was The Least I Can Do in the worship set and then Matt West’s tune ‘The Motions’ … well, we had transposed it for my vocal and I was playing it an easier key and forgot to transpose the keyboard before we started. I had one of those fantastic moments where you just stop dead in the middle of an intro and say into the mic, "yeah, I’m gonna need to fix that…" then you fix it and start over. Nothing else I could do, my band doesn’t transpose a half step on the fly. :) I’d love to hear your transpose button / capo-on-the-wrong-fret stories… it’d make me feel better I’m sure!
Many blessings to you all! Until next week…
1 comment:
Hey Mark,
Been there done that! Yep, a couple of times now, I've started a song that worked good the night before but then in the morning somehow it's just too low or too high for the vocals and I'm standing there strumming away all the while wondering if I should just fake it through the song or stop and transpose on the fly. I've done both and neither works out to be a smooth operation.
Or how about this one... I just got thi transposer thing on my worship planner and I'm still getting used to making sure I've set the original Key right. I can prepare for the set and have all the songs in the right key but when I print them they are all jumbled up. Stupid as I am, I forget to check the printed versions and run off to church all ready to play the set only to find them a mess.
Once again I'm standing there trying to decide what to do. Fortunately, the errors are discovered during the warmup and I can get them fixed but one time I missed one during the warmup and had to stop, apologize, and fix it during the set. (wont make that mistake again!)
One good thing is that the only other musician that needs chords, etc., is the bass player and he's probably better than me at playing on the fly.
I'm so thankful that the Lord covers these "ugly" moments and somehow makes our worship times wonderful anyway.
Hope you feel better now :)
cosima
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