Five (and a half) Tips for Teaching New Songs, #2

By Jon Nicol

Tip #1 gave us the idea of doing a new song as a pre-service song. This gets your band familiar with the song in a live setting, and even lets some of your early & on-time arrivers hear the tune.

After a few weeks of running the new tune in a pre-service song, it's time to unveil it in the service. As you do, consider taking another intermediate step before actually putting it in as a congregational worship song:

Tip #2: Use the song as a special music* piece.

Setting the song apart from rest of the worship songs helps shine the spotlight on it. And while you and I would rather jump right in and use it as worship, our congregations will likely appreciate being able to listen to the song before they try to sing it.

Here are a few ideas to make this even more effective as part of the teaching process:

1. Project the lyrics, but format them differently.

Our default is the typical big, blocky, white with black-border, drop shadow, sans-serif text centered on the screen. So for specials, I ask my assistant to format the text and screen differently to set those lyrics apart from the regular sing along. (Hint, consider a serif font, smaller, left or right justified, etc.)

2. Keep it solo-voice driven.

If your team tends to be heavy on the vocals, consider stripping it down to one single voice, with other voices only used sparingly as BGVs. Why? The melody is more easily caught when there are fewer voices and parts.

3. Consider inviting people to sing along towards the end.

Some already may be doing so. If you sense that they want to, invite them into it. But it's OK for people to listen the whole time.

4. Prep people for what's ahead.

You don't need to keep it a secret why you're doing this. Either before or after the song, tell them that "we'll be worshiping with this song in coming weeks. So we thought we'd introduce it to you today."

Introducing a new song first as a special music piece is a simple way to bridge the gap between "brand-spankin' new" and "now we're trying to worship with it." I don't always do it that way, but this extra step of teaching can be effective.

Questions: Have you found this method effective for teaching new songs? What other methods do you use teach new songs?

*Or whatever you might call performance songs at your church.

Post graphic derived from Stock.xchng

October 15, 2012