I got an email yesterday from PraiseCharts.com and dig some digging on their site. They’ve recently released click tracks for popular worship songs to go along with their piano/lead sheets and also orchestration for some stuff. I bought the click/track loop for “Everlasting God” and had some fun playing around with it yesterday – I think people are going to find these really helpful.

I didn’t listen to the click and compare it to the CD arrangement but I’m assuming that they used the original as their guide for the loops & click. I have a bit of a tough time locking myself in to a pre-assigned arrangement like I have to do when I use a loop track but this one (and I’ll assume that the rest are equally as good) is done really and I could see us using one or two of these a week in our services.

Like any click/loop track, the file is in stereo. If you pan the audio hard to one side you’ll get only click and no loops. If you pan it hard to the other side you’ll get only loops and no click. If you haven’t used click before the idea is that you send this stereo signal to the board and have it split to two channels – click in one channel, loops in the other. Your sound guy can then send click through monitors (you sort of have to use in-ears to make this work) to your drummer and send loops to monitors as well as to your main speakers. Obviously, don’t have him send click to the mains – your people will be wondering what that weird sound is and they’ll start looking to see who’s playing the castanets! :)

I know some bands where ALL of the players like to have click, I know other bands where ONLY the drummer wants click. You have to play around with it and see what works best for you. I know that when I’m leading and I’m thinking about playing guitar and singing, I don’t want click – I leave it up to my drummer to keep us in time. If I’m playing on a team as either a guitarist or piano player but not singing, I like to have some click just to really settle in to the groove and work closely with the drummer.

Ok so how do you actually run the click track during your service? There are probably 3 main ways -

1. Have the loop/click tracks on a CD with a numbered track list close at hand. Have a CD player that is either accessible by your drummer or by your main sound guy if he really knows the band and you really, really, r-e-a-l-l-y trust him! When it’s time to play a song in your set that has click and loops, they can just hit play on the CD player and let it run. Obviously the downside with this is that sometimes CD’s skip, sometimes CD players get knocked over, sometimes a wrong button is pushed, etc etc – lots of things can go wrong!
2. The second way to do it would be the same idea but instead of using a CD, use an iPod. Load all of your click/loop tracks into one playlist and before your service starts you can just make a custom playlist of the songs that you are using on that day. If you are in a band that travels for lots of events you may want to have a standard 30- or 45- or 60-minute set that you are really familiar with and you could have playlists on your iPod for each of those different sets. Again it would be up to your drummer or sound guy to operate the iPod during the service. Of course this takes some preparation and practice – you have to make sure that everyone knows what song is coming next, everyone needs to be ready as soon as the count-in happens, etc.
3. The third way (which is probably most common now) is to run loop and click tracks from a laptop on stage. Again, same basic idea as using an iPod but the ability to use more tracks and customize exactly what is happening when increases this way. If you are familiar with any kind of multi-track software you know that you could have, for example, 16 tracks worth of backing material for a particular song – some drum loops, keyboard tracks, synth pads, maybe even some BGV’s – and depending on the setting that you’re actually playing that day, you may not need some of the tracks. By just muting or unmuting certain tracks you can really customize the loop to suit your situation. This method is probably a little overkill for what most worship teams are looking for but if you’re wanting to use loops on a regular basis you should check it out.

So yeah – check out PraiseCharts.com and their click tracks. If you’re interested in exploring this idea of using clicks and loops in your worship services you’ll find some good material there to work with.