10 Free Christmas Worship songs

The fine people over at WorsthipTogether.com have put together a tasty little Christmas treat for all you worship leaders who are starting to freak out that Christmas Eve is only a few sleeps away! They’ve put FREE sheet music online for 10 songs that you can use this year for your Christmas series or Christmas Eve. Check it out here – www.worshiptogether.com

The songs they’ve featured -

• Emmanuel (Hallowed Manger Ground) – Chris Tomlin
• All Creation Sing (Joy to the World) – Fee
• Sing – Josh Wilson
• Born in Bethlehem – Third Day
• Here Is Our King – David Crowder Band
• Glory in the Highest – Chris Tomlin
• Silent Night (Emmanuel) – Matt Maher
• Joy Has Dawned – Keith Getty & Stuart Townend
• Love Came Down – Ben Cantelon
• Born That We May Have Life – Chris Tomlin

There is some goooood stuff here! Thanks Worship Together folks!

Video – Listening Skills

One of the big steps in maturity for a musician is learning how to listen. Listening skills are just as important as playing ability and this video talks about how it applies to worship teams. Lots more good stuff like this over at www.musicademy.com –

Remembrance Day

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

GarageBand – How to change a loop tempo

Okay so I’ve recently made the jump to the Apple Army and I’ve been pretty happy with it. Whether you are a Mac user or not, you know that one of the big benefits of Apple products is how intuitive the software/hardware combo is and the ease of use of interface. For the most part, I’d say this is definitely true and I’ve made the switch from Windows XP to OSX pretty easily.

This weekend, however, I found myself in a pretty frustrating situation with GarageBand ’09 and couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a solution for what I was wanting to do.

First – some setup:

At my church, we use click/loop tracks almost every week. I’ve talked about this before and they are a pretty standard part of our worship team toolbelt. In the past, I’ve pulled a stereo wav track in to Audacity, split the stereo file and run the audio channels to either front of house or in-ear monitors. If we need to make tempo changes on the fly, Audacity can handle that through one of their little drop-down menus.

This past week, I decided to try using GarageBand to take a pre-recorded click/loop track of “Sing to the King” and add some organ and pad parts. Here’s a shot of the GarageBand project -

Two things to notice. First, the click and loop tracks at the top of the window is orange. Second, see in the bottom left-hand corner where it says “Follow Tempo & Pitch”? That’s greyed out – no option to check that box.

Okay – so we play the click during rehearsal and soundcheck and after our first service decide that the tempo is just a touch slow. The loop is programmed at 118 and we want to run it at 120. Unfortunately, changing the master tempo of the GarageBand project from 118 to 120 only changes the timing of the programmed organ track and does NOT change anything with the click and loop tracks.

After a quick look through the menus and searching through the help files, it looks like I’m out of luck. I jump over to my Windows laptop, fire up Audacity, adjust the tempo from 118 to 120, export as a wav, upload to Dropbox and then wait. Too bad for me – not enough time between services to get the new click/loop track re-inserted to GarageBand at the new tempo.

So yesterday I’m thinking to myself that there must be a way to do this with GarageBand. I begin hunting around on Google and eventually find out that switching the tempo of a pre-programmed loop track is definitely possible but.. get this.. it is not documented in the help files and not available anywhere in the menus. How stupid is that? Apple – you should be ashamed!

Alright, so what is the solution? It goes like this. Remember our orange click and loop tracks? Hilight those tracks and press Control-Alt-G. Click somewhere in the track window and those tracks should now change from orange to purple, like this -

And what’s this? Remember our “Follow Tempo & Pitch” option that was greyed out? Tada!! It’s alive! Click that checkbox and now your click and loop tracks will be slaves to your master tempo for your GarageBand project.

Release Day Giveaway – Paul Baloche – “Glorious”

Paul Baloche has been writing worship anthems for the church for years and his new CD “Glorious” releases tomorrow, November 3. Our friends at Integrity Music have put together a pretty cool giveaway for FIVE people out in blogworld. This Release Day Giveaway is a little different – there are five blogs all running the same giveaway and each site will have a winner who will receive a copy of the new CD as well as the worship leader digital songbook.

I’ve had this CD for a couple of weeks and I’m really enjoying it. This is classic Paul Baloche – singable melodies, lyrics rich with theology and all of it presented in a way that is accessible and memorable. If you’re a fan of Paul Baloche’s song, you will love this CD.

Here’s a video of Paul Baloche and his band playing the title track from this CD, “Glorious” –

How do you enter? Each blog owner can make up their own rules but here’s what we’ll do here -

1. Leave a comment on this post and tell me why you’re excited about winning this CD. Lots of comments are great but it will still only get you one entry in the contest

2. Post about the CD and the giveaway either on your own blog or twitter – make sure you include a link back to this blog when you are posting! Post a link to your post as a second comment and you’ll get entered TWICE in the contest.

3. Go ahead and enter on all five blogs if you like but you can only win once. I’ll choose the winner here tomorrow evening.

Here are links to the other blogs that are part of this giveaway -

• www.ChrisFromCanada.com
• www.FredMcKinnon.com
• www.RichKirkpatrick.com
• www.JoshuaSeller.com
• www.BrentInWorship.com

UPDATE: I used random.org to help pick the winner and the lucky person is Adam Clarke! Congratulations Adam! I’ll get your info to Integrity and they will send your CD out very soon.

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