I have been all over the place in my years as a worship leader when it comes to choosing the music we use. I have spent countless hours writing out praise charts. I used packaged material like S.P.I.N. which combines chord charts, rehearsal CDs and powerpoint slides. I have bought song books, chord books and scoured the internet for tabs and chords.
Working with adult and youth worship teams, I have decided that it doesn’t matter so much how you get your songs, but use the same versions with each. Here are 3 reasons why:
1. Organization- When you have several versions, from several sources, of different songs it makes it hard to keep track of which song is used with which group.
2. Mentoring- When you use the same versions of songs, it makes a learning partnership possible. I can have my keyboard player from the adult team work with our keyboard players from the youth team and they are both working from the same reference music.
3. Fill In- From time to time members of our Sunday morning team are out of town. Since we use the same versions of the songs for our youth band it makes it easy to have one fill in when needed without having to learn all new songs.
I will note that we do not do all of the same songs with both groups, however we have enough overlap that it works most of the time.
So how about your groups.. Do you use the same music? What resources do you use?
We have quite a bit of overlap between our adult and youth worship bands. We have at least one youth with our adult band every week. We use songselect.com for sheet music, chord charts & lyrics. We use planningcenteronline.com for organization of all things worship. Finally, we use ProPresenter for our presentation software.
Thanks for sharing Joel. We use planning center online also. Love it!