Let me clarify that I do not have all the answers! I'm on a quest to reach a higher plane and I'd like to share some of the successes with my fellow worship leaders and band members. Take from this what you will and please comment on how you might be doing things differently or perhaps in a similar manner.
1. One of the first things we changed was how we capture electric guitars in the live setting. We tried a few weeks of using tube amps in different places on the stage - they all simply had too much volume. The main auditorium has far too many hard surfaces and the excess stage volume had to go. Removing the tube amps from the stage, we switched to playing through the new Line6 POD X3 Live. I'm a tube amp freak, and was a little resistant to using a POD for live sound. I've toured the country with tube amps and know how to get great sounds with a real amp. That said, although these little boxes don't have many usable presets out of the box, we've created and settled on a few different amp sounds that work and sound great and eliminate the stage volume from loud amps. The most amazing part about using a POD is the ability to save individual delay and effects settings/tempo for every song. All you have to do is hit the next button and all your tempos and effects are setup perfectly every-time. Line6 also has this cool GearBox software that comes with the X3 Live for free. You can use it to manage/cut/paste/save your presets to/from your POD. It makes the week in/week out changes really easy.
2. One of the next big things that was implemented into our system is the use of Jeff Berg's Planning Center. This is a really fantastic piece of web-based software that allows you to coordinate multiple departments, automatically email your band/vocalists and organize the worship/service flow. This is a paid service, but from our experience, it is a great investment since Jeff and his team are constantly working to update and improve this already fantastic service.
3. Probably the most important change: changing to an Aviom-based in-ear system and integrating a click-track into everyone's in-ears. This is one of the most critical additions that has helped improve the worship flow and quality. The click track is simply a metronome that is triggered to start/stop and advance to the next song by the drummer via a footpedal situated near the base of the hi-hat stand. Every week before rehearsal, I tap out the tempo of each worship song (while I'm programing the delays on my POD for the week, btw) and write them down. Then I take those tempos and program them into a Boss DB-90 Dr. Beat metronome. It's extremely customizable and easy to setup and use. There are other metronomes that would work, but I prefer this one to the rest. The end result is that the band is more consistent and much tighter than ever before. Thank you Dr. Beat! :)
4. The last big change has been to streamline the way we handle/create chord charts for the band. When I arrived at the church, there were beautifully prepared notebooks for each band member, complete with cover sheets and everything. The only problem with this setup is that the vast majority of the charts were lead sheets and tended to be over 3 or 4 pages long. These can be more accurate, but far too cumbersome to use in a regular dress rehearsal. The new rule has been to keep the charts to an absolute maximum of 2 pages. This is made really simple with the use of some free software by John Huss. His little gem of a software package is called Chord Chart Wizard. This software works on pretty much all platforms: PC/Mac/Linux. There are a couple bugs here and there, but the overall usefulness is good and I've been able to use it to craft functional and beautiful charts that are easily transposable.
For more info and pictures of my adventure at Brookwood Church: Follow me on Twitter.
Here are a few iPhone pics of a recent dress rehearsal at Brookwood Church.
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