Sunday Setlist and Recap, January 18, 2009

To continue my participation in Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlist for Christian Church of Broomfield for this past week:

10:45 (Contemporary) Service
The Lord Almighty Reigns (Terry Butler)
Wholly Yours (David Crowder)
Holy, Holy, Holy (Reginald Heber, John Dykes)
You are God Alone (Billy Foote, Cindy Foote)
God of Wonders (Steve Hindalong, Marc Byrd)
Above All (Paul Baloche, Lenny LeBlanc)
I Stand in Awe (Mark Altrogge -communion)
Power of Your Love (Geoff Bullock -invitation)
Awesome God (Rich Mullins -closing)

I ran sound for our first service at 8:00, but again neglected to bring a bulletin home so I could post that setlist. Our DVD player (which we also play CDs with) made some interesting noises, so we'll be looking into that before next week. The music for first service went fine - there were no other issues with sound and the team did a fine job. The only problem I could hear, or rather couldn't, was the organ. See the organ's volume is controlled solely by the organist, it's not connected to the sound system at all - due to voiced speakers, I'm told. I try to stay away from organ discussions, it's something of a sacred cow. It gets played twice a month at hardly-audible levels and is a waste of space and resource, in my opinion.

For second service I played guitar. You'll notice the length of our set..that was a challenge. We cut down songs to make them all fit. I think we should've axed a couple songs instead, and that's something I'll bring up with our leader tomorrow. The performance aspect got off to a bad start because all the instruments and vocalists were muted in the house. The sound tech was distracted with recording, and didn't realize the problem right off. The whole first song was.. missing :) Once that was resolved, the songs went pretty well from a band standpoint.

A significant change was made at the drum set during rehearsal. Working with the drummer, we found a patch in the Roland brain that has a more defined bass and snare drum. That made a big difference in timing and tightness of the band over weeks past, and gives me some hope about our rhythm section, certainly much room for improvement there - but progress happened.

My favorite song this week was "God of Wonders" because I thought we did the best job on it overall. We hit the changes, we hit the tempo, we hit the parts, we hit the breaks. Everyone did, it was beautiful. The only real problem we had was starting "Holy, Holy, Holy". We'd worked out an arrangement during rehearsal, and decided that bass and piano were going to start the song together immediately after we finished "Wholly Yours". It didn't go well because the pianist forgot, and the bass player was waiting on eye contact with pianist to get started. Finally, the bass just started and we were able to get into the song. It tripped up our flow, but we recovered.

We tried something new this week: we held a 10 minute debrief immediately after the service. The purpose is to come up with things that we did good with, and things we can improve upon. As I listened to the discussion, I think I'd like to make sure everyone has a chance to participate, so I'd like to try a format of

- each person say one thing they thought was good about the service that someone else did
- each person say one thing about what they themselves need to improve on
- each person say one thing they think the team needs to improve on

and see how that goes next week. I'm excited about how this went this week and look forward to this being a tool for improvement.

The 2 major things that came out of this were: starting songs, and transitions between songs. Other things I thought of later were the 'too many songs' issue, and quality of sheet music/chord sheets. That issue tripped myself and the bass player up a couple of times this week.