Church Music Resources for Part-Time Musicians
When I received this review of the Lifeway Worship Project from long-time friend and PartTimeMusician.com contributor Steve Hamrick, I knew several of our readers would love to see it. If you play music in church on a regular basis, or even on special occasions, this could be a great help. Resources like this enable us prepare better, play better, and generally make life better for musician and listener alike. :-) Steve, thank you for passing this along!
Keep playing,
Mark
A Review of the Lifeway Worship Project™
Many of the readers of PartTimeMusician.com are involved with music in some church-related capacity. Regardless of denomination and size of church, there are many challenges we all share in finding new, reasonably-priced musical resources for our church programs. Serving as a worship minister for many years in the local church and for the past several years as a state music director for a major evangelical denomination has given me an opportunity to see the struggles of churches in finding things like new hymns, praise songs, instrumental accompaniments, accompaniment tracks, and new choir music. While there are many publishing companies that provide quarterly resources through choral clubs, I haven’t found they are too helpful in providing music for congregational worship. And what if you serve in a small church with no pianist or organist, or perhaps the only one who plays is sick or on vacation? What do you do then?
I would like to tell you about a product that I have used for over a year that has helped me more than any other single resource for congregational worship, the Lifeway Worship Project™. I should say that this company does not pay me nor am I representing them in this article, although I have been privileged to visit their headquarters in Nashville and know many of those who have developed this product.
It must be a real challenge for church music publishers to provide music for such a varied audience. Some churches sing hymns, others sing contemporary praise songs, many use a blended approach while yet others prefer a southern gospel or country style of music. Church music programs are often accompanied by a full orchestra; others, a praise band, organ, piano, guitar, or perhaps they have no accompanist at all. To provide a single resource to meet these vast needs would be a seemingly impossible task.
When the Lifeway Christian Resource Company was in the process of producing a new hymnal a couple of years ago, the realization came to surface that in our digital society, a hymn book was out of date before it could even be printed. As a result, they decided that alongside the new hymnal, they would produce an online resource in which they could add new songs and arrangements as necessary. Lifeway took on an enormous task of developing an online and hard-copy product that included arrangements of all the 650 songs in the printed hymnal plus 250 additional new songs and optional arrangements. Here’s where it gets interesting.
Lifewayworship.com decided to not only to make the SATB arrangements of the hymnal available online, but the following parts may be downloaded a la carte: extended piano accompaniment, organ, vocals, full orchestra, individual instrumental parts, lead sheets, praise band charts, chord charts, PowerPoint™ files, and even Finale™ parts. If that wasn’t cool enough, with the finest session players in Nashville, Lifeway recorded MP3’s of every song in the project. Each song can be downloaded as a listening track, a split track (accompaniment on one side and vocals on the other), or a stereo accompaniment track, sometimes in multiple keys. The hymns are recorded with full orchestra and the praise songs are recorded with praise band instrumentation. The accompaniment tracks are extremely helpful for soloists, small groups, or choir. The tracks make a great option for the church with no accompanist. Lifewayworship.com decided to price their products similar to the iTunes Store®. With no monthly membership fees, downloads range from $.10 to $1.99 each.
Wait, there’s more. Because every soloist and worship leader doesn’t always want to perform every verse, Lifewayworship.com allows you to make a Songmap™ of many of the songs in the project. A songmap allows you to make your own arrangements of the hymns and praise tunes. Do you think an arrangement has too much repetition? Just cut out the extra parts. Need it in a lower key? Most songs are available in several keys. What is amazing is that Songmap™ will provide you with an accompaniment track, printed music, and even orchestral parts exactly to your specifications for your arrangement.
Another neat feature of the Lifeway Worship Project is that it saves your downloads on their database. This means that when you download a song to your computer, you will also have it stored on-line where you may access your library at anytime from any computer as long as you have internet access. Of course, there are copyright restrictions by which you must abide. Almost all the products you can download are also available as hard copies on DVD/CD. There are also some excellent video accompaniment tracks for praise songs and hymns. The Lifeway Worship Project also produces moving and still backgrounds for media projection software.
You can listen to every song in the project by clicking on this link. Go to the middle of the page where there is a box labeled “Play the Lifeway Worship Project,” scroll to the song you want, and hit play. You can also hear snippets of any song from the main Lifewayworship.com when you type a song in the “find and buy” box. You can also preview pdf’s of every printed arrangement before you commit to purchase anything. Another neat feature is that in the “find and buy” box, you may also type in a subject, scripture, or author and get results of your search. You do not pay for anything until you check out so I encourage you to experiment within the site. There is also a basic free worship planning tool called Worshipmap™, and an advance worship planning tool called WorshipmapPro™ which has a yearly subscription. The Lifeway site sometimes is slow and accessing it from a fast internet connection is advised.
While you will not find every hymn or praise song from every denomination, you will find over 1000 songs written in terrific arrangements to use in your church. Sign up yourself or your church for free and then give it a try.
Steve Hamrick is a regular reader of PartTimeMusician.com and currently serves as the director of Worship and Church Music for the Illinois Baptist State Association, Springfield, Illinois. He can be reached via email or at his website.
I was going through one of these periods lately when our youngest was scheduled to solo with a local orchestra. Her piece was extremely difficult (Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen), but she was ready…and the orchestra was, too. She played beautifully, and the music made by both daughter and orchestra filled my heart with joy and my eyes with tears. How can we, as musicians, so quickly forget the inspiration our music offers us?
