The Christ Church Worship Rehearsal Model
As we add more services to a Sunday we are also asking more time from volunteers. The need for extra musicians increases to prevent possible burn-out from those giving their time each and every week. So as we campaign for new musicians it is necessary, in the meantime, to vigorously guard the time of our volunteers. This blog is about how we do that in band rehearsals.
First let me explain how the Worship Arts team is structured at Christ Church. We all fall under the greater umbrella of worship arts. One part tech, one part band, one part vocal team, one part drama, one part choir, and one part orchestra. We’ll focus on tech, band, and vocal team for this post.
The vocal team is a line; anywhere from 5 to 9 vocalists on any given Sunday. The band is a typical rock combo. Drums, Bass, Electric, Acoustic, Keys, Piano. At 6:30 sharp, the band goes to the stage with the band leader (me in this case) and the vocal team retreat to the choir room to work out parts with Christ Church Worship Director, Don Frazure.
The first thing we do at 6:30 for the band side of things is a sound/line check. We start with drums. Our Technical Director, Nathan Tobin, will call out different pieces of the drum to check and he’ll dial it in. This gives the band a chance to dial it up in their in-ear mixes as well (we use Aviom.) Then he’ll ask the drummer to lay down a beat. Usually we pick a song to jam on and one at a time Nathan will invite another instrument to join until we have the full band going. This is the time to make monitor adjustments. Of course, we can ask throughout rehearsal for tweaks, but this is literally a designated monitor time.
At 7 sharp, we all get together for a quick devotion. The vocal team enters, the tech team listens in, and the band stays put. Don usually leads this, but it can be anyone. He uses a mic so that tech can be in and band members trapped in cages (drummer!) can listen through the monitors. This devotion is anywhere from 5-10 minutes and ends with prayer for the rest of the rehearsal.
At 7:05 or 7:10, full band rehearsal is underway. Now, the word rehearsal is defined as “a practice or trial performance of a play or other work for later public performance.” The word “or” in their implies a choice of the two. We go with “trial performance” for our rehearsals. This means each musician is expected to know the music before they come in. We’re not practicing it for the first time on Wednesday night. We’re going for it at this point!
So we run the songs, many of which we have played a million times, but some new ones. We hit the new ones a few more times than the ones we’ve played before. We’ll stop and work the kinks out if need be, but by about 7:50 we check in with the engineer to see what he needs. We’ll hit that specific area in a specific spot, reset for the top of the set, and we’re done by about 8. At that point the volunteer musicians are free to go.
The worship staff will then meet briefly. We will decide which songs we need to hit again at Sunday morning soundcheck for the bands sake, which songs we need to do for lighting sake, and which ones we need to do because of a different lead vocal. We fill out a form that we’ve created using jotform.com. You can open the form on an iPhone, iPad, or laptop computer and fill it out really quick and set it up so that it emails a copy to whoever you want. In this case, Don, Nathan, and myself get a copy of the Sunday morning schedule in our email, easily accessible on stage that morning from our phones!
Extra. Here is a sample of the form we use:
- 1 year ago
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