 |
 |
 |
|
|
I'm not a musician, so I'm not going to say much about writing or playing your own stuff. If you're not a musician either, then check out our resources pages for pre-recorded music you may wish to use. If you are a musician, just a few words from a non-specialist:
Remember that a good song to be performed is not the same as a good song for everyone to sing.
The melody for singing together must be much simpler, have a more narrow dynamic and vocal range, and a simpler rhythmic variation. Although there will always be some good singers in a service who can follow the syncopation of a difficult melody line, most will be struggling and it'll sound ragged. Other than that, I've nothing to offer on the subject of composition.
A number of alternative worship groups write lyrics to instrumental tracks that they like: often these use simple repetetive chants, and sometimes the original track is digitally edited, or interspersed with sampled loops to make it more suitable for the chant.
Besides using background pre-recorded music or backing tracks, you may wish to experiment on your own. Some kind of editing facility comes in useful eventually. One of the easiest ways of doing this is on a computer with a sound card. If you've got a decent soundcard (Soundblaster) then you should be able to record, edit and playback samples or complete songs (assuming you've got a nice big hard-disk) without too much problem. Don't bother using an 'on-motherboard' soundcard - they invariably distort the sound horribly, and won't produce anything worth playing over a PA.
One nice technique is to loop samples. Until a couple of years ago, we used to use quarter-inch magnetic (reel-to-reel) tape loops, with very critical editing to do this. With the advance of computer technology, it's now much easier to do it digitally. For this you'll need decent WAV-file recording software, such as Steinberg Wavelab or Wavelab Lite which comes free with some Soundblaster cards. You'll need to record from a soundsource (normally the CD drive of your computer). Then you can highlight the portion of the piece you want to loop - using a standard highlighting technique. Then you press a few buttons to tell the software to loop the selected portion, and hey-presto! When looping, it's best to pick sections of tracks that don't vary in volume too much. Also, for really good loops, they need to be fairly repetitive, and ideally have some 'clicky' bit to act as a loop marker - such as a high-pitch plucked chord, or cymbal.
All you then need to do is master to CD or MP3 for as long as you think you'll need. Other things can be sampled and looped in a similar way. I've got a great piece I recorded from Radio Vatican on shortwave radio, with tons of nuns saying the Ave Maria with loads of phasing and other distortion. You can record vox pop from people in the streets and treat it to some interesting effects (like slowing it down, up-pitching or down-pitching, etc.)