The Monday Mojo is a weekly posting of great resources for worship leaders. You’ll find anything from album highlights and releases, introspective articles on worship and the church, helpful media, tips on instrumentation and sound, sites and applications to boost the organization & structure of your respective teams, even simple words of encouragement. Click the Monday Mojo category above or come back every Monday to stay in tune with the mojo… -Jaydubbs
Lets get straight to the point here. If you are a worship leader/musician in the church and you’re not implementing a click or metronome during your music sets, you are severely limiting yourself and your ministry in terms of versatility & musicianship/talent. I will explain my thoughts on why that is below, but first, there is a prerequisite before you can begin piping in click to your players…you must have the ability to use in-ear monitors (IEM’s).
In-ears vs. wedge monitors are a whole other discussion, so I’m not going to focus on that, but the bottom line is you can’t use a click if you are only using wedges for your monitor feeds.
If you have the capability to use IEM’s, it would be ideal to have all your musicians and vocalists on click, meaning that they all have the ability to hear the click. At bare minimum, just having the drummer on click would raise the level of musicianship significantly once your players are accustomed to it a bit. Here’s 3 reasons you should be using a click:
Stability/Tightness: This is the most fundamental and important benefit of using a click in your sets. We’ve all had the song that started off at 105bpm and ended up at 121bpm by the time it was over. Or having the instrumentalist who starts the song starting it off waaaaayyyy ttooooo sssllloooooowww. Having a click allows you the freedom to assign a particular bpm (beats per minute) to the song and it will stay that same speed that whole entire time. A click will also naturally progress your musicians to a higher level of playing. Over time, your players will become tighter, tastier, and simply…better. The click makes musicians become better at their respective craft.
Versatility/Freedom: A click frees the drummer up from having to start a lot of the songs by giving tempo on the ride or hi-hat cymbals. Or from having the worship leader always start the songs. By having a click, you can let the keyboard player, the electric guitarist, or whoever start the song and be confident that they’re starting it at the right tempo. And those dramatic breaks in your songs will never be out of sync again!
Programming Tracks: One of my favorite benefits, using a click gives you the ability to incorporate programming tracks (synths, electronic beats, vocal textures, etc.) behind your music. Tracks, if used right, can give your music a beautiful secondary layer and movement that you won’t get from live instrumentalists.
Here’s a few metronome and click resources to help get you started in stepping up your game…
>Boss DB-90 Dr. Beat Metronome – This is, in my opinion, the best consumer click setup out there right now. It’s the one that I use 95% of the time.
>Music Math 4 – Great little free download for Mac’s that gives you the ability to find out the bpm’s of your songs by tapping in the tempo.
>Tempo iPhone App – This baby has saved my skin 2 times now since I’ve had it. Great resource to fall back on when you have no DB-90 or other click. You can even save set lists into the app just like the DB-90.
Are you using a click in your worship ministry? How has it affected the quality of your music programming?
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