How do you do worship at your church? We have your basic rock-infused, worship service on Sunday morning, but on Wednesdays, our lead pastor and a beautiful young lady (my wife) lead us in a much simpler acoustic worship service. It’s simple and beautiful, but sometimes, our large auditorium feels a bit empty with just two voices and an acoustic guitar.
That’s when we discovered the beauty of sound padding.
Now, there are a few ways to do this. If you’ve got a keyboard on stage, you probably use it’s MIDI function to provide some background padding, but that might be a bit too technical for some people and also requires a keyboard capable of such. For those of you in this camp, let me share my church’s solution: Pads from Worship Tutorials.
Pads: An Introduction
Basically, Pads are MP3’s that can be played from your AV computer or any MP3 player through your sound system as a music bed for the rest of your live music to lie on top of. We purchased the first set, where each track consists of twenty minutes of swelling keyboard music within one of the major keys. So, each week, I load a playlist with the tracks/keys needed (usually only one, sometimes two, if we can’t find three songs in one key) and turn it on as soon as our pastor begins to strum on his guitar. Not only does this help to fill the room with sound, but it frees up our pastor to slow his strumming, or even stop, without the room becoming entirely silent.
He’s a video from Worship Tutorials explaining the Pads in greater detail and after that is a example song played using the pads.
[Video via YouTube]
Song Example: “No Longer Slaves” by Bethel Music with Pads
[Video via YouTube]
We’ve been using these pads for about a year now with great success, and I think they could be of real help to your church regardless of your worship style. Below are two links you should take time to check out. The first is to the Pads section of WT’s website, where you’ll find six different sets of pads to choose from, and the second is to their Freebies page, where you can download some sample pads and other helpful worship aides.
Links to Worship Tutorials: Pads | Free Stuff
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