Ch 2: Leading Yourself
In this lesson, we’ll discuss an important part of the MD role: preparing for a service you’ll be MDing. First and foremost, the most important preparation is preparing our hearts for the service. All the technical and musical preparation and leadership should stem from (1) the overflow of our daily walk with Christ and (2) our hearts prepared to minister to His people and to our musician team through our leadership. Always remember: We’re ministers who happen to play instruments, not the other way around.
Know Your Team
A big part of MDing is knowing who your musician team is that week. It’s wise to think about the strengths and opportunities you have on your team. For instance, if you have a newer, developing drummer on for the next Sunday, touching base with them midweek may be wise to encourage and make sure he/she feels confident and prepared. Five days before any service, the Worship Leader will send a message on your campus’s Prebrief Thread, where the leadership for that week also dives into the vision and variables of the service. As MDs, we then convey the vision while adding our own notes on what to pay especially close attention to for the week in our preparation. It’s also important to mention any musician variables in the Prebrief Thread to make sure everyone’s clear on all the variables for that service. Variables aren’t a bad thing. In fact, quite the opposite! It means we have an opportunity to grow and develop our team through that service!
Know The Songs
If there’s a new song on the setlist, dive deep into it! Get the “why” behind the song in your spirit! We need to understand what this song is communicating before we try to communicate it. Listen to the song 10, 20, 50 times. Not just your part, the whole song. Watch YouTube videos of the original artist expressing the song in a live context. If there’s a New Song Cafe video about the song where the songwriter(s) dives into what inspired them to write it, watch it! Encourage your team to do the same!
Know The Parts
As an individual contributor, you listen to two things: the song as a whole to get the song in your spirit and the part for your instrument. As an MD, you need to understand not only the big picture of the song but each instrument’s role and the part they play in it. Remember, each musician is asked to learn the part as is, note-for-note, so the better understanding we have of how each part sounds and fits in with each other, the better we can convey the original heart and sound of the song. A great best practice for this is listening to each part midweek and writing down the specifics of what you hear at each point in the song. For instance, when if you’re studying an EG part, it may look like:
Intro - tacet
Verse 1 - tacet
Chorus - main riff with light overdrive, no delay, medium reverb
Interlude - big, overdriven chords on diamonds, quarter note delay, light reverb
And so on for every part of the song…