Worship Teams
Worship Leading Before Tracks & Being Flexible w/ Brett Younker
Brett Younker from Passion joined Loop Community Founder Matt McCoy to talk about leading worship before tracks and how worship leaders can be more flexible in worship.
[Matt] We’ve both lead worship with tracks for a long time. What was it like for you leading worship before tracks?
[Brett] Being a college student in the early 2000s, we didn’t have access to how to do stuff. It was like, “How does the David Crowder band make those sounds?” They were the ones for me that were on the forefront of using tracks. A lot of those guys became the Passion band like Paul Whittinghill and Brian Carl, and in those early days of playing youth groups we would use a software called Reason. I didn’t have a keyboard player. Brian, our guitar player, would make the sounds that would help us transition songs. Then Paul would run Reason, and our “loops” would literally be loops, not tracks. Something to add rhythm and motion.
[Matt] My worship sets before tracks could sometimes be 40 minutes. We used to just flow, repeat more, jump back to another song. Now they’re 17. You can do that with tracks. But I think we’ve lost a little bit of the natural spontaneity. This is coming from a guy that all I do is tracks and we’ve made software that lets you be spontaneous with tracks! But I do think worship has become more programmed.
[Brett] Yeah. I lead worship at Passion, obviously it’s a huge gathering. It’s one thing if you’re a band and you play together all the time, you can kind of read each other’s minds. But when you have a large team and you’re rotating people in and out that’s a little bit tougher. I’ve always found if you design your system in a way that can be flexible and a culture that does that, it helps for sure.
If you just play songs straight through on a Sunday morning you can fly by a verse that could be a great verse. It might be awesome to sing that verse again, and it may land different in the hearts of people. Sometimes when we sing it goes over people’s heads. Allowing some of the lyrics and truth to settle in with people as you’re leading, you can see people’s hearts engage.
[Matt] Totally. At Loop Community we always say, “you control the tracks, don’t let the tracks control you”. Use a MIDI Controller or an app to help you be flexible. How do you do that at Passion?
[Brett] We have an MD and it’s usually the keyboard player, and they’re also running the tracks. Before the service I’ll give my team a few windows in the songs, and tell them what we might do, so that we’re all paying attention to each other and what’s happening in the room during those windows.
Watch the full interview below!
