How to change up your worship songs.

I believe as a worship leaders, we need to add our own flavor to songs we sing every week, so it's fresh. If you get on CCLIs website you will find that these 5 songs are sung the most in churches every week.

1 How Great Is Our God Tomlin, Chris \ Reeves, Jesse \ Cash, Ed 4348399
2 Mighty To Save Fielding, Ben \ Morgan, Reuben 4591782
3 Blessed Be Your Name Redman, Beth \ Redman, Matt 3798438
4 Here I Am To Worship Hughes, Tim 3266032
5 Everlasting God Brown, Brenton Riley, Ken 4556538

Rightfully so, these songs are loved by our communities.

As a someone who was trained in jazz, the idea of playing/singing the melody and the tune exactly like the original artist is foreign, illegal, and Windows 7. We develop our own ways interpreting melodies and harmony, that is the fun part, it stays fresh and alive and improvised!

However in the church setting, there is not much you can do as far as the melody is concerned. People have heard it on KLOVE (in between, them begging for money) and know how to sing it a certain way.

Still, we can play around with the chords, or harmony as long as it doesn't effect the melody. A lot of churches do their own arrangements and their own dynamics, but for the most part across the board all of the churches I have been to, play and sing "How Great Is Our God" like Chris Tomlin.

Let's take that one for example. The basic chord structure is C Am F (G). It is pretty simple. This is what I did to the chords for a few weeks at our community.

C.................................Bm7b5.E7.Am
The splendor of a King,...............clothed in majesty
.....Gm7.......C7.....F
Let all the earth rejoice
.......................Fm
All the earth rejoice

Chorus
...........C...................Bm7b5....E7
How great is our God, sing with me
..........Am.......................Gm7.....C7
How great is our God, and all will see
.........F............Bb7............C
How great, how great is our God

Now this may be complicated depending where you are musically, but that is ok. AND by adding new harmonies you can pick and chose which ones to make it easier for you or your team. However these changes do not effect the melody, and I can tell you that the chorus really works with the changes over "sing with me, & and all will see." TA DA new life to a song we have done forever!

Let's take a more simple version of what I am purposing. "Blessed Be Your Name" by Matt Redman. The basic chord structure is |B|F#|G#m|E| and then |B|F#|E|. It's pretty much that way the whole time. So to make it more of our own and less the same, here is what we did with it.

For the first two lines of the verse it is the normal progression, then for line 3 and 4 of the verses we used |G#m|F#/A#|B|E| and then |G#m|F#/A#|E| because those lines are talking about how God is still blessed in times of lament. You can do this on the pre-chorus as well, you can do it where ever! Or not do it. That is the point, it is your call, make it!

There are other things we did with it later in the song, but for now you can see/hear/feel that just changing the 3rd and 4th lines of the verse breathes new life into a song we have done for years.

More on this later. And if you have questions about how it works, facebook me. I'm happy to help. PS sorry about the periods, it wouldn't line up correctly without them.