Free Resources
1. Spotify:
I use Spotify for everything! It is the best way to find new music and listen to it for free. It is also very easy to share songs and albums with other Spotify users. Spotify is completely legal, and the free version is ad supported.
2. Elevation Worship:
For those of you who play songs from Elevation Worship, they graciously offer chords, tutorials, loops, and lyric sheets for most of the songs from all 7 of their albums. We play a few of their songs in our high school ministry and this site is invaluable. Many other worship bands offer similar resources, for example Mars Hill Music & Bethel Music have many great free resources for their songs.
3. New Release Tuesday:
This is a great place for new music, chord charts, artist interviews, and more. If you’re looking for a new song to teach your congregation, check out New Release Tuesday. You won’t be disappointed!
Paid Resources
1. Spotify Premium:
No commercials. Higher audio quality. Offline playlists on your smartphone (streaming music with no internet connection), collaborative playlists, and more. $10/mo and it’s totally worth it! I use this with my high school ministry and the worship leaders follow and can add to our list. It’s a great place to find new music as well.
2. Planning Center Online:
This is the best worship scheduling resource on the market. Schedule your entire service down to the second (don’t worry the Spirit is still working), link songs with chord charts and mp3s for the band, input series artwork, use the matrix to schedule out weeks in advance, and much much more! Every ministry at GraceSLO uses this and it works amazingly. Get it!
3. SongSelect:
This is the best sheet music/chord chart resource out there. Many of you I’m sure use this already or have at least heard of it. That said, invest in this for your worship team. Great, simple, easy to use resource.
Did we not include a key resource you use in your ministry? Let us know by commenting below!
I Led My Team Astray
Dropbox and Google docs.
Both great resources! How do you use them Andrew?
With Planning Center, there is an app called Music Stand. You probably all know about it. But basically, if you use an iPad, it will give you all the music in order, PDF that you can annotate on, and change the keys with one easy step. I love it. Match that with the Airturn/Bluetooth foot pedal, and you are golden! Or, you can just memorize!
I use Music Stand on my iPad at home – saves loads of paper. I can’t remember the last time I printed a chart!
I use Spotify to make the playlist for that week and share it with the team so they can listen to it throughout the week leading to that Sun.
Onsong, Playback from Multitrack and Autotune Pro