Well I hope this title caught your attention and no, I’m not just going to tell you to make your practice shorter by practicing fewer songs.
Today, most people have access to the Internet and, as we know, are spending a lot of time surfing the web, watching videos and listening to music. Well, why not direct some of that time that your musicians are spending in cyberspace to learning the music you will be going over at your next practice? In recent years, the production quality of Catholic music for worship has improved by leaps and bounds. Many recordings are being produced by some of the best people in the music Industry and many of the musicians playing on these recordings are professional studio musicians who record for their living. Many publishers have websites where you can listen to the music out of most hymnals in their entirety. If you don’t do it already, consider sending out a weekly email to all your musicians that contains links to as many of the songs used in your Liturgy as you can find. Even if you can only find two or three, this will help your group to be more familiar with the melody, instrument parts, tempo and structure of the songs thus saving time at your practices learning a song from scratch. It will especially help those who don’t read music to listen to the song a few times and get their part in their head. A few web sites that you can go to and find these links are:
There is also a website called mycatholicvoice.com that contains links to all of the above listed sites. You simply type in the song title you are looking for and then select the version of the song you are looking for. After you get to the page, simply copy the link and paste it into the email with the title of the song listed above it. You can also find many songs on youtube.com that have a video along with them but be careful to watch the entire video before sending it out to make sure the video is what it says it is and that there is nothing inappropriate in it. You may also be able to find the videos on Godtube.com, which is safer to use.
Another aide to reducing your rehearsal time is to see if your copy machine can scan music and create a PDF document. If it can, you can scan in a stack of music into one large PDF that you can send out in the weekly email so that your musicians will have all the music in advance and come to practice prepared. Hopefully if put into practice, this will cut down on your rehearsal time and give you more time to be in prayer and fellowship or to be home with your families.
