Danielle Blog

singing at church!

Sunday was quite eventful in my music and praise life!

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to be joining the Praise Band at my church in a few weeks. Part of the reason this became a fact, instead of a hope, is a series of events that began 3.5 weeks ago.

On that Sunday, 3.5 weeks ago, the pastor gave a sermon about prayer. It was so well received that on Tuesday, he sent an email to everyone on the church email list that he was going to continue preaching about prayer for the next two Sundays.

Prior to this email, I had spoken to the music director, we’ll call him N, about singing with the Praise Band. One of the things N had said to me was that if I ever wanted to sing a solo in church to let him know about the song, and they would fit it in when the message of the song and the message of the sermon were similar. Well, my intention was never to be some big soloist in church; I just wanted to sing with the band. I haven’t really worked to find songs that I’d be good at as a soloist. There are songs that I know, where I’ve done solos on the verses, from my church back in MN. But they aren’t necessarily ones that I’ve connected with the strongest.

BUT since I KNEW the topic of the upcoming sermons, I was inspired to try to find a song in my repertoire that fit with a message of prayer. And voila! I found one of my favorites! The song is a prayer to offer one’s life up to God to do His will, and to be led by Him; it is called The Potter’s Hand.

I emailed N and the pastor to offer up my willingness to sing this song. I sent them the key phrases that were about prayer, and that spoke to me. I suggested that perhaps I could sing it for them so that they could “decide if they wanted to incorporate it” into the 3rd service on prayer; this is code for “you can judge my singing and see if I’m good enough to sing at church.”

Well, I stayed after church on that 2nd Sunday of the prayer series, which was 1.5 weeks ago, and I sang it for and with N. At the end of running through it a few times, he told me that he thought it was ready to go and he’d tell the pastor as much.

Now, it was just a matter of seeing if the pastor thought the message of the song fit with the message of his sermon, and I needed to wait to hear from them.

Well, last week, I never heard from either of them. So, I assumed that it didn’t fit with his sermon after all. I was okay with that. I was mainly excited that I’d be joining the band soon (Aug 22)! I got ready for church, like usual. I showed up about 5 minutes before the service would start, like usual. And when I was walking down the aisle to go to my see, N was at the front of the church and walking toward me waving at me to come talk to him.

Our conversation was something like this:
N says “Hi Danielle! I’m so glad to see you! I lost your phone number and wasn’t able to reach you. Would you be willing to sing with the band today?”
Mind you, they had just finished practice and the service was about to start.
My eyes widen and I pause and say “uhhhhhhh….. sure.”
“Because we are planning on doing the Potter’s Hand.”
“Oh!” pause “Did you want me to sing lead vocals?”
N says “Absolutely!”
I say “uhhhhh… sure!”

And then we had a hurried 3 minute conversation discussing the logistics. My biggest concern was that when we had practiced it the week prior, I discovered that they did a different order of chorus and verses once they got through all of it once and were doing the repeats. I had these visions of my being ready to sing another chorus when the band was going back to a verse! But he reassured me that the powerpoint was correct and that the person running it would switch the slides in time for me to be prepared for the next part of the song.

And then, we prayed. And the service started!

The opening songs were great. It felt wonderful to be back up front singing and helping to lead the worship music. I felt right at home. Albeit, I was still adjusting to the sound and microphone some.

The pastor gave the children’s message, and I knew The Potter’s Hand was up next, and my mouth was getting a little dry from nerves. I drank water, ate a mint. And then it was time for me to lead everyone in singing the Potter’s Hand!

Once I got up front, and the keyboardist started playing the song, my nerves went away with the familiarity of it. N started introducing me; I was listening to him until the vocalist next to me started humming the song. When I heard her, I realized the key was VERY different than what I’d practiced. I realized, or at least I thought I realized, that singing it at the high octave might make it too high when it got to a later part of the song. And singing it at the lower octave might be too low. But I didn’t have time to try it out, because by then, he was done introducing me and I needed to start singing!

oh dear!

I decided to sing it low. As I was going through the first line and approaching the second, in my head, I did one of these “oh crap! I’m not sure I can hit the next notes, because they are so low!”, but I kept singing. And I hit them!

To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, I recorded me singing it at the approximate key where we’d practiced it and then the key that I (think) I actually sang it during the service.

Note: In order to a) use the equipment that I have – which is only an HD video camera that has audio too and to b) continue to not show any pictures of me and protect my anonymity, of sorts, the recordings just show my computer screen of the words while I’m singing.

Oh and I’m, of course, singing it acapella, since I don’t own or know how to play keyboards. And I was behind the camera so that I could see the words on my computer screen and have the camera recording the computer screen. But it has decent sound, I think.

Here is the key that I did in practice:

And here is most of the song in the (approximate) key that I sang at the service. Note that I did it in one “take” and discovered after I’d uploaded it to Flickr that Flickr only accepts videos of 90 seconds maximum. My video was 1:48, so the last line is cut off. I didn’t want to re-record it, or edit it, since it had already taken me a while to get it all set up and then to upload it. But again, you can hear a decent chunk of it; I cut out the 2nd verse, as it stands.

I’m also a little nervous about putting this out there, because it isn’t perfect by any means. But well, perfection is overrated, right?

And there you have it!

It was well received. People in the band were very complimentary and surprised (in a good way), judging from their comments. I felt good about it. N told me it was good.

And regardless of how it went, I sing in the band on Aug 22nd!