Worship Backing Band is a series of worship song backing tracks designed for churches that have few or no musicians and musicians who need worship songs to practice to.
Worship Backing Band is a sub brand of Musicademy, founded in 2003 by Marie Page and Andy Chamberlain, who produce instructional DVDs specifically for church based musicians. Over the last few years we’ve found that in helping develop practical skills for worship teams many, many smaller churches struggle with singing some of the more contemporary worship songs because of the lack of quality musicians or in many cases, ANY musicians.
In wanting some high quality practice backing tracks with which to supplement the instructional DVDs, we decided to invest in backing tracks churches could use in live worship with built in flexibility and expression as near as possible to working with a great live worship band. All in all so the music element of worship could be something that captures beauty rather than an offering through gritted teeth and bad noise! (This unfortunately is the reality that many local churches and small groups face.)
So we teamed up with Paul Burton who has produced many well known worship albums over the years and made use of some of the recorded stems from his Encounter Worship compilation series as the basis of our backing tracks. Encounter Worship CD’s were originally designed as a resource to gather together the best of the current worship songs, alongside rediscovering a few forgotten classics and a few songs from relatively unknown writers that perhaps wouldn’t have enough material for a full album but one brilliant song that the wider church would benefit from using.
The songs are recorded in the studio using some of the best Christian session musicians currently involved in worship, but with church friendly rather than ‘clever’ arrangements, so every song has a multitude of expertly produced and sensitively played parts which try to capture a ‘genuine worship’ feel, played and sung with meaning, emotion and conviction.
From there we have so far produced two products, the first is a very easy to operate DVD, really designed for churches and small groups with very limited technical know how and resources who want an uninterrupted time of worship. So you can load the DVD into a computer or put in on your TV and the words come up on the screen and change automatically with the music. Also if you are a confident singer you can de-select the lead vocals and lead worship using Worship Backing Band too. Its easy to navigate from song to song with the menu system but for the ultimate ‘push one button and go’ experience you can select any of 50 different pre-programmed worship set lists or play lists where one song moves seamlessly to the next without any need to mess with the controls. The play lists are sensitively chosen for different demographics and and have short lists or 3 or 4 songs, long lists and even themed lists where the songs are grouped together around topics like God’s love, God’s faithfulness, prayer, forgiveness, personal renewal and many more themes. In fact, all in all, thirty five themes in a very low cost easy to operate DVD package with 54 songs.
The second product uses the same 54 songs but this time is designed for musician’s private practice rather than public worship times. So as well as words on screen you also get chord charts and even the capo chords for guitarists when the song is in a particularly guitar un-friendly key! You don’t get the play lists but you can get rid of one of any instrument per song. So you can play a song without vocals, or without guitars, or keys, or bass, and if you get rid of the drum track you get a click track in place. Perfect for developing your timing!
