Smartphone Sessions

So, here’s what’s going on. As with many of you, my church has been shut down due to the recent coronavirus outbreak, and we’ve been having church services via Zoom. For the first couple of weeks, I led worship by playing guitar and singing into my phone over Zoom at the appropriate times during the service. The sound quality was bad. Like BAD. Not just because of my performance, but for some reason the streaming was just not playing well with my guitar playing. We had some guest worship leaders with mostly the same results. So I started to record myself singing and playing the worship songs on my iPhone voice memo app, and then my pastor would play those recordings during the service. The results were much better.

Well, as I started hearing about how the current circumstances are likely to continue through the end of the year and beyond, I started looking into ways to improve the sound quality as well as try to get my church’s praise team involved somehow. So, I downloaded a simple multitrack recording app to my phone, and started messing around with arrangements. I then sent rough mixes of these files to musician friends both inside and outside my church, and had them record themselves playing along on their instruments. They then sent me the sound files, and through that process, I was able to put “unplugged-style” arrangements of these songs together.

As I realized how significantly better these sounded to our previous attempts, I started to put more of these together. Knowing that it’s asking a lot for musicians to spend time recording for free, I started contacting other musical friends that I’ve been acquainted with, hoping to build a network of musicians and spread the workload around. I plan to continue working on these until we are able to meet in church regularly, and as a result, I am now building up a collection of worship songs that were recorded on (mostly) little more than cell phones by musicians from different parts of the globe including the U.S., South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Mongolia, and others, the result of a collaboration and unity of Christians across borders and even during the most trying times when even basic contact is a challenge.

Keep in mind, though I do have a lot of experience in the studio, my part was always the performance/creative side of things. My understanding of the technical side of things is slim to nil, not to mention most of this was recorded on our phones, as mentioned. So the quality of these recordings will be, quite frankly, utter crap. My performances will be crap. The mix will be crap. But you know, I’ve always been a believer that worship music needs to be honest and real, the best of our ability, warts and all. And these are certainly the best I could do with my technology and budget, and I believe they are beautiful to God’s ears, and hopefully yours as well. Enjoy!

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