VJ Sunday Morning Worship How To

Recently there was a post on the Christian Electronica Group on Facebook about Djing a worship service.

Thursday I am demoing how to do this to the Student Pastor at my church. I wanted to take this opportunity to share how to do this. You are mixing videos in a program like Virtual DJ rather than mixing audio only.

There a four main considerations. 1. Finding the music. 2. Making the video 3. The technical details at the show. 4. The flow of worship and managing Pastor expectations.

11.       I have been blessed to be the administrator for Creuk Radio. Over the last ten years I have listened to around 5000 Christian Electronica songs. At this point I have about three dozen that I could see being used in a Sunday Morning worship environment (aka a sing-a-long).

Here is the list (separated by BPM):

80 to 90 and 160 to 180

·         An Epic No Less – One Word

·         Soul Survivor – Your’e Beautiful

·         Stellar Kart – Something Holy

·         Switchfoot – Darkest Horses (remix)

·         Youth Alive WA – God of Miracles.

110-120

·         Matt Maher – You’re Grace is Enough

·         The Digital Age – How Great Thou Art

·         The Jellyrox – Dreamweaver

125-140

·         Aaron Keyes – Lavish Your Love

·         Andrae Crouch – All the Way

·         Ben Cantelon – We Will Dance For Your Glory

·         Britt Nicole – Amazing Life

·         Casey Darnell – Coming Alive

·         DJ Doomsday – I Can Only Imagine

·         Dreamlab – Breathe

·         Eleventyseven – Give it Up

·         Michael W. Smith - All I Want (Heavens Avenue Remix)

·         Planetshakers – Good to Me

·         Ryan Stevenson – Yesterday Today Forever

·         Toby Mac – Me Without You

·         We Are Leo- Heartbeats

Odd bpms

·         Hillsong London – Follow the Son

·         Seven Places – Glowing Hearts

Potential Songs

·         Avalon – Undeniably You (Jeff Savage Remix)

·         Men of Standard – Feels like Rain

·         Aaron McLaughlin – Love that Lasts

·         Aaron Shust – Long Live the King

·         Anchor and Braille – Goes Without Saying

·         Andrew Feliciano – Dancing On the Ashes

·         Andrew Feliciano – Son of God

·         Andy Smith – Breathe

·         Ben Cantelon – No One Like You

·         Bluetree – Burn Me Up

·         Brandon Heath – I’m Not Who I Was

·         Charlie Hall – Constant

·         Crumbacher – It Don’t Matter

·         Dikko – In the Night (Radio Edit)

·         Elim Sound – It Is Jesus

·         Melba Moore – There is Power In the Blood

·         Press Play – My Everything

·         Soul Survivor – Saviour

·         Steve Hare – Our God is Here

22.       Make a video the text on the screen to sing-a-long with.

33.       The setup can be tricky. You can use an mid-low price computer (like mine) and use the VGA output. You will need a VGA splitter one will go to an lcd monitor that you will need to carry with you. This is your video monitor (additionally you will need an audio speaker as all DJ’s do).

You can bring up a preview window and make that full screen on the second monitor. I tried to use HDMI because my computer has it. However it uses another video output setting that uses up too much memory and causes the video to freeze. If you want higher quality video output you will need to buy a $1500 computer.

You’ll need to split the audio with external audio card. I have RCA’s going to churches speaker system and headphone jack from external audio card to the speaker (aka DJ audio monitor which in this case is a guitar amp J).

I split the video with the grey box called Averkey iMicro. The yellow video cord out to churches video and the blue vga goes to the Video monitor.

Pictures of my setup are below:

44.       I have categorized the songs in my arsenal to two threads. First: Contemplative and Committing. Second: Challenged, Thankful, Celebratory. That is the songs all are in one of the five categories. I want to move the worshiper through the categories I the order above. I think that challenged is a wild card and doesn’t always need to be used. For me sometimes I disagree with the Pastors ideology so I think a good rule is that not commenting on what they preach and in return they should not comment on what you play.

Total Cost:

Averkey iMicro $100

Behrenger audio card $30

Video Monitor $50

Guitar Amp $100

DJ2Go controller $50

Headphones with mic built in $50

PC $500

With cables and all it should be $1000 or a little less. If you want HDMI video then you need a more powerful PC which would be about $1000 more.

Thanks. God Bless.

Aaron.