How to Improve Your Worship Rehearsals

Think about your worship team’s rehearsals. Everyone shows up on time, right? They are always prepared and know their parts. And of course, your rehearsals move quickly, efficiently, and always end on time. If that’s the case, then you’re an oddity and this article isn’t for you!
For the rest of us, what can we do to improve our rehearsals? After all, if we don’t rehearse well, it’s difficult to step onstage with confidence, and without being distracted worrying about chords, melodies, and song structure. Since rehearsals can have such a big impact on our service, how can we improve them?
How to Make the Biggest Change
Want to quickly improve your rehearsals? Clarify this one point — Rehearsal is not practice. Rehearsal is not a time to practice a song. It’s not a time to learn your part. It’s a time to rehearse. The difference isn’t just in the words you use. There has to be a major shift to stop treating rehearsal like practice.
Practice is personal. It’s an opportunity to learn your part — to practice your part multiple times. You might get together with another band member or two and practice together, but primarily it’s done on your own. Practice time is your time to “woodshed” your part and make sure you’ve really got it.
Rehearsal, on the other hand, is an opportunity to bring everyone’s parts together to coordinate them — to improve the overall sound and make sure it’s cohesive. It’s a time to lock in tighter and to focus on serving the song together.
Here are a few practical ways to stop treating rehearsal like practice:

Stop listening through the song in rehearsal. This is a dead giveaway that you didn’t prepare beforehand. If someone needs to hear the song during rehearsal all the way through, they didn’t prepare well, if at all. It’s okay to address their lack of preparation, but do it privately, not in front of the group.

Stop teaching people their parts. I’ve been guilty of showing up knowing the chords of a song and the structure, but not knowing the guitar hooks. Stop teaching your unprepared musicians their parts. Make sure they have what they need to prepare beforehand, and then hold them accountable to know it during rehearsal.

Prepare Properly
It’s easy to blame your team for not being prepared. They didn’t listen to the song. They didn’t learn their parts. We often find ourselves making excuses for them “because they’re volunteers,” but as leaders, we should first look at ourselves to see if and how we can improve. I often find that there’s plenty of room for improvement on my end to help my team prepare properly. Here are a few practical ways you can help your team prepare properly.
Make sure your resources are correct, clear, and current
Make sure that your chart and the reference MP3 match. With so many different versions of songs available, it’s easy to shift into autopilot and purchase an MP3 and post any chart to Planning Center. Often chords are wrong, or the song structure doesn’t match, and there’s no clarification on which to follow. Spend the time playing through your charts and listening through your arrangements, and make sure they line up. If you made an edit to an arrangement, update your chart and edit your MP3 to match.
Now you may be thinking, “We often change the song structure of songs from the record, so how can we possibly get our team the accurate resources before rehearsal?” If you have a reference MP3 to start with, drop that into Ableton and edit the arrangement to match what you want to do.
Then the next time you get together for rehearsal or soundcheck, record your rehearsal, or record the first time you do the song live, and replace the reference track with the recording of your team. If you do a lot of original music, start with a demo (even if it’s just you and an acoustic guitar), and then later replace it with a recording of the full band.
Post your key and tempo
Make sure your team clearly knows each song’s correct tempo and key. If you can, drop your song into Ableton and edit it to match the correct key and tempo for practice. For the sake of everyone practicing the correct key and tempo, make sure you’ve posted that beforehand on Planning Center. This allows people to practice with a click track ahead of time and lets guitar players and keyboardists save tempos into their effects and keyboards, so everything is in sync.
Get your team rehearsal tracks
If at all possible, let your team practice with the stems or multitracks. The easiest way to do this is to give your team access to RehearsalMix by MultiTracks.com. With a subscription, your team gets access to every part of every song in the MultiTracks catalog, a click and guide, and the original song to practice with. They can use the up-mix (with their part turned up) to learn their part and then practice it using the minus mix (without their part). It integrates directly into Planning Center, and it’s also licensed for rehearsal, so there’s no “rehearsal license” necessary.
How Should You Prep for Spontaneity?
You might find yourself in a situation where you often change the arrangement of your song on the fly. How do you prepare your team for this? First, you’ve got to give your team a starting place. Have a starting point for the arrangement and change from there. Encourage your team to learn the song in sections so that you can ask them to change on the fly and repeat a song section or jump to the bridge, and they can follow along easily.
Communicate Sooner
How far in advance do you communicate songs to your team? I’ve found when you communicate songs to your team less than a week before service, you’re diminishing their opportunity to prepare well. I’ve been on teams and led teams that could handle last-minute changes well, but that’s the exception, not the rule. If you can give your team at least a week’s head start, you’ll see their comfort and confidence greatly improve. If a week seems out of reach, challenge yourself to try for a day sooner than you’re currently doing. If you share the set list with your team a day before rehearsal, try for two days. Then in a month, try for three days.
Set a Limit on Your Rehearsal Time
You need a hard start and end to your rehearsal. If you say rehearsal is going to start at 7PM, then start at 7. As important as it is to start on time, it’s even more important to end on time, consistently. Decide on how long rehearsal will be, and don’t leave it open-ended. If you’re spending more than an hour at rehearsal, you’re going to lose efficiency. Not sure you could ever get rehearsals under an hour? Here are a few tips that might help:

Limit the number of new songs you try to work in. If you’re doing a new song every week, your rehearsals are going to run long.
Make sure your team has the right tools to properly prepare, and hold them accountable when they don’t prepare. If you’re treating rehearsal like practice, your rehearsals will run long. If people aren’t learning their parts ahead of time, or are listening through songs before you play them, then your rehearsals will run long.
Avoid starting and stopping too much. If you find yourself constantly starting and stopping a song, it’s likely because someone didn’t come prepared. Again, hold that person accountable; don’t hold up rehearsal.

A great rehearsal helps you prepare for a great service. And a great rehearsal begins long before you arrive for rehearsal, with proper preparation and realistic expectations for your team. Hold your team accountable, first by setting the standard yourself and then by clearly setting expectations for them. When you stop treating rehearsal like practice, help your team prepare properly, and set a limit on your rehearsal time, you’ll be amazed at how quickly the confidence and comfort increases, for both you and your team.
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