You don’t have to have any equipment to start training! The most important thing is to start now and start with what you have.
Special Webinar about Setting Up a Jam Space
REGISTER FOR SPECIAL WEBINAR: https://event.webinarjam.com/register/14/gmm86fo
Get more Info at https://www.worshipbandbuilder.com/podcasts/jamspace
Once you have committed to training new people you have to get creative
Jam sessions
Small group sessions
Private lesson sessions
Outreach events
Instruments you may need
Guitar
Bass
Drums
Piano/keyboard
First Option - Use Stage
Work with leader
Communicate!!!
Get help
Option 2 - Create a dedicated room for band practice
Setup Options
fender passport $400-$800
Your own portable setup $500-$1000
These portable systems can be used in many ways and they are a good investment for whole church
Equipment Links (Amazon Affiliate Links)
Mini PA System for user $300
Fender Passport
My Mixing Board
Powered PA Speakers (low cost)
Behringer PA Speakers about 300 each
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Eric:
Hi, welcome to the worship band builder podcast where we're working with you to lay the foundation for skillful worship. I'm Eric Roberts is my co-host Emily Roberts.
Emily: Hello.
Eric:
And today we're going to jump right into it. No super big promos or anything. We're gonna get right down and dirty into this episode about building a jam space for your worship team training. And this episode is inspired by our conversations I've been having with some of the all, yeah, we were talking to melody a bit, some LD and she was on the webinar last week. We did a really great webinar on sort of what's in the end of this, a podcast about how to purchase like a small sound system. We're going to get to that. But Melody's thing is she's trying to build her worship team and they've got some people kind of on the worship team and she's saying, well where am I going to do this? So this is really about, once you've decided to do training and to make training a part of that, the DNA of your church growing, where do you do it? You know, and I, I wasn't thinking about this until I started chatting with melody and then I realized I do have a lot of experience setting up jam spaces, but then we're going to come at this also from the angle of the worship leader. Like you don't want to go and make your worship leader mad. So we're going to go through this. But you know, you don't have to have any equipment to start the training. So,
Emily:
So the easiest and most obvious place to start or that you would ideally like to do your training is on the stage.
Eric:
Yeah, I mean if the stage is there, it's, it's the easiest place. That's what we decided as I was talking and realized that's the easiest place to do it. But you can also make people mad. Maybe you can't do it on the stage. Maybe there's reasons why your worship leader doesn't want a bunch of extra newbie trainees on the stage. Maybe you don't have, maybe your church isn't even have a big stage with instruments and stuff. So we'll talk through some of that.
Emily:
We know that if the worship team has practiced, say on Wednesday or Thursday night, they've got the sound system marked, they've got everything laid out, chords where they want them, Mike's at the right height, all of those kinds of things have been prepared for Sunday. So we want to be respectful of that. That's kind of a standing weekly. What do you,
Eric:
Well, it's a standing weekly annoyance. If you were to say have a Friday or Saturday night, like youth band rehearsal on the stage, the worship leaders never going to go for that. So I was thinking through that as a worship leader, if you're going to go, Oh, we're going to get together on Friday nights and jam with the youth band, that's going to be bad because we already had our Wednesday night rehearsal and everything's cleaned and set and ready to go. So one of my pet peeves is when I was leading worship and is basically, you know, I'd set up my practice and I would set up the stage and then Saturday night the women's ministry would come in and do a skit on the stage. And then I would come in Sunday morning and I would just like, you know, find everything in disarray. Yeah.
Eric:
I mean you just freak out. So I would sometimes go Saturday night and check the stage and stuff. But the worship leader, you got to understand if he's there or she's there, they're kind of, that's their domain and they're setting stuff up in there. They're doing stuff. So don't just assume that it's the church, it's all of our church. We can all just show up and do whatever we want on the stage. That's what I was saying. Work with the worship leader, talk to him and her and say, Hey, I want to do some training. Would it be cool if we did it on a certain day of the week? What can we use? What can't we use? What really, in theory it'd be great if your worship leader was involved, if he was actually the one doing training and being there. So maybe get the sound guy to go in there with you and do all that stuff.
Eric:
If you're going to use the stage, get, get people involved, get the, get the leadership involved. And if you're not, you say the worship leader but you're just a volunteer in your training, make sure you're working really closely with them. This has to be a team effort, right? Whether you're doing it, yes. Communication is vital to maintaining a good relationship. Yeah. So, but then after we were going through this webinar last week and I realized, well you don't have to really have anything, all you have to have is some basic training and the kids or the adults, whoever's involved can bring their own guitar. They can bring their own base. So before you get kinda like all freaked out about, you know, thinking about how to make this happen, have people bring their guitars, have them bring their base, have them bring their stuff to a church, into a room and just set up just some little amps and just jam.
Eric:
You know, that's the, the beginning doesn't have to be this big a deal. But as you say, well, we're going to add a drum set and we're going to add something. Then it starts to become more of an issue where you need all of this stuff set up. So let's, let's look at the list here. Once you've committed to training new people, you're going to have to get creative in how to train them. So you know whether you're gonna use the big stage or whether you're gonna use a Sunday score and we're going to get to that. But you can start out with jam sessions, small group sessions, private lesson sessions where you actually going one on one with people telling them to come in and work with them. You can do outreach events. We've talked about doing a lot of outreach events where you're telling like all the high school kids, Hey, you can come learn guitar on a weekend and all of these things.
Eric:
So you, once you've committed to sort of doing this training, then you can get creative with that when you're going to do it. And then you're going to try to get on the stage as much as you can. But that's the first option. Work with the leader, communicate, get help, try to get on the stage. If you have a stage, okay, now what if you don't have a stage or if the worship leader says nope ain't happening or what if it just feels like it's not the right venue for now? What if it's a really big, some churches may have really big expensive gear and you might just not feel comfortable bringing a bunch of new people up there. So there's all kinds of reasons. Sound systems are very intimidating. Yeah, and so if you're trying to do this by getting up on the stage and you don't know how to run the sound, there's a lot of reasons why the stage might be a problem in the early stages. So we're going to talk in this section about dedicating a room, a dedicated room for your jam session. It could be at your house, it could be a Sunday school room, it can be the youth room and how to set that up. So first you have different setups. And this is pretty much Emily's. Just like thinking, yeah, she's a shake your head like this is a great idea, this is a great idea. Just do this
Emily:
Well anytime that you are doing training, it is a good thing. You're building the worship team, you're building worship into individuals and they can take that home and and use that in their personal time and with their families you're doing a good thing. So there are some complications here and there, you know, but as long as you're communicating with your worship leader, you shouldn't have too many problems. If a room at the church is not available, a living room, a garage, a basement, any place that you can gather is really okay.
Eric:
Yeah. And so let's talk about garage band. When, when I was talking with Melody and she started talking about jam sessions, I was like, Oh yeah, that's what we want to do. We want to jam. I started jamming and it was just in the basement. You get some drums, you throw in some guitar amps and that's cool. We're going to talk about a couple of setups and if you check out the links in the description of this video or in this podcast, I have some drawings for you of the different setups. So, and I have that a webinar also put a link down there so you can get a a video of that webinar where I was drawing and explaining all the different setups. But the thing is is it's going to cost a little bit of money so you can tell people to bring their guitar amps.
Eric:
But then if you want to have vocals or if you want to have an electric drum set or if you wanna have a keyboard and plug it in, you're going to have to get a mini sound system. And there's a couple of reasons why I like these mini sound systems and it's going to be an easier sell to your church if they're tight on funds. If you say, Hey, if we have this many sound system, we can use it for like you know, outreach things out in the community. If they want to do a harvest party, they can set it up if the kid's ministry needs to use it. It's a small portable system that you can use at your house and your garage in the fellowship hall, right anywhere is the idea and small, portable and small. So my first option was really simple. It was a fender passport. They're not my favorite systems because they're kind of small, but churches love them because they're real easy. Okay. They're really easy to use. They look like a big suitcase and they pop open. They've got the two speakers. Have you ever seen him?
Emily:
Maybe
Eric:
It's a fender passport anyway, you'll see it on, you'll see it in the, in the drawings if you, if you download the notes, but the fender passport pops up. It's got like four inputs so you can plug your guitar, vocalist, bass player, something in there and just jam jam session at your, in your space. Okay. Then you can take it out, play music. So that's about $800. That's kind of expensive. I am going to give you advice to set up your own portable sound system with your own little mini mixer and your own powered speakers. That's, that's the way I would go. And a few reasons why. Why would you, do you, do you want to say why would you do that? Why do you think I'm going to do that?
Emily:
Okay. Well, I guess I was going to, rather than make a statement, I was going to ask you a question. How many instruments can you plug into this kind of a system? How, how are you going to use this with set? Can you put everybody through the mini system or how does this work?
Eric:
So that's like the fender passport has I think four inputs or six. And that's what you're gonna look for. Any mixer you're going to look for. Like the, how many channels, how many XLR inputs are on that board, how many power amps on there are power preamps. So some of them were four or six, eight, 12, 16. The one at our church, it's like 24, 48. They get really big. But the small ones for like the fender pass part, I think is four plus it gives you a couple extra for like a iPod or something else. You can plug a guitar player, a vocalist, maybe electric drum set, but you're gonna run out pretty quick. It's just going to be little mini. Maybe you're going to just have your guitar players bring their amps and then plug in two or three mics into your passport cause that's free vocalists. Yeah. So the reason why I like that as it's, it's, it's still a seven 99 I like it cause it's easy and it's portable and people won't, don't get too freaked out about it. I mean it's pretty, it's pretty much the button. There's very few buttons on it, which also is good for beginner, but it also starts to limit you as you start to learn. You want to do more stuff and they've made it so easy that you can't, do
Emily:
You know what I mean? I see what you mean. But I think in the beginning, simple is probably best.
Eric:
Yeah, symbols best. So I'm going to say in my perfect setup for my little jam session that I'm going to do with my band, I'm going to build a little system and you guys can build this too. If you just check out the show notes and you can probably do it for about the same price as a passport, $800 or less. And when you buy each individual piece, let's say you buy a little mini mixer and you buy some powered speakers. The thing is you can get a eight channel mixer or a 12 channel mixer, maybe get a little more channels. Or if you would just buy that cheap four channel one and let's say a year from now you go, this is not enough channels. You can just replace the mixer. You can just take the mixer by a different mixer. You can keep upgrading. So I like the modular systems because they're more upgradable.
Emily:
Okay, so you've got more flexibility you feel like?
Eric:
Yeah. And then the ones that I showed you on my YouTube channel before is the one I use on my, it has built in effects like some reverb and some compression. They're like really little mini pro mixers. Maybe they only have six channels, but they've got like really nice EEQ. They've got built in effects. So let's say you go buy a mini mixer. You can get them for a few hundred dollars. So you're talking 200 bucks. You can get a little six channel mixer with effects and everything in there. They're fantastic. Check the links in the description again. If you're listening to this on a podcast, just go to our show notes and then if you want to buy these powered speakers. So there are a few hundred dollars a piece. So you buy a couple powered speakers and then you have really a really great portable system that's, that's upgradable. Okay.
Emily:
Powered speakers.
Eric:
Yes. So I talked about this in depth in the webinar and I drew pictures. It's, it's kind of hard to understand and I don't think we're going to get too involved in this, but when you look at speakers, you have three elements of the system and these are, these are on the show note drawings. You have the mixer, then you have the power amp and you have the speakers. Okay. Now if you think of those three elements, those are the key elements. You have the mixer where you plug all your stuff into, like your mix your guitars. Then you have the power amp, which is the power. Okay. And it's usually is separate. And then you have the speakers which makes the sound. So what these manufacturers have done is they've put the power amps into the speaker boxes. Okay. So that's why we call them powered speakers an element. Yes. We're taking the power amp, putting two things, putting in an or, and some of the manufacturers have done this, they've taken that power amp and put it into the mixer. So you either have to get a powered mixer or a powered speakers. You have to have power in there somewhere. So just let me know if you have any questions about that. But you, you have a mixer, which I would call a passive mixer, which has no power amp in it. And then you would have powered speakers. That's my favorite setup.
Emily:
Okay. So regardless of which kind you get, you need someplace to plug yourself in.
Eric:
Yeah. Especially if you have an electric drum set, a keyboard or vocalist, those are your big, the big ones that need plugged in. An electric guitar player will, we'll sometimes have an amp and he won't need to plug in. So you'll get, you'll get the feel for who's going to plug in, who's not going to plug in, how are we going to do this? And you know, you can build a very small system for under a thousand dollars, probably even under 800 and really don't go overboard. Don't, don't go to like the ends of the world buying all this expensive equipment because you're just practicing number one. And you'll be able to upgrade as you go. If you buy the modular systems, you'll be able to upgrade to a 15, 16 channel board later or an eight channel.
Emily:
And you can typically trade in, right? Or resell your gear.
Eric:
Yeah, I would resell it. And a lot of this stuff you can get on a Facebook marketplace. Craigslist, I mean, if you're trying to save money, that's where I buy almost all my gear is bought on eBay, Facebook market or Craigslist. If you're not afraid of Craigslist, stalkers and killers. So you can do that. So these, this is how it is and it's a great investment for the church. You always, everybody always needs a portable sound system. I mean, that's probably the biggest thing I've used in my ministry. I'll ever, every pastor is always like, well, can we run this through a sound system? And I've always had a sound system, so I've always been able to take it and use it. If you don't have a sound system, then you can never do anything that the pastor's going to ask you to do. You want to set something up in the fellowship hall, you want to do some of the parking lot.
Eric:
So this is going to be an easy sell for you. I'm trying to help you guys out. If you're trying to go to your church and say, we need this, Hey, it's great for kids ministry. It's, it's portable, it's usable for everybody. So $1,000 investment for year. These things last forever. Okay, they'll last forever. Here's the brands I like. Beheringer very inexpensive, good brand, Yamaha, more high end brand. But that's some of them. Some of the stuff that I have is Yamaha, but I've mostly used Behringer and harbinger or some of the guitar center off-brand stuff. It's like, I don't know, cheap China made stuff, but it works and people will say, Oh, it breaks down and everything, and I've never had anything that I bought from those off brand guitar center brands break. I mean, I know they do, you know? So I would just say go, go with the off-brand cheap stuff and you know, get there.
Eric:
There really is a lot of good off-brand, cheap stuff out there. Harbinger Behringer if you get into Mackie and Yamaha, then your price goes up to about double and you know the quality goes up too. So if you can afford it, then look into Mackie and stuff like that. All right, well that's all I have for this episode. It's really confusing. I know for the beginning, and this is why we got into this on a webinar where you can actually see the pictures on the screen, check the webinar out, check out the show notes, check out some of the YouTube videos that I have. I've got some great videos explaining and showing you my setup, which is key really to have. You're going to have to sort of verse yourself in this,
Emily:
And if you're doing this, Bravo, congratulations, and, and God bless you for moving forward and raising the voice of worship on the earth.
Eric:
Amen. All right, we'll see you next time. God bless you guys.
Speaker 1:
[Inaudible].