Quality vs. Flexibility | Why Hillsong is changing the way they run tracks.
There’s more than one way to bake a cake. There’s more than one way to cook an egg. There’s more than one way to use this phrase, even. But when it comes to leading worship, finding the best solutions for your church and your volunteers is crucial.
We often think that for high quality production we have to spend copious amounts of time building tracks, setting up equipment, and training volunteers for what will be a rigid and inflexible worship experience. Or on the other hand, the desire for flexibility can cause us to abandon high quality production for fear that we won’t have the ability to be flexible in the moment.
But what if there were a way to achieve both high quality and retain the flexibility to respond to the moment?
We recently sat down with Nigel Hendroff and JP Starra from Hillsong, along with recording artist Justin Tweito to find out how they utilize tracks to best meet the needs of their campuses, volunteers, and ultimately give them more freedom to focus on what really matters, leading worship.
Nigel Hendroff: It’s no secret that we run tracks on our weekends. Using tracks will obviously preserve the sonic quality of the song. The song will still sound like the song regardless of if you have three people on stage or ten people on stage.
JP Starra: One of the challenges we’ve encountered as we try to roll out this tracks approach across lots of campuses is that level of flexibility and consistency that we should have. We’ve been looking at MultiTracks as a solution to that, as a tool that can provide some of that flexibility. That is crucial in the hands of a volunteer that doesn’t need to spend two years learning Ableton.Justin Tweito: My favorite thing about Playback is that it is created specifically for worship. You need to be able to change in the moment, you need to be able to change on the fly. It saves you so much time, so I can focus more on the people I’m leading and less time spending hours and hours and hours on tracks making them perfect.
When we craft our our setlist with the worship leader we want them to be completely free to do what they want. Their job is to lead worship.
NH: In early days when we were just starting out using tracks it was like you press play on the track, you do the arrangements and you don’t veer off that arrangement. When we craft our our setlist with the worship leader we want them to be completely free to do what they want. Their job is to lead worship.
JP: There were too many situations on a Sunday or on a weekend where the production guys would have to rescue the tracks rig or fix something. So we started chatting with some of the Multitracks guys and we realized how much of a tool this can be for our campuses. We’ve been helping with the beta testing of Playback for Mac and we’re in the stage now where our campuses are starting to use it.
JT: The stability of Playback is great. It really frees us up to change on the fly because we can trust that it’s going to do what we tell it to do.
NH: It’s been a wonderful experience getting to know the guys at MultiTracks. Seeing their heart behind wanting the best for worship teams, wanting to resource worship teams globally. I love that. Genuine, humble, worshippers, fellow worshippers who serve in their local churches week in and and week out as well as well all do, just wanting to create the best experiences for our congregation.
You don’t have to choose between quality and flexibility.
JP: The fact that I could download it on my phone and in five minutes basically could figure out how to do most of what I do on Sundays, that was really attractive to me thinking of all of the volunteers who will be using that. The choice between quality and flexibility, you don’t have to choose between one or the other. That ease of flexibility is something that is crucial for us, and I know it’s crucial for a lot of people, so we’re really grateful for that.
Learn more about our integrated ecosystem at MultiTracks.com.