WORSHIP SET PLANNING: KEYS, CHARTS AND CUES. ready before Sunday

Every team plans a set somewhere: a shared doc, a planning app, a list on the rehearsal-room whiteboard. Keep doing that. The plan is where the order lives, along with who leads each song, the key, the tempo, and how you get from one song to the next. That is a team decision, and it belongs where the whole team can see it.

Chord Lens doesn’t hold a setlist. It works one song at a time: you open each song from the plan in the Studio, from its YouTube link or from your own audio file, and prepare it there. Its key, its chart and its cues come out of that song, and you write the results back into the plan. You can keep the week’s songs together in a Collection in the Studio’s library, a folder on that computer, but the order and the keys belong in the plan.

A useful plan has one line per song with at least these: the song, the link to the version you are playing, the key, the BPM, who leads, and a note on the arrangement, such as “skip verse 2” or “double the last chorus”. The Studio’s Copy link button puts a song’s YouTube link on your clipboard to paste straight in.

Work through the plan in order, one song at a time: key, then chart, then cues.

Most worship songs were recorded in the key that suits the artist who sang them, and that is often too high for a congregation. A room full of people singing together is most comfortable with a melody that stays in a middle range and doesn’t sit on its top notes for long. If the chorus on the record makes your leader strain, the room will stop singing.

Try the song in the key you are thinking of before you commit. In the Studio, press Key + or − and the recording moves a semitone at a time, up to 12 either way, at the same speed. The chords on the chart move with it, re-spelled for the new key, and if the song is split into stems, every stem moves too. Sing the highest and lowest lines of the song along with it. Our guide to the best key for your voice has a quick way to test a range.

Think about the songs on either side as well. Two songs back to back in the same key, or keys a step apart, make an easy transition: the band can hold a chord and the leader can talk over it. A big jump between keys needs a gap, a count-in or a short modulation, and that belongs in the plan.

Write the key you chose into the plan. When you open the song again, check that the Key control reads the key in the plan before you print or rehearse anything.

This is the routine for each song in the set. Once you have done it a few times it takes about ten minutes a song.

In the screenshot the demo song Coming Home is moved from B to A, two semitones down, and the Key control marks the shift as −2. The section cues are switched on: each section in the cue lane carries its spoken name, ready to call Verse, Chorus and Bridge a bar before they arrive.

Once the key is set, the chord sheet is already in it. Every chord on the chart has moved with the song. Print it from the chord sheet’s printer button, and the page carries the song’s title and a line saying which key, capo and tempo its chords are for, such as “Key A (−2) · 143 BPM”. Printing is part of Premium and Pro; on a phone it opens the phone’s print sheet, where you can save a PDF.

Pick the view that suits your band before you print. Lead prints the chords over the words in two columns, which is what a singer or an acoustic guitarist usually wants. Grid prints a real-book style chart, eight bars to a row, with each section named and timed and the bar lines lined up down the page, which suits a band that counts bars. The shapes of the chords in the song print at the top, for whichever instrument you have picked.

For a band that plays the same songs in different keys from week to week, switch on Nashville numbers. The chart then reads 1, 4, 5 and 6m instead of letters, and the header adds “1 = A” so everyone knows where 1 is. The same printed chart works whichever key the leader picks next time. Our guide to the Nashville number system explains how to read one.

Two more switches change what prints. Simplify swaps hard chords for the basic chord under them, which helps a newer player keep up, and the header says “Simplified” so nobody wonders why the chart looks different. A capo, set for guitar, prints the shapes to play with it and puts “Capo 3” in the header; the capo chart guide shows which fret gives which key.

Teams that use in-ears often run a guide track: a voice that says “Chorus” just before the chorus, counts the band in, and calls “Last Time” before the final repeat. It keeps a band together when the leader changes the arrangement on the fly, and it helps newer players most of all.

The Guide Track Maker builds one on the song you have open in the Studio. Turn on the section cues and each section speaks its name ahead of it, from 37 recorded names that include worship ones such as Vamp, Tag and Exhortation. The count-in is on from the start, one or two bars, fitted to the song’s meter. Then drag in the dynamics you want onto the beat they belong on: Build, Break, Drums In, Worship Freely, Last Time, Key Change Up and more. Chord Lens never guesses where the band should build; you place each one.

The cues come from the song’s sections, so a section in the wrong place gives a cue in the wrong place. That is why checking the sections comes first in the routine.

For in-ears, switch In-ears to Split left / right: the cues and the click play in the left ear and the band, folded to mono, in the right. That works when the Studio plays its own audio, which means a split song or your own file, not a YouTube song before it is split. On Free, cues and the count-in play inside the 2-minute part you choose; Premium plays them for the whole song, and Pro can export them for your own practice.

Put the key and the link for each song in the plan, and each musician can open the same song in the Studio and set it to the same key. Splitting needs a computer, in Chrome or Edge.

From there each player works on their own part. The bassist solos the bass and loops the turnaround. The keys player slows the bridge to 0.75× to hear the voicings. The drummer mutes the drums and plays the song with the click and the cues. Our guides to making a backing track and slowing a song down cover those routines.

Everyone arrives on the night with the song in the same key, the same arrangement and the same cues in their head. The rehearsal goes on the hard parts, and the set on Sunday sounds like a band that knew where it was going.