We’ve been doing the ready-made church media thing for a long time, and in the process, we’ve been fortunate enough to make friends with a lot of the people and teams who work to equip the church in the same or similar ways. We’re even more fortunate to get to partner with some of those friends. Here’s an introduction to our newest partnership.
GETTING TO KNOW SEEING SOUNDS
Our ( Australian 🦘) friend Grant Fletcher has been creating tour visuals for major artists like Hillsong (United, Young & Free, et al.), Chris Tomlin, Rend Collective, Ellie Goulding, and many more, for years. In the process, he has created song-specific visuals for many of the songs today’s church is singing.
He started Seeing Sounds as a way to take these same visuals and repackage them in a way that made them accessible to the worship teams all over the world who are singing their songs.
Grant introduces himself and Seeing Sounds to the Igniter team.
One of the things we love about Seeing Sounds is that Grant approaches the worship background creation process completely differently from most church media creators. Creating visuals for a specific song may limit their universal usability a bit, but it increases the cohesiveness of the presentation of the song as a whole (lyric, melody, and visual experience), which makes for a really powerful experience.
MUSIC LICENSING
One of our biggest challenges in developing our lyric media category has been obtaining proper licensing to actually use the lyrics and music. Observing the rise in popularity and use of sites like MultiTracks.com and Loop Community (which offer a variety of downloadable song audio files that worship teams can perform with), Grant came up with a clever—albeit confusing to the uninitiated—way to bypass the music licensing rigamarole.
The first thing you’ll probably notice about Seeing Sounds’ lyric videos is that they contain neither lyrics nor music. Licensing challenges: SOLVED.
I think it’s fair to say that most of the lyric videos you’ll see on Youtube (that weren’t created by the rightsholders) have been created and uploaded without proper licensing. But in that world, Youtube has empowered rightsholders to make claims on monetization and removal of those videos—and casual Youtube users are generally none the wiser.
When you download a Seeing Sounds lyric video, you’re essentially getting a long-form worship background that’s set to a click track and visually designed to ebb and flow with the dynamics of the song.
HOW TO USE SEEING SOUNDS' CONTENT
Most of Seeing Sounds’ content falls into two of our product categories: worship backgrounds and lyric media.
Their worship backgrounds work just like any other worship backgrounds you’ve used. However, unlike most other worship backgrounds, these were originally created as part of a longer-form lyric video for particular songs. So in some cases, the imagery they contain may not work with other songs.
If you’re already familiar with our lyric media products, you might be wondering how you’d use a lyric video that doesn’t have music or lyrics. There a variety of ways to make it happen—here are a high-complexity option and a lower complexity option.
The higher complexity option requires a multi-track performance software like Abelton Live, and the ability to route at least one mono audio channel to your front-of-house mixer and a mono click-track audio channel to your band’s in-ear monitors (oh yeah, and you’ll need in-ear monitors). If you already have all of that infrastructure, you’re probably tech-saavy enough to figure out the way to do it that works best for you, so I’m not going to go into detail here.
The lower complexity option also involves your band having in-ear monitors, but doesn’t involve the use of multi-tracks. You can download the song’s video from our site, upload it to your presentation machine, and route the click track from the video to your band’s IEMs. You’ll need to add lyrics using your presentation software and cycle through them just like you would any other song with normal motion worship background.
We’re really excited about where Seeing Sounds is headed and the fact that they’ve chosen to let us introduce them to our audience.Go check out their stuff,and leave some love for them in the comments below!
Seeing Sounds is just one of more than a dozen producers we’ve partnered with to bring you a library of church media that’s unparalleled in its variety, quality, and usability. Decide for yourself with no risk—sign up for a 14-day free trial of our Premium membership and download 2 Sundays worth of content of your choice from our library of over 30,000 media products, specifically designed for churches.
