How to Include A cappella Music in Your Live Stream Worship

I'd like to show you how we've incorporated singing into our online service. Since we have nobody here in the building, we needed to find a way to provide the singing along with our livestream, that we've been doing for years. And so we start with a service called PraiseandHarmony.TV.

It's by the acapella company, and they have a collection of videos where you can find congregational singing with lyrics on the screen. The best way I found is to use their search feature and look for the song you need.

They have a lot of different video types, and the ones you're looking for are congregational videos. These videos will have the lyrics as well as a group of people singing them. Be careful as there are multiple versions of the same song. One will have the congregational singing, and another will have just the tenor part or the soprano part. Make sure to choose the correct one you need.

We've been using the congregational one and it's been going well and getting a lot of good reviews. So we live stream using a software called vMix. You could use a similar setup with OBS or other broadcasting software.

The main idea is that we're playing the video over here and using a technology called NDI to send that over to the live streaming platform. This is not something I've created. It's something that vMix has created and all the other platforms have. It is a very common thing now to be able to send video wirelessly.

So I'd like to jump in onto the computers and show you the different technology that we use to do that.

I'm on our PowerPoint computer, accessing Praise and Harmony. I've logged in so it sends me straight to the catalog. Our song leader, Titus, picks a song from the good selection of potential songs. They have quite a variety. You can see soprano only, bass, and other options for training. Choose the one that works best for you. I open it up and leave it open in the middle of the window.

This is gonna be important when we go over to the other computer (our streaming computer). So then we can open up a right click on here, open up in a new tab, and he can find the next song. Let's, whatever that would be, Beautiful Star of Bethlehem. Great. And so you see this one in this tab is also open in the exact same part of the frame.

We're gonna capture this part of the screen, and that's what we're gonna bring into our livestream. So it's important that they are just in different tabs as you go along. And this is synced up with vMix. This is vMix dot com. And if you use this software, they have an NDI on the left side, an IP production with vMix.

If you click that, this gives you desktop capture software for Windows or Mac, and then you can install this. Like, we have this installed right down here. We click this little tool down here to open, and it will automatically connect to our other computer across the sound booth. And it is really very interesting what you can do on the other. So I'm gonna jump in onto the other computer, and we're going to see how we're gonna bring it in, how we crop in, and get that going.

So here I am on the streaming computer. I want to add my NDI capture from my other computer. I've got all my other inputs going, and we need to get that in there. So let's go over to add input. Let's hit more, and then we're going to select the NDI capture option.

And as you can see, it's got my current computer and the PowerPoints computer that's using the NDI technology to send its screen. Let's click on that first one, display 1, and bring that in. So now that we've got that input in, we're going to hit the configure here, the little gear icon. And I believe, if I remember correctly, thankfully on this one, you can zoom the thing in and out to your right side, and you also need to move it around to fit. I'm doing a 720 live stream, so I've got the ability to zoom in a little bit and keep most of the quality.

So that was what I had. Thankfully, the video is centered as best it can on the other computer. And we can go ahead and, well, let's give it a name. Nice name. Live songs just for fun.

And then we'll click out the x and you can see that we've got that new input ready to roll right there. Let's go ahead and just drag it over here. Okay. So now that we've got your live songs in here and you've got your camera, we've been doing a song leader who's been announcing the song just to keep it more familiar with how it's been going. He'll announce the song.

And then I'll hit space bar, I'll hit play. Sorry. I'll hit play on my current computer over there on the video, and then I hit space bar on my live mix on the streaming computer to send it over to the other side. So here we go. I'm going to hit play, and I hit space bar, and the songs are going.

You can see the audio levels in the middle, showing that the audio is coming out of the headphone jack of the other computer. Then it goes into our main mixer and is sent to the streaming computer. When the song is over, we'll hit the space bar again, which will return to the song leader at the podium. This is our current setup since nobody is in the building. Normally, we have three crowd mics set up.

There's 1 microphone in the middle and 2 at the front that we use to capture sound into the vMix software. We then mix that with the regular song slides that appear on the screen, the white and black content from the paperless hymnal. By combining these elements, we create our own congregation singing experience. The setup may look similar to what Praise and Harmony provides, but with different colors and themes, resulting in a unique effect.

And I think it's very helpful. I hope to make more of these videos to give us some more tips that we've been using to get our stream going, and I hope it's been helpful for you. Thanks for tuning in.