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 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, in their collection of videos, you can go through and find videos that have congregational singing and the lyrics on the screen. The best way that I found is that to use their search feature and look for the song that, you need.

They have a lot of different video types, and so the ones that you're kinda looking for are congregational videos. And those videos will have the lyrics as well as a group of people singing them. One thing to be careful of is they have multiple versions of the same song. One that will have the congregational singing and one that will have just the tenor part or the soprano part. And so you gotta make sure in there which one, is the correct one that you're gonna 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 we're using a technology called NDI to 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 been, logged in so that it sends me straight to the catalog. And the way we've been doing this, our song leader, Titus, has been going in, and he's been picking a song. And he'll look it up, and they have quite a bit. So it it's a good selection, good catalog of potential songs. And as you can see, you've got the soprano only version bass. This is for all their training stuff. And then look down below. You've got different options. I'm not entirely sure what those, the differences between that. You can find the one that works better for you. And then what I've done is I would open it up, and we leave it open here. And it's right in the middle of this 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 of this screen, and that's what we're gonna bring into our livestream. So it's important that they all are just kind of 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 a NDI over here 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 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 wanna 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 hit the NDI capture right here.

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, you know, 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 keeps 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 so that we've been doing a song leader who's been announcing the song just to keep it more familiar with how, 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 going in the middle there, showing that the audio is coming out of the headphone jack of the other computer. And then that's coming into our main mixer, and then we're sending that along to the streaming computer. And so when the song is over, we'll simply just hit space bar again, which will come back to the song leader who would be standing there at the podium. So that's how we're doing it right now because nobody's in the building. Normally, we have crowd mics that we've set up, 3 of them around.

There's 1 up in the middle here and 2 up at the front that we pull in the sound into, into the vMix software. And then we mix that with the the regular song slides that we show up on the screen, the white and black normal stuff that you see from, like paperless hymnal. And we mix those 2 together to to create our own congregation singing. So the difference is we're just using a group. It looks similar, different colors, different, theme layouts that the, the Praise and Harmony people have put together, but a good 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 our stream going, and I hope it's been helpful for you. Thanks for tuning in.