Tuesday 20 September 2011

Singing the Faith

I have now had my music copy of Singing the Faith since Friday last week and have been working through it and have mixed feelings. It is good to have a copy of it at last – wish it had been out in June as originally planned. It is a pity that take up does not seem to have been very good and I know this is for a variety of reasons that may be very sound and well argued by those who are not supporting the new book. I probably agree with some of the thoughts.

But lets come down to the actual book and some observations I have made in respect of it – they are not in any particular order.

The book is a fair size and appears to sit on the organ music stand quite well – time will tell.

The print is reasonably clear and for me a good size.

There is some inconsistency as some hymns have guitar chords and others do not – I think it would have been helpful to have chords on all the hymns and I am sure it could have been done reasonably easily. When the worship group lead worship leads at our church this would be helpful to our guitarists who read chords rather than music.

Some hymns songs go over three or more pages which means a page turn and while this may not have been something easily solved it does mean it may be necessary to photocopy music to assist musicians.

I was disappointed that words were separate to the music – often we lead worship from a keyboard at the front of the church and there is an expectation that we will sing and play – not always easy when the hymn is not so well known and the music and words are not together – I have seen books where the words are all within the music and hoped this might happen with Singing the Faith.

While I realise this all seems quite negative they are early observations on Singing the Faith which may well change to some degree as I use the book and get more used to it.

Watch for further updates.

4 comments:

Liz Mackay said...

Thanks for telling us about the new hymn book. I am not buying my music copy for financial reasons, but may do eventually. Shame about the words and music being separate. with our small congregation I like to sing along as much as possible. thanks for all your encouragement while I've been training for LP. The facebook group is going well.

Robert Brenchley said...

We're getting enough copies to have enough for people to share if we have a lot of people for a baptism or whatever. Other churches seem to be very hesitant. I remember it was the same when 'Hymns and Psalms' came out; there was a slow uptake round the circuit I was in at the time, but churches got there in the end.

Fat Prophet said...

Thank you both for your comments. Liz I would have bought a copy any way but our church has bought a copy for each organist as well as on for the organ. I am pleased that your facebook stuff is doing well and I have told some of our folk about it as I believe it is a really useful resource.
Robert we are going for the electronic copy with a few copies for those who might want to use a book, although on previous occasions when we have used a projector most people seem to look at the screen but that may be because our church building is not a big one and you can see the screen and the words on there reasonably easy. I think one of the issues in our circuit apart from apathy towards the book is lack of publicity - I am amazed how many folk are unaware of the new book.

Anonymous said...

Jim.
I have just read the instructions for installing the electronic version and what a painful nightmare this appears to be.
How difficult and complicated this has been made to put onto a PC - 5 A4 pages of instructions to wade through. I hope that if I make a mistake during the installation the program key won't be invalidated.
No information re secondary or third computers where the work load is shared.
Information awaited.