How to Rehearse a Church Choir or Worship Team Online

Online tools for church musicians fall into two categories, and confusing them wastes money.

Some help singers and instrumentalists learn their parts individually before rehearsal. Others let geographically separated musicians take part in a rehearsal, or even perform together.

If the goal is simply that everyone knows Sunday’s music by Thursday, rehearsal-track systems may be all you need, and they are good at what they do. If the music director needs to work with the choir or worship team as an ensemble — repeating passages, hearing people together, listening to sections, making musical decisions — that is a different problem with a different answer.

Most search results for “online worship team rehearsal” return the first category. Lyrekos is in the second, and this article is mostly about that one.

Preparing for rehearsal is not the same as having the rehearsal

It is worth being precise about the distinction, because both are legitimate and most churches and houses of worship need both.

Preparing means each musician works alone. A vocalist learns her part against a track. A guitarist plays along with a stem mix. The output is a better-prepared individual arriving at Thursday night knowing the material. Products like these are mature and well made, and for most worship teams our recommendation is to use them.

Having the rehearsal means people work together. Somebody says, “let’s take the second chorus again, altos come in early.” Somebody hears that the blend is wrong. Somebody makes a decision that changes what everyone does next. None of that happens when six people practice separately.

The question, then, is not which product is better. It is which of your two problems is costing you.

The real constraint is Wednesday night

For most church musicians, the binding constraint is not talent or preparation. It is that everyone can be in the same building at the same time approximately once a week, if that.

The volunteer with a commute cannot make the seven PM start or, indeed, cannot drive at night. The bass player travels for work two weeks a month. The exceptional soprano who moved forty minutes away still wants to sing but cannot justify the drive twice a week. In December, when you need three extra rehearsals, you get one and hope.

So directors do what directors do: they cut and cope. Something does not get rehearsed, and often it shows on Sunday.

Remote ensemble rehearsal does not add hours to anyone’s week. It removes the drive, which is usually the reason the rehearsal did not happen.

Situations where this changes the answer

These are not hypotheticals. They are the ordinary week of a church music program.

A midweek rehearsal without another trip to church

The full choir rehearses Wednesday. Two passages in the anthem are not secure and the director wants thirty focused minutes with the whole group on Saturday morning. Asking twenty-five volunteers to drive back to the building on a Saturday is not a request most directors are willing to make twice. Sending a link is.

A choir member who is traveling

A regular singer is out of town for two weeks, or on an extended trip, or caring for a parent in another state. The ordinary case is that they return having missed everything. There is no reason for that to be true anymore.

Weather

Ice, snow, or a night when the church council would rather not have thirty people driving. In much of the country this happens several times a season, and the rehearsal is simply lost.

A worship team member in another city

Small churches increasingly share musicians, and musicians increasingly live somewhere other than where they serve. A keyboard player an hour away is available for Sunday and effectively unavailable for Thursday.

Vocalists separately from the band

Thirty minutes with just the singers, working harmony and blend, without four instrumentalists sitting through it. This is the sectional problem again, and it is the rehearsal that is hardest to schedule in physical life and cheapest to schedule remotely.

Christmas and Easter

The seasons when you need extra rehearsals are precisely the seasons when everyone’s calendar is worst. A church that can add two thirty-minute working sessions in December without asking anyone to drive is running a different program than one that cannot.

Can a worship team sing and play together remotely?

Yes, and it is a somewhat different case from a choir, which is worth spelling out because the search results in this space almost never do.

A choir is many voices on a few parts. A worship team is a handful of people on distinct parts: worship leader, backing vocals, keyboard, acoustic and electric guitar.

The architecture does not care about the difference. Lyrekos uses what is best called shared-reference synchronization: every participant performs against the same common reference, whether they are singing an alto line or playing a keyboard part, and the contributions are aligned to that reference. An instrument is just another source.

What does change is what makes a good reference. For a worship team the natural reference is often the click and guide track the band already plays to on Sunday morning, which means the reference problem is solved before you start. Many worship teams are already, in effect, performing against a shared reference in person. Doing it from four locations is a smaller conceptual leap for them than it is for a traditional choir.

What about the worship leader?

The leader can be the reference. When the leader’s vocal and guitar are what everyone else follows, the ensemble is built around a person rather than a machine, which is closer to how these teams actually work.

The leader can also lead visually. We run a mode where everyone hears and sees the leader while they play, synchronized hand motions and lip movements included. The group is seeing the leader a few seconds delayed, which turns out not to matter, because leading only travels one direction. It does not have to go out and come back inside a beat.

What does not survive the distance is the round trip. The leader who is singing or playing live cannot respond to something a musician does inside the same take. The musicians cannot react to each other in the moment, because reaction is a round trip. Even in this scenario, though, the leader and all participants hear the result immediately after the take. In our experience this often leads to a conversation — which, being a conversation rather than singing, has no 20 ms sync constraint, and inside Lyrekos behaves like any other videoconferencing system.

The round-trip issue is real, but note how narrow it is. Playing freely over an agreed frame is a different thing from following an unannounced change. If your team improvises over a progression everyone knows, that progression is a shared reference, and that works.

Does everyone need special audio equipment?

No. Just headphones or earbuds and a browser.

This deserves more emphasis in a church context than anywhere else, because the barrier for most congregations is not money. It is technical support.

A worship team is usually a group of volunteers with varying tech comfort levels. If ten people have to install software, grant driver permissions, select the right input device and troubleshoot why the sound is coming out of the laptop speakers, the tool will be used twice and abandoned. Not because it is bad, but because the director became the help desk and stopped enjoying their job.

Lyrekos runs in a browser. Nothing to install. Works on phones. Wi-Fi is fine. If a volunteer can join a video call, they can join a rehearsal.

Headphones are the one real requirement. Open-backed headphones are best, because a singer needs to hear their own voice while they sing. People with closed headphones typically wear them partially off one ear. Earbuds are good too.

Can each rehearsal build on the last one?

Yes, and this is the part with no equivalent in a rehearsal room.

A rehearsal in a room is ephemeral. You run the anthem, it gets better, and what survives is whatever twenty-five volunteers happen to remember by Sunday. Nothing durable comes out of the evening. Next week you start from memory again.

In Lyrekos every pass is kept, and any pass can become the reference for the next one. The first take might be sung against a piano track. The second take is sung against the first, so now every singer hears the full ensemble while they sing. The third is sung against the second. What the choir is performing against is the best version of the choir so far, and it only improves. We call this iterative ensemble building.

For a church music program the consequences are practical. The altos can rebuild their line on Tuesday against last week’s full ensemble instead of against a click. The soprano who missed Wednesday can add her part on Friday against what the choir actually sang. A Christmas anthem can accumulate across four short November sessions rather than being rehearsed from scratch at each one.

It is also worth noticing what this is not. It is not a virtual-choir video project, where singers record in isolation and a sound engineer assembles the result weeks later. Everyone is rehearsing, hearing the ensemble, and the director is making musical decisions while it happens.

What can the director do with the recording?

More than you would expect, because of how the system works underneath.

Lyrekos captures every input on its own track rather than mixing them together live. That means a director can listen back to any single voice or instrument alone, right after the take or the following week. Balance can be adjusted afterward. And elements of the backing can be removed from the finished result. The system automatically adjusts the gain on recorded tracks so that their peak levels are perceptually the same, and there are detailed controls for any director or sound engineer who wants to dive in deeper.

For a church music program this is useful in an ordinary way. You can find out which alto is pulling the section flat without asking anyone to sing alone in front of the group. You can hear the keyboard and the guitars against each other without the vocals on top. And because the recording is aligned as a byproduct of rehearsing, you did not have to schedule a recording session to get it.

Remote rehearsal versus rehearsal-track software

A fair comparison, since most churches will end up using both.

If the objective is “learn your guitar part before Thursday,” a rehearsal-track product is the better tool. Those systems exist because individual preparation is a real problem, and they solve it well.

If the objective is “Thursday’s rehearsal cannot happen at church, but the director still needs to work with everyone,” that is the problem a remote ensemble rehearsal system addresses. No amount of individual practice produces a rehearsal.

The two are complements, not substitutes. A church that uses tracks for preparation and remote rehearsal for the extra sessions it could not otherwise hold is getting more from both.

What this does not do

Stated plainly, because a tool oversold is a tool returned.

• While an ensemble is singing together in sync, nobody can follow another musician’s unscripted change. No unplanned vamp, no key change decided on the spot. That constraint belongs to unison singing, not to the session as a whole. Leading and directing travel one way and are unaffected, and talking back and forth is a conversation, which was never under the constraint.
• It requires a shared reference. Usually a track or a leader, and for most worship teams that already exists.
• It does not replace singing in a room together. It makes it possible to rehearse in the weeks when a room is not available.

What it changes is the number of rehearsals a program can hold. For most churches that is the constraint that binds, and it binds hardest exactly when the music matters most.

How far apart can people be?

Farther than any church needs. We have demonstrated four singers performing together across Los Angeles, Canberra and Melbourne, about eight thousand miles, on ordinary home Internet connections over Wi-Fi, in a browser, with nothing installed. We have also run it over Starlink.

One of the singers, describing that session afterward:

I thought it sounded really good. … It sounded really lovely. It was, like, a nice sound and… Yeah, felt together.

Gabbi Coenen, soprano

The point of that test is not that a congregation spans the Pacific. It is that the choir member who moved to the next state, or the bass player who is in Chicago for the month, is a trivial case.

Gabbi immediately generalized past churches entirely:

I think, for example, if you say a composer wanted to, …they’d moved abroad and they wanted to work with their favorite singers, they could do rehearsals using this. … There’s so many vocal ensembles where they’ve got members based in the US and the UK and kind of all over the place. So, I think this is a good platform to have to just… practice working on a piece rather than just doing it by yourself all the time.

Gabbi Coenen, soprano

Where to start

If your musicians arrive not knowing the music, buy tracks. That problem is solved and we are not the answer to it.

If your musicians know the music and you still cannot get them in a room often enough, that is the problem Lyrekos is purpose-built for.

We are working directly with churches and music directors while the product matures, and there are features specific to worship that are not built yet. If you run a choir or a worship team and you have a rehearsal you cannot schedule, we would like to hear about it.