Worship Team Apps

How I’d summarize part of my early young highschool worship leading days is “big dream. many limitations.” The technology wasn’t capable of meeting our needs. It was group emails with the worship set and service flow in my early days. It was using uploading some makeshift tracks to our iPod Classics. Or how about the transparent paper lyric projector on an exposed wall. It’s wild to think about where we started and are now in such a short time. So today, I wanted to take some time to highlight what I consider the best worship team apps.

Today we will look at some of the daily classics used by worship teams & the new features within them that keep them as the leading industry standard.

Also, we will highlight a few apps that some of you might not be familiar with that had changed the game, like old faithful, like Planning Center changed the game when it was first released. We’ll also dive into specific ways I use these worship team apps.

Today you’re getting more than just a list. You’re gaining tips and tricks on maximizing your usage of these worship team planning apps, playback tracks apps, & live instrument apps. With these ten must-have worship team apps, you’ll be able to streamline your communication, simplify your planning process, and sound incredible. Overall we will show you the best apps for worship teams and how to use them at your church.

1. Worship Online

As many know, Worship Online is the perfect resource for worship song lessons and tutorials. But there are features outside of lessons and tutorials that will make your life so much easier as a worship team.

The Lowest Priced Backing Tracks Available

You can find backing tracks for all your favorite worship songs, priced cheaper than any other multitrack stems for live performance. Members pay only $9/song! That’s ¼ the price of most other services. For the price of one folder of backing tracks from other providers, our pricing allows you to purchase the entire setlist for your worship service. Here’s how to upload our tracks into Multitrack’s playback app.

Keys & Piano Patches

Just like our backtracks, we have keys & piano patches for 100s of worship songs. Whether you use only stock Mainstage sounds or plan to use other plugins like Omnishpere or The Giant, these sounds are perfectly dialed precisely to each worship song! These patches sound amazing and save you the time and effort of creating individual sounds for each song.

Worship Team Planning: Schedules & Setlist

With our new setlist feature, you can schedule team members to serve on certain days while also planning out the setlist. Pick the songs, choose the keys, roster your team, assign positions, set rehearsal and service times, add notes about the service, and download custom arrangement and key-specific chord charts. And when you didn’t think it could get any better…

Planning Center Integration

With the press of a button, you can easily share Worship Online tutorials, charts, and other resources directly inside your PCO account. The main benefit of linking Planning Center to your Worship Online account is that you can import song resources from Worship Online into Planning Center.

This is especially helpful if you use both resources regularly to plan and schedule worship services and rehearsals. This would allow you to access song info, song sequence, chord charts, and a link to the worship online video tutorials for that song directly available in your Planning Center catalog.

2. Prime by Loop Community

Another staple in our worship team app list is Prime by Loop Community. Personally, I’m a major Ableton head, and even still, the ease of use and amount of features in this app is unbelievable. The app is straightforward: select your song, choose the key, confirm your arrangement, set your channel levels, and boom!

Team Sharing

Prime offers a setlist team-sharing feature. This allows worship leaders to create setlists and share them with their bands. Band members can then access their parts on their iPhones from home and come prepared for rehearsals.

Loop Community Hardware

Loop Community has incredible hardware solutions, making using Prime a breeze. The Looptimus & Looptimus Mini allows you to effortlessly control, start, and stop your tracks during performances. Additionally, you can connect your playback system to their audio interface: Track Rig. An incredibly simple, 8 XLR output audio interface. This means you can send your tracks on different channels, giving you greater control over your mix and optimizing your audio performance.

3. Planning Center “Services.”

We all know, love, and couldn’t function without PCO! This is such a great worship team planning app. If you aren’t familiar with it, Planning Center is a central location for all the specifics of producing a worship service. The common feature PCO’s know for is team rostering and service order planning.

Matrix Auto-Scheduling Mode

Now here’s my absolute favorite trick of the trade. As I have said already, I wouldn’t say I particularly enjoy scheduling. It’s tedious, takes so long, and inevitably volunteers will decline 10% of your rostering. However, now within the matrix feature is the option to auto-schedule! Select the team you’re scheduling for, and it schedules people with no conflicts that have not served in the longest amount of time. All you need to do is ensure your people’s profiles are correctly tagged with the positions that they serve in and let this excellent worship team planning app do the rest.

When it comes to worship team planning apps, this feature is undeniably a game changer. Literally, all I do is add to the matrix the entire six weeks I’m scheduling for, hit auto-generate, look at the results to see if the auto-generated band makes sense, fine-tune, & voilà! – all done.

Music Stand

Once you’ve loaded your setlist into the specific service, quickly open up the charts for each song in your set and play through. Also, you can connect a foot pedal to your device and scroll through the chord charts. There’s also a metronome and audio player within the app. This allows you to rehearse with all the tools you need within the app.

Speaking of worship team apps for rehearsing…

Have you ever utilized our training and tutorials? They allow you to prepare for your Sunday morning set in half the time! The instructors we have on our team are the worship musicians playing for many of the worship teams and artists whose songs we play in our Sunday morning services.

If you’ve never used Worship Online before, sign up for your two free week trial today and start saving significant amounts of time preparing for your worship services.

4. Ableset 2 for Ableton

Ableset has become my favorite Ableton setlist-based live show interface. It continues to have features released that allow you to do so much more than start and stop the songs. When it comes to worship team apps that are best for live performances, Ableset is #1.

Song Section Jumping

Apps like Setlist or Taz are fantastic but are limited to you starting and stopping the songs. Whereas with Ableset, you can quickly jump around from different sections throughout the song.

Chord & Lyric Monitoring

Import the chords & lyrics into your session and output them to people’s phones and iPads.

5. Pro Presenter

Obviously, this worship team app is a staple. We all know it; we all love it. No need to go in-depth on explaining how it’s the best presentation software on the market. However, there are little things it can do that the average person avoids that will make your life and Pro Presenter experience much better.

MIDI Cues

Typically, our volunteers run Pro Presenter, cueing the lyric slides throughout the worship set. However, training someone to cue with precision and at the appropriate time, hilariously, takes a chunk of time. So what I’ve found to be way more manageable is to program MIDI cues to send out of the playback session and trigger the slide changes within Pro Presenter. This ensures slide changes are taking place soon enough for those dependent on the slide for the lyrics, both on stage and in the congregation.

6. AutoPad

This worship app is simply outstanding! It allows you to easily trigger backing-track pads in any key, with all 12 keys laid out in a row. Tap on a key name, and your pad starts playing – it’s that simple! Plus, you can create simple setlists right within the app. With ten different pad sounds, pad effect controls, and other great features, this app is truly incredible and user-friendly.

If you are already utilizing a playback app & all you need are pad loops, try Worship Pad Loops.

Worship Pad Loops is a collection of 20-minute-long ambient pads in every key (both major & minor). Select the song’s key, and Worship Pad Loops will start playing a warm, beautiful ambient pad that will fill up every mix.

The great thing about Worship Pad Loops is that they can scale with you should you want to integrate them into a tracks rig setup.

7. Sunday Keys for MainStage

MainStage, that’s another classic worship team app. It’s the perfect live-performance virtual instrument. When I didn’t think it could get any better, David Pfaltzgraff changed the game. Sunday Keys is a fantastic collection of patches & presets that honestly sound unreal.

I’ve spent countless hours perfecting synth and piano sounds for worship services over the years. With the number of sounds in Sunday Keys, there’s always a fantastic sound for every song.

If you’d like the peace of mind that the sound you’re using sounds for the specific song you’re doing, check out our keys patch store.

These are my favorite worship team apps

In conclusion, worship team apps have come a long way from the early days of group emails and makeshift tracks. Today, there are several powerful and innovative apps that have revolutionized the way worship teams plan, rehearse, and perform. From Worship Online’s extensive library of tutorials, affordable backing tracks, and piano patches, to Multitracks’ Playback app with its seamless transitions and chart scroll syncing, to Planning Center’s comprehensive rostering and service order planning features, these apps have changed the game for worship teams around the world.

Features like auto-scheduling in Planning Center’s matrix mode & Playback’s “continue with pad” these apps have made the process of planning and executing worship services more efficient and enjoyable for worship leaders and team members alike. Whether you’re a seasoned worship leader or just starting out, incorporating these best worship team apps into your workflow can help streamline your communication, simplify your planning process, and ultimately enhance the quality of your worship services.