Building a setlist for a Sunday service

What is a setlist?

A setlist is the order you play in: which songs, in which key, with what in between. For a band on a stage that is a list of numbers. For a service it is a little more, because things happen between the songs that are not songs. A welcome, a prayer, the offering, a reading.

The goal is not a tidy document. The goal is that nobody has to ask "what now?" on Sunday morning, and that the musician next to you knows what you know.

Start with the service, not with the songs

The temptation is to start from songs you like and then push them into an order. That rarely works. Start from what the service is doing: is there a theme, a reading, a moment it has to arrive at?

Then choose songs that serve it. A song that is strong on its own but says the wrong thing in that slot makes the service feel disjointed. Two songs doing the same job can become one. And four songs done well almost always beats six done half.

Watch the keys and the transitions

This is the part that helps most and gets skipped most. Two songs back to back in keys far apart sounds like a jolt, especially if you run them together without a break.

Put songs that run into each other in the same key, or let the key step up gradually through the set. Shift a song if the melody sits too high or too low. A congregation sings lower than you think. Check too whether a guitarist has to change instrument or tuning. If that happens three times, the order is the problem and not the guitarist.

Leave room for what is not a song

A setlist containing only songs leaves out half the service. Put the welcome, the prayer, the offering and the reading in it too, where they belong. It costs two minutes and it prevents the most common failure: the band playing on while somebody is walking to the microphone.

Note who does what, as well. "Prayer, Anne" is enough. In Revigo you do this with notes between the songs, so they sit in the same list as the music instead of in a second document.

Make sure everyone has the same list

This is where it goes wrong in practice. You send the list round on Saturday afternoon, something changes on Saturday evening, and on Sunday half the band plays the old version. That is not carelessness on their part. It follows from a list that was sent as a message instead of kept as a list.

Whatever you use, make sure one version is the right one and that changes land there. Revigo Team does this automatically. Prepare a setlist and it is there for every member, and a Saturday-night change travels on its own. It is the only paid feature in the app. What it costs is on the pricing page. Without a team you can hand a setlist over as a file or over Bluetooth, but then you stay responsible for the version.

Annotations that belong to this Sunday

On a song you play often you sometimes want to note something that applies only this once: a verse you are skipping, a tempo that should come down, an intro the piano takes alone. Write that on the song itself and it will still be there in three months.

So keep the two apart: what belongs to the song, and what belongs to this setlist. In Revigo annotations belong to the setlist, so your markings for Sunday do not clutter your ordinary sheet music.

What you actually need on Sunday morning

On the morning itself it comes down to three things. You can reach your songs without hunting for them. Your screen does not go dark halfway through a verse. And you are not depending on the wifi in the hall, because it is not there or it is not working.

Print a paper copy if you do not trust it. That is not old-fashioned advice, that is a backup. Agree who leads the list too. One person saying what comes next is worth more than a perfect setlist nobody is looking at.

An example

An ordinary morning service, four songs, with everything in between. Not a prescription, just something to deviate from.

• Welcome, by Anne
• Song 1: opening song in D, solid, everyone knows it
• Song 2: in D, straight after, no talking in between
• Prayer
• Song 3: in E, quieter, piano starts alone
• Reading
• Offering, band plays on over the closing chords of song 3
• Song 4: closing song, in E, last verse a cappella