How to Present Lyrics Professionally

Small changes can have a big effect.

In my last post, we compared two of the most popular media presentation platforms. Now that you have the tools to amp up your production, the next thing to learn is an essential part of every church media tech’s repertoire: how to properly format lyrics.

Lyrics can be a difficult thing to translate to media presentation. Sometimes the phrases are too long to fit well with your template, grammar rules can be slightly different, and then there are certain parts of songs that are technically included but feel weird when you read them on the screen. I hope to, by the end of this article, give you the guidelines that I have personally developed to quickly and easily format any song’s lyrics in a way that is not only easy to follow for your congregation, but easy for the media tech to understand, navigate, and execute without ever hearing the song before.

So, without further delay, let’s get into it.

Be Concise

It is important to make your lyrics easy to follow, their purpose is to assist those in the congregation that don’t the words of course. To this end there are a few things to keep in mind when formatting for Sunday.

The first is that it is easy to get lost in the unfamiliar. A new song can move quickly and be confusing. Our objective should be to serve it up in small, bite-sized pieces. I suggest that lyrics should be kept to a maximum of two lines per slide. This seems to me to be the best amount to use, in my experience, so that our audience can easily follow it and it looks ascetically pleasing as well.

Here’s an example:

(For this and all other examples I will be using ‘How He Loves’ since it is a very uniquely formatted song and is also very well known)

He is jealous for me

Loves like a hurricane I am a tree

Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy

Or…

          He is jealous for me

 Next slide

          Loves like a hurricane I am a tree

          Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy

 The first does not suggest the pause between the first and second phrase and can be a bit of a mouthful, it also is hard to fit on a lower third template. The second implies the pause innately, is easier to understand and work with as well.

It is also important to keep the thought clear, avoid breaking up a phrase at all costs. Using the same phrase as the first example, I have actually seen it formatted this way:

He is jealous for me

Loves like a hurricane

 Next slide

I am a tree, bending beneath

the weight of His wind & mercy

 If you don’t know the song, this format makes sense. But there is no pause in the phrase they broke between the first and second slide, meaning the tech has to rush to the second slide and ninety-percent of the time hit it too early or too late, harming its usefulness.

You see, while it is incredibly important that the lyrics be easy to understand for the audience it is equally important that they are easy to use for the media tech. While the lyrics formatting and operating are usually done by the same person, this is not always true. This needs to be taken into account.

I’ve found that everyone has their preferred method, some write out the entire song as it appears, often repeating slides over and over for the chorus and other such portions. I prefer another method, where the core parts of the song are written out once: one chorus, one first verse, etc. Then those parts are referred back to when needed, it cuts out unneeded repetition and the possibility of getting lost in a large file. If someone other than myself is running the lyrics that Sunday, I make sure to leave notes detailing the song order and composition to keep stress and guesswork out of the booth.

Cross your eyes and dot your teas

Grammar rules in music are startlingly different from anywhere else, for example, punctuation does not exist in lyric in the same way that it does in the written word. You wouldn’t punctuate a song in the same way as an essay. Using the previous example, let’s correct their punctuation:

He is jealous for me

Loves like a hurricane

 Next slide

 I am a tree, bending beneath

the weight of His wind & mercy

And corrected

He is jealous for me

 Next slide

 Loves like a hurricane I am tree

Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy

 In lyric, if you feel that a comma should be placed it should be a new line.

Another thing that is a little different is what I term “vocalization”. Usually this means something that is sung without the structure of words but I use it to denote the little extra bits in songs that don’t add anything. Things like “oh” or even “yeah” are vocalization in my book. Not only are they sometimes hard to incorporate but they are sometimes omitted by a singer during one service, and included the next. My solution to this issue to simply remove them altogether, an example:

Someone’s attempt at a tricky section

And oh, how he loves us, oh

Oh, how he loves us

 Next slide

How he loves us, oh

 And my solution

Oh How He loves us

This gives the band the freedom to say what they wish, when they wish and also simplifies my life considerably.

In this rather unique case, the “oh” is a part of the song that cannot be completely removed. But in simplifying the phrase I give the audience something easy to follow and the tech something easy to use.

One more little grammar thing, that is a personal preference of mine, but I think bears mentioning is the matter of capitalization. Most people capitalize proper names and the like but there is one more rule that I apply. I capitalize at the beginning of a line, to me it looks right and professional.

Optimization

These guidelines are great but they are nothing if you don’t take the initiative and make them work for you. I have a few suggestions that may help you to do this.

First of all, every band plays songs differently so do what works for your media team and make the lyrics work for what your singers sing. Go to practice and write the lyrics, in your presentation software, based on what the worship leader is singing. Do they like to repeat a line of the verse before the chorus? Plan accordingly. But then things can always change. Try to do a run-through of the lyrics, just for you, while the team is doing the sound check and make sure everything matches up.

There you have it, if you use these tips as a starting place to develop your own policy you can have your media presentation looking great and working great as well.