Laying out lyrics on slides seems so simple. Take the words, type them out, and flash them up onto the screen. As churches all over the world discover on Sunday mornings, there is more to the development of a presentation than meets the eye. This is the first tip posting on the topic of using our presentation tools effectively and we might as well start with something obvious.
The structure of the text on our slides should match the structure of the song.
Let’s use the song ‘Draw Me Close’ as an example. If you know the song, lift your hands and sing it so you can get the cadence and phrasing of the tune in your mind. If your church doesn’t sing this one, watch the video so you can learn it before we go on.
When I prepare the lyric text for presentation, I must always keep two things in mind. Number one, it has to be readable and number two, some people are not going to know the song. Check your assumptions on the second truth; we cannot assume that everyone is going to be familiar with the song, its tune, and its phrasing. This means that the praise leader and the accompanying musicians are going to be in the position of teaching the song to some singers and they will rely on your design to help in this process.
The first verse of this song is pretty simple. A good sized font can be used and a fair amount of whitespace allowed making for a pleasing slide. Especially note how the lines of text match the melodic structure of the song. A reader can easily understand and learn the song by matching the breaks in the text with the melody line of the song.
Building slides with this focus is not a one time process. Typefaces, font size, and changes in the background and the slide template can all cause things to go awry. When you assemble your script, you must run through all the slides with a careful eye to ensure nothing has changed or shifted unexpectedly.
Here is an example of a subtle problem that we need to watch for. Notice how the chorus lines have been broken, moving the last word down to a new line. To a singer with an unfamiliar song, this creates a struggle in learning the song. Think about the tune for this chorus. When we sing ‘want’, we hold that that note until starting the next line. Someone new to the song may also expect a whole note on the ‘ever’ in the second line since we have broken the slide there. This would have been even more troublesome if the slide had been center aligned like the top slide.
This is an easy fix if we catch it. Make the font size a few points smaller or stretch the margins a bit so that the lyric line can stretch out.
The problem here is similar to the previous one. The third line is broken in an awkward place but reducing the font enough to fit all of the words on one line makes it unreadable. The fix is found in listening for an obvious musical break in the song and using that to structure your slide. Do you hear the melodic break in the third line? It happens right after ‘else’ giving us two clean lines: “’Cause nothing else – can take your place.” (We pray never to see the word “cuz” on a screen.)
The bridge lines create a little different issue. Should we compress all of this text on one slide or break the bridge (‘Help me find the way, bring me back to you.’) out onto another slide? A case can be made for both, but readability should win out and it can be improved by moving these lyrics onto their own slide. Because the pacing is so tight in this section of the song, careful selection of a transition will be very important here.
Hope you find this helpful. If you have some additional hints and helps to offer, leave a comment below.
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