What Does Your Gloria Sound Like?
Here at HOJ we wanted to at least one song that contained a nod to a traditional Christmas Carol. Because of our service length and the “style” of our worship gatherings, we only do 3 song sets each week. This means that we typically only do about 3 Christmas songs per year.
- 2 weeks before Christmas: 1 Christmas song, 2 regular worship tunes
- 1 week before Christmas: 2 Christmas songs, 1 regular worship tune
- Christmas week: All 3 of those Christmas songs
This year the “new” song that we added in is Gloria (A Mercy Me adaptation and contemporization of Angels We Have Heard). I knew from the get-go that wanted to remix this remix.
We took the bare bones of the verses and choruses for the Mercy Me version and then added our own bridge. We also hinted at the “Hallelujahs” in the Mercy Me version, by creating a 3 layer ending that turned out nicely.
We had 4 vocals: Me on lead, another male on chorus melody, 1 female on lead (verse), 1 female on harmony (both females harmony on chorus).
The bridge is basically a 4 chord progression (the most common and rocking one in rock/modern worship: vi IV I V ), with scripture from Luke read on top of it. Then we dive right into the traditional Gloria (Angels We Have Heard) chorus. I would have liked to polish the vocals a bit more but we just flat out ran out of time. But overall I think the idea turned out really nicely.
Here’s a bit of audio (recorded and ripped from a camera right next to the drums). You don’t get FOH quality mix, but this at least gives you an idea of what we did with it. Your basically hearing ONE of the monitor mixes and live drums. I was pleased with how it turned out.
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What does your “Gloria” sound like? How have you reworked, remixed, or rewritten Christmas tunes to fit your worship environment? This morning Fred shared how we mashed up Hark! The Herald with the lyrics from The Doxology. How about you and your church?
Sounds good man .. and thanks for the link.
I like the way you hit the traditional chorus for a sec there … I should do that on Christmas Eve, shannon lewis is leading this as our “walk-in” …
For the Kingdom,
Fred McKinnon
http://www.fredmckinnon.com
http://www.theworshipcommunity.com
fred’s last blog post..Christmas Carols – To Sing or Not to Sing
this is so funny. saw your tweet. came over. read the title AS i was listening to mercy me’s “gloria” and rehearsing it for this weekend. weeeeird!
great arrangement russ. i really like that! the scripture reading was awesome. loved the excitement in her voice. very cool!
tam’s last blog post..when did you realize…
We’ve done some over the years. A funny story I like to tell is several years ago we were rehearsing “Silent Night.” I was playing drums, and was bored, and started playing this “Hotel California” kind of beat. Our conga player joined in, and soon the singers were singing the song along with us, in this groovy, seductive, Latin thing… We laughed, and then said, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” We played it that way at the concert, sure the pastor was going to have a cow – but he loved it.
Over the years, we’ve redone “Silent Night”, “Joy to the World”, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and a couple of others. I really have nothing in the hopper this year yet, though I’ve been playing with “Do You Hear What I Hear.” and “Silent Night.”
Mike Mahoney’s last blog post..Respect Mah Consistansay!
Hey hey Russ…
I LOVED the arrangement to Gloria. It was amazing. I got so into it. Can’t wait to see what you/we do next!
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@MIke: very cool.
@Maddie: wonderful job on Love Came Down! Because I have singers like you, we can do these great remixes!
aww….thx so much Russ…your a doll!!! lol jk jk… :))
well my cold is getting bad, but with rest and meds, i am hoping to be un-stuffy enough to hit those notes sunday! pray 4 meez!