Seriously Improve the Look of Your Stage | 3 Tips to a Clean Stage

welcome to worship leader hangout where we talk about many aspects of leading worship and leading a worship team and today I'm going to give you guys three ways three tips to make your stage so what's the point of having a clean stage I mean you're playing music people know there's cables they're running out of instruments they're running out of lighting they're running out of Lord everywhere everywhere everywhere you look on the stage sometimes there's cables I wish everything was Wireless that would just be amazing but it's not and most of us have this issue or we're gonna have cables on our stage and it's just the way of life so we can make this look better and it's not just cables there's actually a couple other things I want to talk to you guys about that'll help you so number one the keyboard standard come on everybody has a testimony of how bad keyboard stands can look or how about keyboards can look when they're placed on a stand and you just start plugging in cables everywhere the the sustain pedal and the power cable and you might run stereo so you have two outs on your keyboard you might run MIDI to that keyboard maybe you got a loop set up Ableton something else we can have up to like 10 ish cables running out of our keyboard maybe maybe less sometimes maybe just a brief or a lot of you and they're so spaced out you can't take them one direction yeah it's like the power cables all the way on this side and then all the way on the other side you have your quarter-inch input so let's clean this up I want to show you guys how to set up your keyboard and how to run those cables along your stand or along whatever that you set your keyboard on and make this look so much cleaner and so much more professional so all you do is take one of these what is this well this is you've seen these these actually come on a lot of cables a lot of cable companies will give you one of these to wrap up the cable with just like this when you're done using it and that's it you know and nobody really thinks of these any differently than just being on a cable but if you put these along each cable or maybe each section of cables that's coming out of your keyboard you can actually wrap this thing you know attach it to the cable itself and then then wrap it around the keyboard stand if you need a couple of them maybe your standing is a lot larger and you can weave there you know we have another one in together and now you have a longer one of these so wrap around your keyboards then it just looks so much more professional now a lot of people use gaff tape and that's great but gaff tape gets sticky over time so when you're pulling off that gab tape maybe you need to replace the cable maybe you want to move the entire set up somewhere else and you pull off gaff tape there's gonna be a nice sticky residue if you leave the gaff tape there for a long time of course you know gaff tape Wii is awesome for you know short-term uses put the gaff tape on take it off of no sticky residue but I have had experience with this stuff just sticking I mean yeah you can get it off easily but there's a residue that's left over you don't really want to use it over again it doesn't stick that well so you just grab a new piece so over time it can be a lot more expensive than just buying a few of these now let me show you this real quick how do you get a bunch of these well obviously you can go online and purchase these in bulk I mean they come in a little package actually a package right here I took it out to show you guys but they they're just reusable reusable cable so again you can use these in any situation where there's a cable and something to wrap that cable to to keep it nice and tidy instead of using a gaff tape next up hiding your cables or gaff taping them to the floor or to the stage this is huge you don't want cables hanging out everywhere it's just not a professional look you want to you want to hide them or get them in the place just like we talked about with the keyboard you want to grab those cables together and wrap something around it whether it's one of these like we just talked about or gaff tape or zip ties you know if it's something that's gonna be in place for a very long time yeah use zip ties it's clean it's easy it's very tight it's not going to come apart but if it's something that you're going pull off and on multiple times throughout however long you have your set up then maybe one of these is your best bet or if it's something a lot more temporary then use gaff tape or if it's on the floor of course you got to use gaff tape regardless the best way to do this is is find all the cables that you know you want to be in a specific place whether it's hanging from a truss or a crossing a walkway or a place behind your stage where there's going to be a lot of foot traffic you want a gaff tape that cables down so that way there's there's no tripping hazard or there's no chance of somebody holding that cable with their foot and pulling maybe a power cable out of the wall and now you know half your stage doesn't have power it doesn't matter what kind of cable it is we do not want it pulled from where it's plugged into that's just that's a no-no especially if you have cables maybe running from your drum mics you know lord knows we don't want the cable pulled and our our overhead comes down and you know pulls down a cymbal I mean there's just it can be catastrophic there so we gaff tape them down for for the person's safety as well as the safety of our equipment also you know Gaffin gap taping power cables and DMX to your trust maybe you have some trust set up on stage or maybe you have some sort of stage design where lights are hanging off of take your cables gather them together and hide them or put them nice and neatly in a place to where it looks like you care and the cables aren't sticking out everywhere and just cause an eyesore this will really clean up your stage if you do this all across your stage it'll just it'll look so good and you'll be glad you did and of course you can redo it over time because it's not permanent you know you're not drilling holes in your stage and running cables underneath you're just gaff taping them down or zip tie on them or velcroing them down it's that simple it's that simple so so do this make this a regular habit every time you change the position of an instrument or position of a light tape your cables down and get your cables in a place or you like them and if they're hidden they're out of the way we don't want to seal we want to make it look like it's Wireless right so tip number three remove your music stand of course removing the music stands I talked about this in another video I'll link it below if you want to go watch that but of course it'll clean up your stage if you remove them you have more worship engagement with your musicians your musicians are gonna be able to interact with each other a lot better when they're not buried into a music stand this also promotes preparation and excellence so when your team knows that there's not going to be a music stand in front of them they have to prepare they have to be ready for the music and know their parts and of course like I said in the other video you have to you have to set this up maybe over multiple weeks especially if you if a lot of your musicians are the same people week to week you say look for the next four weeks I'm gonna take away one song at a time from the music stand so that way you start to memorize songs and ultimately we can remove the music stand to have a much cleaner stage and promote worship engagement promote excellence and in preparation and it's going to be a pretty tough conversation if right now you currently have 15 music stands on your stage or you know for us it'd be probably one two three four or five six maybe five or six music stands all across the front especially now if you're using music stands for your vocals you know back in that can even clutter it up even so much more and just it just looks like a wall of aluminum across the front of your stage I don't really want that that it's just not a not a great look it looks so much better it looks like you're so much more engaged with the congregation when you don't have that big thing in front of you now I know there are a lot of professional stages that use music stands and that's great I'm not totally against them I'm just saying for for worship especially for the type of music that we do not all of it is extremely hard not all of it needs sheet music even some of the extremely technical songs you can you can for the most part memorize them you can you can I know you can remove those music stands it's gonna look so much better you'll be glad you did I think I took 11 weeks and took away a piece of music every other week however I don't know it doesn't matter but it's gonna make you so much happier when you come in and you see a nice clean stage with no music stands and everybody knows their music for the most part I know I've rambled on three tips I want to give them to you one more time just as a follow-up clean up that keyboard stand you can use these velcro ties I've been playing with the whole time you probably hear it in the audio number two gaff tape your cables on your stage and behind your stage and tie the cables to whatever that hides them we don't want to see them and number three remove your music stands and if you do all three of these things your stage is gonna look incredible thank you guys so much for watching this video get rid of those music stands and clean up those stages that's gonna be your goal this week and remember great worship leaders are always learning subscribe if you're not already and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Worship Leader Hangout

Views: 68,970

Keywords: worship leader hangout worship leader worship, clean stage, wlh, worship leader blog, worship leader, worship, worship pastor, practical worship, music ministry, worship school, clean piano stand, piano, keyboard, gaff tape, how to, elevation church, stage design, set, college park church, chad buckland, davin hutchinson

Id: LVxcp2XoJrE

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017