Song Rotation (?)

[Hilary]

As a 'lay' worship leader, I am learning a lot (thanks to the web) about "set lists" and "song rotation" and all sorts of software programs and web-based helps. I am currently going through our list of songs (literally hundreds) and I'm excited about the idea of a rotation, but I don't know where to start. I've read various opinions regarding the best # of songs to have, from 30 up to 100 and I'd love to get a little more advice. We sing 4-5 songs each Sunday, so a list of 30 seems small, but it leaves room to start introducing new exciting music & nudging some of the older ones out.

Also...I would love to be able to put our music into a program that makes it search-able by theme or key word and also something that can monitor usage, maybe even a way to 'grade' them for effectiveness in our service settings. If you know how to make that possible, I'm all ears!

[efrisch]

I think a lot of it depends on your congregation... some groups seem to be able to learn and remember more songs than others. We keep about 30-40 songs in our "regular" rotation at any given point, but songs are moving in and out of that list all the time.

As for creating and tracking your library - you should definitely check out planningcenteronline.com (if you haven't already). Even the free version will let you create a database, assign themes and other qualities, and get reports on which songs you're doing and how often. It's a great resource and one that I think you'll find a lot of the folks on this forum are using.