Joshua Riggs shows two ways to add atmospheric pads to ProPresenter worship sets: create slides for each key with long audio files you select manually, or embed pads into slide backgrounds to play automatically with lyrics. He recommends making pads 10-20 minutes long and shares free resources for finding royalty-free pad audio.
If you've been leading in worship and production ministry for any length of time, you've probably heard of worship pads. These atmospheric sounds help to fill in the gaps during worship, prayer, scripture readings, response times, and more. Worship pads help to create a seamless, immersive worship experience. But maybe you're not quite sure how to use them effectively in your services. In this video, I'm going to show you the 2 best methods for using worship pads inside of ProPresenter. I'm going to walk you through the proper setup so you can implement this immediately in your church. In addition to that, I've got a free download in the description below where I list the top 4 places you can download free worship pads today and start using them this Sunday. So if you're ready to learn exactly how to set up worship pads in ProPresenter, let's dive in. Hey everybody, I'm Joshua Riggs, the creator of worshipresources.church, where I help you learn how to use ProPresenter like a pro. If you have any questions about this video or anything ProPresenter related, leave them in the comments. I'll be sure to respond. Okay, I'm gonna show you the two best ways to use pads inside of ProPresenter. First, I'm gonna start by creating a new presentation. So I'm gonna press Command+N, and then I'm just gonna call this Pads. Gonna press Return, and it will start our presentation here. Now I'm gonna right-click on the slide, click Edit Slide. I will double-click on this text and type in A-flat. I'm gonna select the text and then I'm gonna change this font size to 200. In fact, let's make it 300. So now I'm gonna duplicate this slide and you can do this multiple times by holding Option and dragging. So I'm just going to create a bunch of these, one for every key. Now I'm going to go in and change and update these keys. So A, A-flat, A-flat, A, B, C, D-flat, D. E, F, G. And then I'll delete this one. So now when I go back to the Show tab, I have all of my primary keys. There's a few keys I left out, but most worship teams are not singing songs in C-flat. So now I'm going to pull up my list of pads. By the way, you can find these exact worship pads for free. Look in the description below and download that resource where I list 4 places you can download free worship pads. And so now I'm just going to take these one at a time and drag them on top of the corresponding key. So A, A-flat, B, B-flat, C, D-flat, D. E, E-flat, F, G. And there is one in G-flat, so let's go ahead and duplicate this slide by Option-dragging. Then I'm gonna edit the slide, type in G-flat, and then I'm going to remove that action, go to my Finder, and then drag in G-flat. Now that I have all of the keys and the pads set up, I'm going to make note of what keys each song is in. And then when it comes time for that song to begin, I'll click on that slide. So if the first song is in B-flat, I click on B-flat and you can see the audio is playing. The next song is in D, we go to D, and then we go to G. Now, a couple things to note about these pads, and all pads should be this way, is these are 20 minutes long. Your pads need to be at least 10 minutes long. That way you can start it before the song begins and play it after the song ends without having any interruptions. Anytime I'm running sound for church, I usually have my laptop with my computer open up to ProPresenter with my pads ready to go. Sometimes you might wanna have a different sound but be in the same key. In order to do that, just hold down Option and add as many slides as you want in the key you want, and then drag your new pad sound right on top. Well, that's one way you can run pads for worship if you have a dedicated machine. But what if you wanna run pads at the same time you're running lyrics? Let me show you how to do it. Let's say we have a worship set with 3 songs, Who Else, Bless God, and We Fall Down. I know that Who Else is in the key of A, so I'm gonna click on this pad sound and drag it right on top of the background. This file already exists, I'm gonna click Use Existing. Now I'll go to Bless God, open up my Finder. Bless God is in the key of D, gonna drag D in and Use Existing. And We Fall Down is in the key of G, We'll drag that right on top. So now as I start the song, the start the background, it will also start the pad sound. And you can see the video progress here as well as the audio progress. And as I advance through the song, it's gonna continue playing that pad. Then when it's time for the next song, I start the track. And it automatically transitions into the next key. Using worship pads in ProPresenter will immediately elevate your worship experience. Pads help to fill gaps and provide a core foundation to your overall worship sound. Be sure to grab the free download in the description below where you can find free worship pads to start using in your services this weekend. And if this video was helpful, hit that like button and share this with a friend. Also, if you have any questions about ProPresenter, just leave a comment below. I respond to every one. If you're looking for more ProPresenter training videos, you can find those here and here. Thanks for watching everyone. Let's get better together for His glory.
