Untitled Hymn (Come to Jesus)
Words and music by Chris Rice. Arranged and orchestrated by Robert Sterling.
From The Meaning Behind The Song: Untitled Hymn (Come to Jesus) by Chris Rice:
The song “Untitled Hymn (Come to Jesus)” by Chris Rice is a beautiful and heartfelt composition that touches the depths of one’s soul. Its poignant lyrics and soul-stirring melody have resonated with listeners around the world. The song explores the themes of surrender, redemption, and hope, inviting listeners to come to Jesus and find solace in His love.
[More at the link above.]
For anyone new here, I usually post my choir’s weekly anthems here in this section of the blog. If you’re not into such things, you can turn notifications off for this section. The on/off switch is in “Settings” for this post.
This six-verse anthem builds gradually with each verse and chorus. As simple as it is, it’s amazing. This arrangement is by Robert Sterling, with slightly different wording from other formats and arrangements.
This was not a week for our orchestra, but we were fortunate to be able to have an instrumental ensemble.
I would have loved to have sung in this one, but I was on screens again this week thanks to schedule juggling that enables me to be with the altos for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday services. They were six altos this day, which is almost all of the others, and they came through well. Our alto section is the smallest of the four, but quite important for the harmonies. We sometimes even carry the melody while the sopranos do their high voice things.
I noticed some interesting things about the sound this time. The choir sounded great there in the sanctuary, and good when I listened on headphones, although there seemed to be an issue with mic placement and balance for the tenors and basses. On the other hand, when I listened using the built-in speakers in my ViewSonic monitor, the sound was poor. These (I have two, one large, one medium) are great moderately-priced monitors with terrible speakers, although the speakers are fine for what I normally use them for (which is not music listening).
There’s another issue having to do with livestream mixes that can’t really be resolved for everyone at recording time. For those listening live in the sanctuary, the room itself provides a natural reverb, moderated by the people in the room. For livestream, however, the signal is being recorded “dry” (no reverb or other effects). This is not exactly how I would do it, but I’m not mixing it. When listening at home in a room with a good sound system, that room may supply some natural reverb. What the sound system does depends on the system and how it is set.
When listening on headphones at home, there’s a good chance the sound will come through dry, the way I hear it at the screens console through my monitor headphones. It depends on what processing is available and turned on. When I listen at home on my headphones there, however, I’m running it through a small digital mixer (Behringer XR12) with both hearing correction (via parametric EQ — I have one bad ear) and reverb, and it does not sound dry. That one sound coming out of the recording, then, can be different sounds to different people. It all depends.
One other side-note. The slide & caption timing for this anthem was as difficult as any I have encountered in two years of running screens at this church. I practiced it over and over again at home until I could “feel” when it was time for each transition. If I’m not going to sing, I can at least make musical slide turns.
For anthems, where the congregation is not singing, I like to turn them just slightly ahead of when the singing starts or resumes. I think this one came out well, with just one transition that was a fraction of a second early, the same one that gave me the most trouble during practice, of course.
The difficulty arises from the anthem having six verses, with significant variations in the transition from verse to chorus and chorus to next verse each time. Usually there’s a pickup but sometimes not, and the pickups vary in length. Sometimes the transition contains an extra measure. It made for a lot of memorization!
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, March 17, 2024
Excerpted from this livestream.
