How to use MultiTracks.com Search & Chords in ProPresenter 7

Video Transcription

MultiTracks Search inside ProPresenter gives you a fast and reliable way to import lyrics for your audience screens, plus you can show chord charts in any key for your musicians on your stage screens. Now, to start importing lyrics into ProPresenter, you’re going to need a Chart Pro subscription from MultiTracks.com. That subscription gives you access to digital chord sheet downloads that you can print and import into music stand apps, plus it allows you to search and import songs from MultiTracks right into ProPresenter.

However, if you’d like to take advantage of those chord charts in ProPresenter, to display on your stage screens, then you’re going to need to grab the ProPresenter add-on for Multitracks Chart Pro. Once you’ve subscribed, then inside ProPresenter, we can go to ProPresenter and preferences and then go to services to log into our MultiTracks.com account. We can click on login and then use our username and password. Now that we’re logged in, we can start searching and importing songs. We can do this by going to search in the main toolbar or hitting command or control F on your keyboard.

To search the MultiTracks’ database, let’s select the MultiTracks icon on the right, and then we can start typing in a song we want to find. I’m going to search for Christ be Magnified, and you’ll see all of the different options of this song. I’m going to go with the original by Cody Carnes, and you’ll see when we select it, we get a bunch of helpful information about the song, including which key it is in, letting us know that chord charts are available and even automation’s available. And next we can select import. This will bring us to our import dialogue box where we have some special settings for MultiTracks songs. The first one is, “Do you want to bring in chords and automation?”

And, as a reminder, this requires the ProPresenter add-on for Chart Pro. Next, we have which key the song is in, and originally, this song is in the key of A, but we’re going to actually do this in the key of G to make it a little bit easier to sing. Next, we can choose how many lines of text we want on each slide. Normally we do two, so I’m going to set this to two, and then we can select our theme. So you can choose from any of your themes. I’m just using this all caps theme I created. You can set the size of your slide, name your presentation, and select which library it’s saved to and what playlist you want it to be added to, and then we can select to import.

Now our song’s been imported, and the next thing you would normally do when you create a song is create an arrangement of that song. So let’s go and select our arrangement icon and we’ll go over, and when you click on master here, you’ll see that an arrangement has already been created called Full, and this is the full normal arrangement from the original recording exactly in order, which makes it even easier for you to start using these songs. So you don’t even have to create an arrangement if you’re going to do it like the original recording. Now, if you want to make your own arrangement, you can still do that by creating a new arrangement or by going to the arrangement manager and you can duplicate and adjust this original arrangement to make changes.

This is a really fast and easy way to get started with your songs. So our song is ready to go for us, but what about those chord charts? To see our chord charts, we need to add a new stage layout. We’re going to go to more in the main toolbar and go to our stage editor. Now let’s add a new layout by clicking the add icon next to layouts, and let’s choose the MultiTracks chords and lyrics prebuilt layout.

Now, you’ll see that this layout shows your current slide, text, and chords, and your next slide text and chords. So this is all set and ready to go. It also has some other helpful information about your arrangement, and we can adjust this if we want to. So we could select this text box and go to our text settings. Then you can see down here, this is where we actually have chords enabled, so we can change the color of our chords. We can also change the notation from chords to maybe the Nashville number system. So we could say the one chord, the five chord, and then the six chord. Or you can do this using numerals where it’s the one, five, six.

So you can change that and even do Do-Re-Mi. We’re going to leave that as chords, and then maybe we want to change the coloring of this text. So let’s make this a little bit darker of a color so that this one stands out a little bit more and change our text color to maybe be a little bit dimmer, just so that this stands out a little bit more than this slide, so that we know that this is our current slide and this is our next slide.

So you can see how easy it is to make adjustments to that layout. Now we can go back to show and we need to use that layout. I’m going to go to my preview area and preview my stage display. And then let’s go to our stage settings in our show controls, and let’s change the layout that we’re showing on our stage display. I’m going to go in here and I’m going to choose that MultiTracks chords plus lyrics layout, and now when we click on a slide, you’ll see that we’re getting the current slide with chords and our next slide with chords. As we click through the song, we’re getting all of our chords perfectly placed above our text.

Now, if you want to make a change one week to the next from which key you’re playing this in, you can easily change that. We can just click on the key, here at the top, and we can go and change that. So maybe we’re going to do this in a female key, which would maybe be like the key of D for a female lead. So we can change that to D, and now as we click through the song, you’ll see all of the chords have automatically been changed to the key of D for us.

This is really, really powerful and makes it really easy to make changes week to week. So you can see how the MultiTracks.com Search makes adding songs fast and reliable, and the chord chart option gives your musicians the confidence to play the right notes no matter what key you’re in. To start using MultiTracks Search & Chords, head over to MultiTracks.com to learn more and subscribe.