Hello, and thank you for participating in this year's Christmas Collaborative Carol, a rendition of Joy to the World.
This guide is here to hopefully help you learn the new arrangement, set up your recording and filming setup and send your final files to us.
If at any point you find yourself getting stuck, please do contact Ben Lawrence.
The closing date for submissions is: Sunday August 24th 2025
The aim
This collaborative carol is borne directly out of our central Christmas theme for 2025, Gifted. The concept behind Gifted is to help people to discover a three-fold message: they are a gift, church community is a gift, and Jesus is the ultimate gift.
This theme helped us to start thinking about how we could include the local church in our nationwide campaign, to show off our beautiful diversity and wonderful welcoming local communities – because that’s why we exist, to see the local church thrive.
In the previous few years, we’ve had the opportunity to produce high quality Christmas carols, featuring talented singers from across the Connexion – and so this year we wanted to include all of you! That’s where the collaborative carol came from.
How will it work?
Our approach to producing this song is to create a base track, including 3-4 lead singers from across the Connexion and then to dip in and out of your submissions, featuring the local church in all of its diversity.
That means that, your submission won’t be playing throughout the final version, but you will be featured at various points throughout the edited song. Hopefully giving each church a chance to shine! Please bear in mind that there are a lot of churches involved, and we’ll do our best to make sure everyone is featured well throughout – but we can’t guarantee this.
Practicing
Along with this document, you can download three versions of our rough demo arrangement of Joy to the World and a lyric sheet. It’s essential that you sing along to the backing track, to make sure every group is in time and tune with one another.
You’ll find:
Joy – Demo for choir – No melody:
- This is the final version that you will record your audio and video to. It’s the most stripped back version because we need to make sure that not too much audio ‘bleeds’ into the recording you send us, so that our final mix comes across as best as possible.
Joy – Demo for choir – With guide Vox – DON’T RECORD TO THIS
- This is the version you can practice to. It includes a guide vocal to help you learn any slight melody changes we’ve made and the new ending section we have written.
- Please DON’T record your final audio or video to this version, as we don’t want to hear the guide vocal in the final recording.
Joy – Demo for choir – With piano melody
- This version is a useful alternative to the guide vocal version. It will give you a tune to sing along to without the vocals.
- At a push – this version can be used for your final audio and video recording, especially if your group is struggling to follow the tune.
Step-by-step guide to recording
What you will need
- Something to capture audio on (a phone, computer with an interface and mics or an iPad or tablet)
- Something to capture video on (a phone, tablet or camera)
- A speaker for you group to hear the backing track on and a device to play the backing track from (a phone, laptop or tablet)
Recording – Audio
Below is a step-by-step guide to recording your audio. Of course, if there are members of your congregation that specialise in audio and have the right equipment to capture it, then they are very welcome to go about this in their favoured way. Please do make sure they refer to our specifications below.
For other groups
Capturing good quality audio has become a lot simpler in recent years, especially with smartphones. Most up to date smartphones can do a really good job of capturing sound.
We would suggest trying to find someone within your group that has a phone that was purchased in the past few years. This can be an android or iPhone.
When setting up your group for the recording consider these things:
- Record in a room that doesn’t sound too echoey, sometimes this can be good but other times it can be difficult to capture a clear recording.
- Record somewhere quiet, so that you only capture your group singing.
A full guide to setting up your recording is found at the end of this section.
Recording – Video
We live in an ever increasingly visual media focussed world and one of our aims with this collaborative carol is to produce a lyric video for Churches to show or sing along to over Christmas.
We would love to show the faces of those involved, and that’s why we’re asking you to also capture video to go along with your audio recording.
To make sure we are only capturing faces of those who wish to be seen, please make sure you gain consent from everyone within the video.
If there is someone who doesn’t want to be within the video, they can still sing along – just place them to one side of your camera shot.
Setting up your recording (for phones and tablets)
- Find a way to prop up your phone roughly at head height in landscape (how you watch TV) - you could use a tripod or just a table with a stack of books.
- Where possible try and find a room with enough natural light or lighting.
- We will also be filming these recordings – so begin by opening up your camera app.
- Within the camera app, make sure your recording is set to an option of either 1080p or 4K.
- Prepare your group and make sure the backing track level is easy for everyone to hear. Where possible make sure the speaker for the backing track is pointing towards the group and not the phone or tablet.
- Hit record on your phone or tablet before you hit play on the backing track. Wait a little while before you begin the backing track (we can edit this all out).
- Make sure everything is recording properly and prepare your group.
- Hit play on the backing track.
- Repeat: where possible try and capture 2 or 3 takes, just so we have options to use in the edit.
Guidance for those with professional gear
If you are confident in using professional audio or visual gear, please follow our suggestions below:
- Please capture audio in either: 48khz or 96khz in 24bit or higher.
- Please capture video in 25 frames per second at either 1080p or 4k in landscape (16x9).
- If using multiple mics, make sure to place them a good distance apart to avoid phasing issues.
- Please make sure that you have a clean audio signal with no clipping or distortion.
- Make sure to capture a clap on the audio and video recordings, so that it is easy to sync the two in post.
- Follow the other steps in the (for phone and tablet) section for all other general guidance.
Once you’ve captured your recording
Use this WeTransfer link to upload and send us your recordings:
You may need to set up an account or confirm that the email you are sending from is legitimate by entering a code sent to your inbox.
- Where possible, please make sure your recordings are labelled, so we can sort through them easily.
- Add your files and hit send.
- Make sure your files all upload fully and that the screen says ‘sent’ or similar
- Please do send an email to confirm the delivery of your recordings.
That’s It!
If everything goes to plan, that should be all you need to do! In the unlikely case anything goes awry, we'll get in touch with you.
We can’t thank you enough for wanting to be involved in this collaborative carol, it is so fantastic to have you involved and to show the world how wonderful our local churches are.
Once the song is finished, we will let you know when you’ll be able to listen and watch it. So, keep an eye out for an email with all the information on this!
We would love for you to share this with your church, friends, family and community too – it would be fantastic to see this go as far as possible!