Build a Worship Set in Minutes, Not Hours

February 3, 2026 ·

If you're a worship leader or team member, you've probably run into this before: you update a lyric or make a small change to your music, and suddenly you're having to fix it in multiple places.

You find yourself updating your chord sheets, service plans, and lyric slides. This friction and multiplied work adds up week to week. It leaves you feeling defeated, unproductive, and "not allowed" to be creative or able to change things.

What if there is a solution where none of these problems exist? Well, keep reading...

Why Traditional Set Planning Breaks Down

Imagine you're planning out a worship set. You have to compile songs, scriptures, and service events. At first, you might start brainstorming the order and writing it down in a notes app.

After you've thought up the order, you might enter it into a service planning tool. Then you have the job of obtaining or creating chord sheets, and having to create lyric slides if they don't already exist.

Now assuming you're not starting fresh into your role, it's likely you've got a library of chord sheets and lyric slides already created. So you probably pull from these when constructing a service, which doesn't take long.

However, the issue surfaces when you want to make a change, either to a lyric or the arrangement.

Let's say you want to change a line. This means you have to somehow go back to the chord sheet, edit it, and redistribute it to your team. Not only this, you have to go to your lyric slides and make the appropriate changes.

It becomes quite frustrating to update the same thing when it lives in (at least) three different places: your service plan, your chord sheet, and your lyric slides.

What if all these can live in one place and changes are reflected everywhere?

How Uplift Makes Planning Easy

Uplift was born out of this frustration. Your chord sheets, service plans, and lyric presentations live in one place. So let's step through service planning, but now using Uplift.

Creating Chord Sheets & Lyric Presentations with Uplift

You can go to the Plan page and add a new set. You can schedule it for a specific date and time.

Once you do that, you can add service items. These include service events like your announcements, prayers, transitions, sermon, etc.

You can also search your song library and add songs to the service. If you don't have a song yet, entering one is easy.

You can go to the Library page and click Add Song, and then enter basic details like title, key, tempo, and time signature.

Once you've added it and are in the song editor, you can see the chord sheet as you're building it. First, you can add a section, whether that be an introduction or a verse. Typically, songs start off with an instrumental intro.

Then, you can add your first verse (for instance) after the intro. It's easy to copy and paste the lyrics in, save it, and then start placing chords. Chords can be placed above the letters on which they fall by simply clicking the letter and typing the chord.

To save you from having to type the same chord over and over again, you can duplicate chords by holding down the option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key on your keyboard, and dragging and dropping the chord you want to copy to the new location.

After you've placed all the chords, head over to the Timing tab. This allows you to schedule chords, line beginnings, and line breaks in time. First, add the appropriate amount of measures to the section.

Then, click on the beat where the chord or line beginning should go, and this will place it there. After you've scheduled everything, go back to the Performance tab and begin on the next verse, or chorus, or whatever section.

A great efficiency tip is if your verses are the same chord-wise and timing-wise, you can duplicate the verse you just created. All you have to do is copy and paste the new lyrics and reposition the chords.

After you have created and timed every section, now you can address the presentation. What's great about Uplift is that not only does it allow you to build chord sheets, but also it takes care of the lyric presentations!

Head on over to the Presentation tab and you'll see lyric "slides". Most likely, your lyrical lines will overflow the presentation area, so click on the space between words where you want to break it, and it will break the line into two slides.

So go through this routine with every line and break it for both visual and timing evenness.

Finally, go back to the Timing tab and schedule when the line breaks happen, bearing in mind that you're scheduling when the word after the slash is sung.

This basically summarizes the process of entering a chord sheet into Uplift. To make it easier, you can import from ChordPro or PDF, but the approach just explained is recommended because you have full control over how your chord sheet is made. The duplicate section feature is your friend!

Creating chord sheets may feel like a lot of work, but think of it this way: you're crafting exactly and precisely what you want you and your team to play.

Planning Services with Uplift

You can go back to the Plan page and search your song library to add songs you've created. Once you've built up a library of high-quality chord sheets and lyric presentations, planning services literally takes minutes.

At first, it may take some time to enter chord sheets, but once you start reusing songs, you may only have to enter a few week to week.

The big advantage to this is when you update a song's arrangement, lyrics, or timing, your chord sheets, service plans, and presentations are in-sync. No more having to manage these details in multiple places!

Performing + Presenting with LiveScroll

Just briefly, the other huge win when using Uplift is the ability to have your music and lyric presentation scroll in real-time! Because you've entered the timing information, you can perform without worrying about flipping pages. And as to your presentation, no more slide clicking is necessary.

This approach works if you like using a click-track and in-ears at your church. Uplift provides the click track (metronome) and takes care of highlighting and advancing the music for all your performers.

However, this topic will be explored further in another article! So stay tuned!

Making the Switch

If you're still typing chord sheets in MS Word, printing off paper copies, creating song slides in PowerPoint, and compiling service plans in a notes app...we understand your pain.

If your goal as a worship leader is to lead people into unhindered worship, then these hurdles and road blocks we've described in this article only get in the way of that goal.

This is why we built Uplift, because we want to unify your church in unhindered worship.

Making the switch from your current workflow is easy, because you can try Uplift for free without having to make an account or provide payment info.

The free version we offer is great to test it and see what song entry, performance, and presentation is like.

And when you're ready, you can upgrade to the paid version to sync your songs across your devices, and be able to use it with your team.

What's holding you back from worshipping better?