Teaching your team to use Unison

How to use this pack

Three sessions, three different rooms, three different kinds of nervousness. Don't merge them.

The single most common way church software training fails is putting everybody in one room and teaching to the middle. The keyboard player sits through fifteen minutes on projector cabling and stops listening; the AV volunteer sits through transposing and does the same. Both leave having learned the other person's job badly.

Plus a fourth, shorter thing. The Admin's extra half hour bolts onto the end of Session A, once everyone who isn't an admin has gone home. It isn't a session in its own right — it's the maintenance job behind the other three, and it's where you make sure your church has more than one person who can get in.

What each session assumes

How to teach from these pages

Each session has a run sheet — a timed table you can hold in one hand — followed by the teaching content in the same order. Green boxes are what to actually say; you can read them aloud. Amber boxes are things that will go wrong if you don't warn people. Red boxes are things that will go wrong even if you do, and need a workaround.

Before you train — the 20-minute setup

Do this the week before, not on the day. It is the difference between a session that works and a room of eleven people watching you type.

Unison sends each person an invitation email. You enter their name and email address and tap Send invitation; they follow the link and choose their own password. You never see it and neither does anyone at Unison. Send the invitations the week before, not in the session: an invitation is good for 7 days, and until somebody has accepted theirs there is nothing to teach them on.

1. Check you are an Admin, not just a Leader. This matters more than anything else on this page — see the next section. If you are only a Leader, half of Session A is buttons you cannot see.
2. Invite every person. Team → the + button, top right. Fill in name and email, then their phone and, importantly, their instruments — the rota is built from these. Tap Send invitation. There is no password to think of: they choose their own.
3. Do this at least a few days before the session. An invitation is good for 7 days, and nobody can sign in until they have accepted theirs. Until then they sit under Invited on the team list, where Send again emails it again and Take back cancels it. Chase anyone still showing as Invited the day before.
   Note If they already have a Unison account from another church, you are told so. They still get the email, and the invitation is also waiting the next time they open the app.
4. Name guitars "guitar". A quirk worth knowing: the private-tab feature only appears for people whose instrument contains the word guitar, bass or uke. If your instrument list says "Acoustic" and "Electric", your guitarists silently lose that feature. Call them "Acoustic guitar" and "Electric guitar".
5. Set how many of each position you need. Rota → the guitar icon, top right → How many of each. Two vocals, one bass, one drums, and so on. Press Save.
6. Load some real songs. Ten songs your church actually sings beats a hundred you don't — people learn on material they recognise. If you have an OpenSong or OnSong library, import it now (Settings → Library → Import songs) and let it finish with "— all on the server ✓" before you touch another device.
7. Build one real service, for the actual next Sunday. You will teach from it, and at the end of the session it will be genuinely done. Nobody learns from "Test Service 1".
8. Only if you're running Session C: tag your AV people. Team → their tile → tick Projection in their instruments. That tag is what gives someone the console instead of the band's view, and without it the Present heading never appears for them — even though the church has paid for the add-on. Two other tags work the same way: Vocal Lead (can mark up vocal parts) and MD.

Admin, Leader, Member — and why it matters on the day

Unison has two separate ideas that sound like the same idea, and the whole training session depends on getting them straight.

Session A Leaders — run sheet

75 minutes, laptops open, no more than four people. Everyone follows along on their own machine — do not demo while they watch.

A1 The song library

What's where

The sidebar splits into Library (yours and the church's material) and Church (people and planning).

• Songs — the whole library. Church songs everyone can see, plus your own.
• My sets — services and setlists you are on.
• All sets — every service in the church. Leaders only — a member never sees this item, which is why they cannot find a service they aren't on.

Adding a song

1. Press Add song. Top right of the Songs screen.
2. Type it in ChordPro, or paste a chart from the web. ChordPro means chords in square brackets, inline: [G]Amazing [C]grace. Pasted charts — the ordinary kind with chords on their own line above the words — are fine too.
3. If it pastes as plain text, look for the banner. Unison spots a pasted chart and offers a Convert button that snaps the chords onto the syllables. It only appears when it is actually needed, so if you don't see it, you don't need it.

Bringing an existing library in

Settings → Library → Import songs. OnSong files, ChordPro files, OpenSong XML, or a whole OpenSong .osb backup all work. As an admin you'll be asked whether the songs go into the church database (everyone sees them) or your own list.

Archiving, not deleting

Songs you've stopped singing don't need deleting. Long-press one (right-click on a laptop) and choose Archive. For a clear-out, use Select next to the Current / Archived filter, tick several, and archive them together. Switch the filter to Archived to bring things back.

A2 Planning a service

This is the part your team will actually feel. Do it with next Sunday, live.

1. Press Plan a service. Give it a name — it pre-fills "Sunday morning" — and a date. The date is not optional in practice: it is how Unison knows who to tell.
2. Add the songs. Add songs under Songs — the key the band plays. Tap a song and it's added instantly — no confirm, and the picker stays open so you can keep going. Each row shows you when it was last sung and when it's next on, which is how you avoid doing the same four songs three weeks running.
3. Set the key the band plays. Each song row on the service has a key dropdown. Change it and Unison confirms "Band plays it in E". If it differs from the written key, the row shows written in G underneath so nobody is confused.
4. Put them in order. Drag them on a laptop, or use the little up/down arrows on a phone. You can put planned minutes against each song; the total shows underneath.
5. Say who's playing. Choose the team under Who's playing. Admin only If the service has a date and you've already built the rota, there's a shortcut at the top — "Add the 6 on the rota for this Sunday".
6. Check it. Press Play the service yourself and look at the first chart. That is exactly what the band will see.

The one concept to teach properly: whose key is it?

This is the thing that generates the most confusion and the most delight once it lands.

A3 Building the rota

1. Open Rota and pick the month with the arrows either side of the month name. Then switch to All rotas.
2. Set how many of each position. The guitar icon, top right → How many of each. This is the church-wide default for every Sunday. Press Save. Admin only
3. Press Auto-fill. It staffs every Sunday fairly, skips anyone who's blocked the date out, keeps nobody double-booked, and makes sure the MD is someone already playing. If it can't find enough people it tells you: "Filled — but short on 2× Vocals".
4. Fix it by hand. On any Sunday card, add puts someone in, × takes them out, and the + / − change how many you need that Sunday only. As an admin, tapping anyone's name gives you Replace with someone else…, Swap with another spot… and Remove from this spot.
5. Press Save. It stays greyed out until something has actually changed, so if it's grey you have nothing to save.
6. Check your work with Why this rota — the ⓘ icon. It shows how many Sundays each person has, tells you plainly whether the load is even, names who's spare, and lists the gaps and who was away.

Letting the team reply

It is off until you turn it on, and it is well hidden. Exactly where:

1. Open Rota.
2. Tap the guitar icon in the top-right corner — the second of the two small icons, next to the ⓘ. It has no label; hovering it says How many of each. Admin only If you can't see it, you're not an admin.
3. Scroll to the bottom of that screen, past the list of instruments and their +/− steppers. The switch is underneath: Let the team accept or decline.
4. Tap it, then press Save. The switch alone does nothing — leave without saving and it silently reverts.

Now, and only now, each person can tap their own spot on the rota and choose Accept this spot or Can't make it. Their chip shows a ✓ or ✗ that everyone can see, and an unanswered spot of their own says tap to reply.

Days people can't play

Plus and Pro Team members block out dates on their own My schedule calendar, and auto-fill skips them. On the rota, anyone marked away shows as can't play and doesn't count towards the number you need.

A4 Telling the team

Saving tells nobody. This is the single most important habit in the whole pack.

Unison deliberately does not notify people every time you save — five tweaks on a Saturday night would be five alerts to the whole band. Instead there is a button, and you press it when you're finished.

1. Finish and save the rota or the service.
2. Press Tell the team. On a rota it's under the month; on a service it's at the bottom. If you've already told them, the button reads Tell them it changed.
3. Read what it says back. "Told 8 people." means it worked. "Nobody new to tell, or nobody has alerts switched on" means it sent nothing — usually because the team hasn't turned alerts on yet, which is Session B's job.

A5 When someone can't make it

Plus and Pro On Plus and Pro, the team sorts this out between themselves and Unison moves the rota for you.

A member taps their own spot and picks:

• Ask someone to cover… — either open it to the whole eligible team (first person to accept takes the spot) or ask one named person.
• Request a swap… — a straight trade. Pick the person you want to swap with, then pick which of their spots you'll take. If they say yes, they play yours and you play theirs.

Replies land in Requests in the sidebar, with a number showing how many need you. Accepting reassigns the rota automatically and safely — the person accepting doesn't need edit rights.

A6 The weekly rhythm

Software training fails when it doesn't attach to a habit — so don't leave the room without a rhythm. Below is an example of what a week on Unison can look like. It isn't the only shape that works, and yours will differ. Use it as a starting point, then agree out loud, in the room, what your weekly rhythm will be, with names against each line.

Session A+ The Admin's extra half hour

Bolt this onto the end of Session A, with only the admins in the room. Thirty minutes, and everyone else has gone home.

Admin is not a seniority badge and it is not the same as being a worship leader. It is a maintenance job: the person who keeps the team list true, the rota buildable and the church's own settings sensible. Most of it is done once and then touched monthly.

Keep this separate from the main leaders' session for two reasons. It's a different task — running the church's Unison rather than running a service — and half the people in Session A shouldn't be admins at all.

What only an Admin can do

Everything in this table is invisible or inert for a Leader. If someone reports that a button "isn't there", this is the first thing to check.

Running the team list

The team list is the spine of everything. The rota is built from instruments, notifications go to people on it, and a leader can only pick from who's in it. Ten minutes of tidying here saves an hour of confusion later.

Adding someone

Team → the + button, top right. Name, email, phone, instruments, role — then Send invitation. There is no password box: they choose their own when they accept.

Roles

Tap a member's tile and use the role dropdown — Member, Leader, Admin. Two rules worth saying out loud:

• Leader follows the instrument. Anyone with the Worship Leader position becomes a Leader automatically, and picking the Leader role adds that position. The two can never disagree.
• Admin is separate and is never implied by an instrument. You grant it deliberately.

Instruments — and the three that aren't instruments

Instruments drive the rota, so they should describe what someone can actually be rostered on. Alongside them sit three capability tags, which look like instruments but grant something:

Sorting a big team

Sort and Group, top right, will organise the tiles by name, role or instrument. On a thirty-person team, grouping by instrument is how you spot that you have six vocalists and one bass player.

Passwords, and people who leave

Reset a password: tap their tile → Reset password → type a new one of 8+ characters → Set. It changes their login immediately, so tell them what it is. Only admins see this.

Members can change their own from their name at the bottom of the sidebar → Your profile → Account → Change password. Worth mentioning, because nothing on the Team screen points at it.

Someone leaves: tap their tile and remove them from the team — you'll be asked to confirm by name. Do it promptly: a stale team list means auto-fill keeps rostering someone who stopped playing in March.

The church's own settings

Settings shows you two groups nobody else has.

The church

Your church's name, as it appears to everyone on the team. Pro Your logo, if you're on Pro.

Billing

Change plan and manage the subscription. Worth knowing before you're asked:

• A trial unlocks every plan feature, so during a trial the team sees things your paid plan may not include. Tell them which ones before the trial ends — see what's on which plan.
• The projection add-on is never included in a trial, and isn't part of any plan. It's bought separately.

Importing into the shared library

Settings → Library → Import songs. Only an admin gets asked whether songs go into the church database (everyone sees them) or their own list. Everyone else can only import to their own.

If something looks like it hasn't synced, the same screen tells you: it lists writes still waiting and names the reason if one was rejected, and Re-sync library to server re-pushes your whole local library. It matches by ID, so it never makes duplicates and is always safe to run.

Reports

Plus Reports in the sidebar — admin only, on Plus and above. Song usage, usage per leader, the busiest key, filtered by year.

One honest caveat: reports are built from what was planned — the songs in your services — not from a record of what was played on the day. A service you planned and then cancelled still counts. It's a good picture of what your church sings; it is not an attendance record.

The monthly admin check

Five minutes, once a month, on the same day you build the rota. Put it in the diary with a name against it, or it won't happen.

• Is the team list true? Anyone joined, left, or changed instruments?
• Open Why this rota and read the fairness line. Is one person carrying the month?
• Check the gaps card on Home — the Sundays that are short.
• Are there still two admins? If one has drifted away, appoint another now.
• Anyone new since last month? They need the alerts walkthrough from Session B — five minutes, one to one.
• On a trial? Note when it ends and what the team will lose.

Handing it over

Admins move on. The job survives if the next person gets these six things — write them down somewhere that isn't one person's phone.

1. Make them an admin before you go. You cannot do it from your own tile, and once you've left nobody may be able to do it at all.
2. Tell them who the other admins are. There should be at least one besides them.
3. Hand over the billing. Which plan, what it renews at, and whose card it is.
4. Say who's tagged Projection, if your church runs the screen — it's the tag people forget exists.
5. Point at this pack. Where it lives, and that the sessions can be re-run for new volunteers a few at a time.
6. Warn them about the traps — the crib sheet. It's the fastest way to stop a new admin concluding the app is broken in the first week.

Session B The band — run sheet

30 minutes, on their own phones, straight after a rehearsal while everyone is still in the room. Standing up. No laptops, no projector, no slides.

B1 Getting in

1. Open the app in the browser and press Sign in. Their email is the one you invited them with, and the password is the one they chose when they accepted the invitation.
2. Put it on the home screen. This is not optional on an iPhone — see the alerts section. In Safari: the Share button → Add to Home Screen. On Android, Chrome offers to install it.
3. Open it from the new icon, not the browser tab, from now on.

B2 My schedule

Sidebar → My schedule. This is a volunteer's home page and most of them will never need anything else.

• The whole day goes green when they're on — a service or a rota spot.
• The whole day goes red, with a line through the date, when they've said they can't play.
• It's the entire square, not a little dot, so it reads at a glance from across a room — useful when you're teaching this to eleven people at once.
• Upcoming, beside the calendar, lists what's coming with the instrument they're on. Tapping a setlist opens it.

Saying you can't play

Plus and Pro Tap any day you can't play — the whole square turns red and the date is struck through. Tap it again to clear it. You only ever mark the days you're away — a blank calendar means available. Auto-fill then skips them, and the leader can see it.

Two useful extras

If they're on the rota on a day they blocked out, Unison warns them at the top of the screen and tells them to ask for cover — it doesn't assume the leader has spotted it.

Sync to your calendar. Further down there's a private link. Copy it, and paste it into Google Calendar under Add calendar → From URL, or Apple Calendar under New Calendar Subscription. Their rota spots and setlists then appear in their normal calendar and stay up to date. This is the single feature that most reliably converts a sceptic.

Replying to a spot

Only if an admin has switched it on — see the leaders' section; it's off by default and most churches never find it. When it's on, an unanswered spot of your own reads tap to reply. Tap it and choose Accept this spot or Can't make it; it becomes ✓ You're confirmed or ✗ You've declined, and Clear my response undoes it.

If your team taps their spot and gets nothing, it isn't switched on. Don't teach this part until you've checked.

B3 The stage view

Everything a musician needs is behind one tap that nobody finds on their own. Teach this first and the rest of the session is easy.

1. Open a service from My sets or from My schedule, then press Play the service. Or just tap any song in Songs.
2. Tap the words. The bar appears at the bottom. Get everyone to do it. Wait for the room.
3. Make it bigger. A+ and A−. It's remembered — set it once and forget it. You can also pinch to zoom with two fingers.
4. Change the key from the dropdown. The song's own key is marked (original key).
5. Set a capo with the − and + next to Capo. The chart then shows the shapes you finger, with two little badges at the top telling you what it actually sounds like — capo 2 and sounds G.
6. Move through the set with the arrows at the left and right edges, or the list icon, top right, to jump straight to a song.
7. Leave with the back arrow in the control bar — see the warning below.

The other buttons, briefly

B4 Autoscroll and foot pedals

Autoscroll

In the control bar: Scroll starts it and becomes Pause. The Speed slider beside it sets the pace.

• Tapping the chart stops it — that's the quickest emergency stop.
• The speed doesn't stick. There's no number on the slider and it resets when the app is reloaded, so "set it to 1.4" isn't advice you can give. Teach people to nudge it during the intro and leave it.
• Bigger text scrolls faster — the speed scales with the font size, so if someone enlarges the words mid-song the scroll speeds up to match. That's intentional, and worth mentioning so it doesn't feel like a glitch.

Foot pedals

AirTurn, iRig BlueTurn and PageFlip pedals pair as Bluetooth keyboards — you pair them in the phone or laptop's own Bluetooth settings, not in Unison. Once paired they work.

Inside Unison, Settings → Foot pedals gives you a tester (Start testing, then press each pedal button to see what it sends) and lets you remap any action if your pedal sends different keys. A pedal can be set to turn the page, jump to the next or previous song, jump between sections of the arrangement, or start and stop the autoscroll.

B5 Notes and private tab

Notes on a chart

The note button sits in the control bar, next to the autoscroll controls. A note lands where you're currently looking, not at the top, and you can drag it where you want. They take bold, italic and bullets, and you can set a colour and width.

Private tab

Guitarists and bassists get Add my tab in the control bar, marked private to you. It's yours alone, it appears under the chart on your own screen, and when the leader puts the song in a different key the frets move with it.

If a guitarist can't see the button, their instrument in Team doesn't contain the word guitar, bass or uke — rename it and it appears.

B6 Alerts — the five minutes that make it work

Do this in the room, together, and finish with everybody's phone buzzing. If you leave it to homework, half the team never does it and your Tell the team button reaches nobody.

1. iPhone and iPad first: Unison must be on the home screen. Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen → open it from the new icon. Apple only sends alerts to a home-screen app, never to a browser tab, so until this is done Unison won't even offer the switch.
2. Everyone: Settings → Notifications → turn the switch on.
3. Press Send me a test alert, just under the switch. Wait for the room to buzz.
4. Do it again on every device they use. A phone and a laptop are separate. Turning it on for one does nothing for the other.

Offline

Worth thirty seconds at the end: once loaded, Unison works with no signal — a church basement, a hall with bad wifi, a phone with no data. Charts, sets and the rota are on the device. Changes sync when they're back online.

Session C Tech & AV — run sheet

60 minutes, at the actual desk, with the actual projector on, with the one or two people who will actually run it. Never theoretical.

C1 Screens

1. Plug into the projector and set the display to Extended, not mirrored. macOS: Settings → Displays → Use as → Extended. Windows: Win+P → Extend. Check: the projector should show an empty desktop, not your Unison window.
2. Sidebar → Present → Console. The console opens in its own window.
3. Pick the service from the dropdown, top left.
4. Pick the projector in the screen dropdown, then click Open screen.
5. Click the output window and press F for full screen.
6. If you have a band screen: click Stage, drag that window to the band's monitor, press F.
7. Put a countdown up before the service starts.

C2 Driving it

Click a slide and it goes live. If you'd rather line one up first, tick Hold before live at the bottom, then press Enter to send it.

C3 Fixing it live

Teach these by breaking things and making them fix it. Reading the table is useless; doing it once at the desk sticks.

The fault table — print this and tape it to the desk

Reassurance worth saying: the words never go down because a background is missing. If the picture fails, the text stays.

C4 Ableton and MIDI

Skip this section unless your church runs tracks. Most don't. If you do:

1. Turn the MIDI pill on — every slide then shows the note that fires it.
2. Notes run in service order from C3, channel 1, upwards. Read them off the slides.
3. In Ableton, send a MIDI track out to the IAC Driver bus (Mac) or loopMIDI (Windows).

Two machines

Ableton on one Mac, the screen on another, joined by Network MIDI. Set up once, it stays set up — except the join itself, which does not survive switching off. Every single time:

1. Both Macs on, on the same network.
2. On the Ableton Mac: Audio MIDI Setup → Window → Show MIDI Studio → double-click Network → find the screen Mac in the Directory → Connect.
3. Then open Ableton.
4. Then open the console in Chrome.

Prove the chain in ten seconds: sidebar → MIDI check on the screen Mac, and press play. It touches nothing and reports what the browser can actually hear.

• Notes appearing → the chain works. Wrong note number at worst.
• Inputs listed, no notes → the join or Ableton's routing. Not the console.
• No inputs at all → the session isn't there, or Chrome has lost Local Network permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network — a Chrome update can silently drop it).

For a permanent installation: a cheap network switch and two ethernet cables beats wifi every time, and also cures the screen changing half a beat late.

C5 Backup — and the one thing to tell the next person

Make one now, in the session: On the screen → This machine → Back up this console. One zip, media included. Keep it somewhere that is not this laptop — a stick in the desk drawer, or the shared drive.

On a new machine: sign in → Console → On the screen → This machine → choose the file. It tells you what it will replace before it does anything, and afterwards says what it brought. Media is only ever added, never removed, and the projection log is merged rather than overwritten.

Afterwards, if you need the list of what you played: On the screen → Credit tab → Download what was projected (CSV). That record lives in this browser, so export it before anyone wipes the laptop.

What Unison doesn't do

Say these out loud in the session. A team that hears the limits from you trusts the rest of what you said; a team that discovers them alone at 9am on a Sunday doesn't.

It does not report to CCLI

Unison keeps a record of what you projected and will export it as a CSV. It does not submit anything to CCLI, and there is no CCLI integration. Your licence reporting stays exactly as it is today — the CSV is something you can refer to, not something that files itself. (The song finder will open a SongSelect search in your browser, and songs can carry a CCLI number, but that is a link and a text field, nothing more.) If anyone tells your church otherwise, they're wrong.

It does not control lighting

No DMX, no lighting desk, no MIDI out to a lighting rig. Unison can be driven by MIDI from Ableton; it does not drive anything else.

You cannot set somebody else's password

You invite them and they choose their own. If they forget it, they tap Forgot your password? on the sign-in screen and Unison emails them a link. You cannot set it for them and nobody at Unison can see it. Send the invitations the week before the training session — see Before you train.

Things that are on a paid plan, not missing

Trainer's crib — the fourteen traps

One page. Read it on the way to the session. Every one of these was found by walking the product as a new user, and every one of them will come up.

Printable handouts

Three one-pagers. Print this page and you'll get each on its own sheet.

How this pack was checked

This pack was first written against the Unison source on 16 August 2026 — screen names, button labels and the order of steps are quoted from the product, not from memory or from marketing. Where a behaviour could not be confirmed, this pack says so rather than guessing.

It has not been re-walked in full since then. Two narrower passes have happened, and each one is recorded below with what it did and did not cover. No build number is printed on this pack any more: naming a build is a claim that the whole pack was checked against that build, and that is not what happened.

Deliberately not included

Keeping it current

A training pack rots faster than documentation, because it asserts sequences rather than facts — one moved button breaks a whole numbered list. Re-walk it on any build that touches the rota, the stage view or Settings, and re-run the fourteen traps: the good ones disappear as they're fixed.