Sometimes you get useful tips here

A few weeks ago i complained that you can’t search on the church’s music web site by meter. I still don’t know how to conduct a proper search, but i’ve since looked more closely and discovered that you can browse by meter—there are two methods, one straightforward and one less so. The straightforward method is useful when you know what meter you’re looking for:

1. Go to the church’s music site.
2. Click on the “Music” link, and then on “Hymns” in the menu that pops up. (Note: This does not work for the “Childrens [sic] Songbook” link, which i think is really a shame.)
3. Click on “Meters” (naturally enough) in what comes up

That’s fine and all, but you have to know the meter you’re looking for for that method to be much use. If you know you want to match the meter of a particular song but you don’t know its meter off the top of your head, you have to use the roundabout method:

1. Pull up any of the songs in the hymnal on the interactive music player. (Here’s “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” my second-favorite song in the book.)*
2. On the left-hand side is a box titled “About this Song”. (Yes, the capitalization is a little messed up.) If it’s collapsed, click on the triangle to expand it.
3. One of the entries in this box is “Meter”. (For “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” it’s a mindboggling 14 14 4 7 8!) Click on the meter itself, not the label.
4. This opens up a new page from which you can browse through songs by meter, already opened up to the meter of the song you started with. (As you might expect, no other songs in the hymnal have the same meter as “Praise to the Lord”.)
5. Enjoy the music-nerd happiness.

By the way, if anyone can figure out an way to actually search by meter on that site, i’d like to hear it.

* My favorite is “All Creatures of Our God and King”, but you can’t use the interactive music player for that one due to copyright restrictions.