And what an exciting morning it is this morning. This Hope is also singing this week. There a contemporary so. gospel group and they’re pretty good.

Man it feels good to be here!!

How Many People Does It Take?

Originally uploaded by audibleworship

Apparently three. One to hold the card, one to guide the card, and one
to supervise. LOL. This was just one of many great moments last week
as we replaced the ProSys DSP with London BLUs. Pretty powerful DSPs.
We actually put in two BLU80s as Jim managed to use up all the DSP in
one BLU. We have a fairly complex network of exploded clusters through
out the room, all of which are bi and sometimes triamped. Lots of
processinf to get this system to sing like it did today! Yeehaw!
Today was actually my last Sunday at Sugar Creek. Im gunna miss this
place but Gods got big thinks in store for me at Gardendale.

–John

Jim’s cranking away on the new DSP in the worship center. London BLU.

–John

Change is inevitable, especailly in churches. People and churches are always in a season, and sometimes we find ourselves in different seasons.  Good and bad… Luckily mine is good.

I’ve been at Sugar Creek since October ‘06. In that time, I feel like I have done a lot for the ministries I have been involved with, including the Worship Center, which I’ve never had any direct responsibilities.  But with the students, we’ve made tremendous leaps and bounds in the world of lighting, including of taking delivery of our new Vista S1 next week. Audio wise, the guys have all gotten better with there mixing chops. I feel like that team has painted itself into a corner though. The bar has been set so high, that it’s going to be tough for just anyone to walk in and maintain that.  Good and bad.

Video has by far seen the most tremendous growth. When I first came there were a lot of different components in place, some that didn’t need to be there. The VT3 toaster has now gone by the wayside, as had the multiple DVD players, and most importantly, now gone is the days of PowerPoint (except for prompter…). We’re now using ProPresenter 3, and everything has been consolidated to that machine. The quality of visual worship has grown exponentially.

In the worship center, we finally went digital! I feel the most accomplished here because I had been after both of the guys I served under since the day I took the job.  Thats not to take all the credit because Rick did the hard part, getting they money.  I feel bad that I am going to be leaving so soon after taking delivery, but the guys have it. No doubt about it. I have all the confidence in the world.

So leaving a legacy. I just hope I left a good legacy, because I know what it was like when I came in. The guy before me had a bad legacy. I just hope mine will be a good legacy… 

So where am I going?

I’m making a HUGE move in my life. I’m moving to Gardendale, Alabama (north of Birmingham).  I’ve accepted the position of Audio Engineer/Production Management at Gardendale’s First Baptist Church. I am super excited about the possibilities that God has created with this opportunity.  I’ll be getting to focus more on Audio than any other production area, which is my speciality.  I’ll get to interface with the broadcast world, as I’ll be responsible for the TV re-mix each week for the weekly broadcast. I’ll be working along side some great people, sometime I’ll blog about the experience that I had while I was interviewing for this opportunity to serve, it was truly humbling.

I’m sure the blogging will tail off significantly more than it has in the next few weeks/months as I get my feet on the ground, but I’m really hoping to maintain this.

Please keep me in your prayers!

Sugar Creek has been a volunteer based production ministry for a few years now.  One area that was new to volunteers was Audio, as it was always staffed by a staff member.  A lot of people often wonder how we can use volunteers like we do, especially when we implement new technology, like a digital console.  Today is an example of that answer. Our volunteers are eager to meet the challenge.  Pretty simple eh?
This morning one of our stronger A1s was up to mix.  Now, after Wednesday I had kind of had a few concerns because it seemed as if he’d get lost in the console, and loose focus on the mix.  Well this morning, it seemed to be less of a problem, as he was scootin’ around pretty good.  I wasn’t nearly as hands on as I thought I would be. Whew! This volunteer stepped up to the challenge, and not only met it, but succeeded my expectations.  This morning was probably one of the best sounding Sunday’s  I have heard at Sugar Creek in a really long time.  Looking forward to next week. Maybe after Wednesday I’ll be able to sleep in again on Sunday AM….

It’s time to make a new recruiting push to grow my student volunteer team.  I started creating little 1 minute emails once a week called LYF Tech Minutes.  In my last minute last week, I talked about what do we need to do to recruit? I got some very interesting responses, and these are some of them.

• Big recruiting events, don’t work! It’s too intimidating.
• Announcements from the stage, or in our weekly announcements, also don’t work.
• Spreading the word through small group leaders, kind of works, but not well.

The best recruiting technique was suggested, was, word of mouth.  INTERESTING! So I’m going to try something I’ll dub Empty Seat, Open Spot. Granted that means I need to buy some more chairs for my production areas, but I want to see if my students can get some friends involved to fill those empty seats. I originally got this idea from Greg Atkinson.  Very ingenious, and something I want to try. I’m curious to my limited readers out there, what recruiting tricks work for you?  

Second to Audio, I’d have to my next real skill-set is lighting.  However, more slowly I’ve come to really enjoy working with Video. I love directing video, unless Rick is my producer, because on a Veterans day affair this year, I had nothing patriotic but the American flag, so I very creatively found 34 ways (we really counted…) to shoot 2 American flags on the stage during a patriotic medley.  Tommy Franks was our speaker that night, and it was a throughly an enjoyable evening. The organizer for the event recently contacted us about a really nice fund-raiser to be held in our LYF Center.  Being that the organizer is also the chairmen of the Finance Committee, I’m more than willing to go that extra extra mile for him. Jeff Malott taught me that if the Finance Committee can buy into what you’re doing, and appreciate it, getting funds for capital projects, might be easier.Wow, I feel like our senior student pastor, because I totally chased  a rabbit on this one! 

LIGHTING CONSOLES!

It’s time.  The Avolite Pearl’s have finally lived there lives long enough, and have officially become the biggest pain in my technical rear.   I’ve finally joined the hate on avolite discussison group that Rick, and one of my student volunteers have formed.  Well today, I saw a little bit of light. We’ve been on a kick lately about the Jands Vista lighting controllers.  Our local vendor has set up a really sweet deal for our worship center with the T2.  Being large staff of mac snobs, we want to run the software on a Mac Mini, so we’re really looking at the S3, and will likely end up with an S1 in the new gym in the new children’s building we’re building.  So then Rick pops in my cubby hole today, and noticed that I have escaped to Jason’s office for a refreshing change.  More like I am avoiding my desk…. He got some pricing on a Vista S1, and 512 dongle, and how cool would it be to throw that in the LYF Center. The poor LYF Center never had a designated budget in his budget, and getting  the student ministry to open there wallet has always been tough, so he graciously gave me a little bit for each area for a small capital project in each area.  Well, I already bought some lights, but I hadn’t touched my audio portion, so I’ll likely cash that in, and go with this, if we can make the numbers right.  I’ve downloaded the software and have been playing around with it today. SWEET STUFF!  I think I could have programmed a week’s worth of services in 30 minutes.

I’ve got a few methods to my many madnesses. I’ve got a general thought on how things should be done in a church. I’ve seen so many things that work, and so many things that don’t work. Thats not to say I can’t be creative and as this blog develops I hope to open up to some of my many methods.  For lighting in worship, I’m a strong believer in a cue list, programmed to a service, programmed to go along with the service, so that an operator, and maybe even the person who programmed it, can just press GO for the service.  With Avolites, we run it like a lot of the rock guys on the road do. Or so I’ve been told.  I don’t know how else to describe that.   I also believe in multiple playlists, so that if all of a sudden you want to run some pre-programmed movements with intelligents light, you just start working through that programmed cue list.  and then when you click go on the next cue on your original cue list, you pick up where you left off.  With the Pearl, IMPOSSIBLE. I’m hoping we can make this happen, as I think it will be 10X easier to recruit new volunteers for the area of lighting, which is where I feel is a great need for us right now.

It is with great pleasure that I announce that the DiGiCo SURVIVED the first weekend at The Creek. I walked in at 6AM after waking up from a nightmare earlier that night, and powered up the sound system. To my relief, everything came on, and worked. Rehearsals started, and I got to fix a lot of the things that didn’t get fixed on Wednesday. Rhythm section got tighter, praise team got tighter, and it all kind of came together.

Our first service is our Traditional service, so the desk really didn’t get pushed real hard. Mostly piano, bass, a little acoustic, and some orchestra. One of my main problems all morning was the orchestra, or lack there of. I got ZERO rehearsal time with just the orchestra this week. Luckily, next week I can build off of the rhythm section and work on the orchestra some more on Wednesday, because they were fairly absent today, except the horn section. During the Mosaic service I learned something about our system, it’s way transparent now. A lot of the system tuning in the past has been to compensate for the aging of the consoles, and the colour (in honor of my UK DiGiCo friends) of the sound that they added. Instead of changing output caps, the system just got tweaked. We’re currently waiting on a DSP upgrade to BSS London’s before bringing our tuning guy out. But 1 request already I have is a little more gain out of the system so I don’t have to drive the console so hard. Luckily the limiters on the DiGiCo outputs are ROCK solid, and never let me clip the console, which is great thing because .001 dB over zero on a digital console is a nasty.

The second service rocked, now it was a little louder, or perceived louder than services in the past.I won’t even comment on our third service, other than this. Already, week 1, my A2 for the first two services, A1′d the third service. FIRST WEEK WITH THE CONSOLE AND ALREADY I HAVE VOLUNTEERS ON IT! YAY! Next weeks crew will really let me know how this transition is going to be. But I’m not worried. The third service is going through some musician transitions, and it’s been a difficult past couple of weeks as they hunt for a new drummer, and guitar player. It was still a tremendous confidence builder for the volunteer to be able to drive the desk - first week out, and it didn’t crash or blow up!

If anyone has any questions regarding the digital shift. Feel free to contact me.

We’ve been using ProPresenter since July of 06.  When they updated to version 3.3 I wasn’t sure how the added features would be much of use to us because the Live Video encode/decode puts in too much of a delay.  Well, tonight, the DVD feature, and Live Video feature bailed me out of a tough situation. Our LYF Center video project got put on hold when I ripped up my ankle, but now that DiGiCo is in, it should resume and go in really soon.  Maybe even next week,  before Bryan can come in and program the control system.   But tonight I needed to run a laptop from the stage, play a DVD, and run some other slides. Now I don’t have a switcher in the LYF Center, just the Mac, and 2 projectors. Well, here’s how I set up.I took the laptop and sent it down an auxiliary video feed to FOH video booth and ran it into a ADVC-300  to tap into the Live-In on ProPresenter.I then used the DVD functions of ProPresenter to cue up the DVD clip the speaker brought in.I exported the PowerPoint announcement slides from the PPT files to JPEGs to put into ProPresenter.So now ProPresenter is acting as a 3 input switcher, and very well!1.5 hours down, 1.5 and 1 more to go on this Marriage conference… I’ve sat through more ladies confrences and marriage conferences ever since I dedicated my life to church production, than I can count. But the knowledge obtained….