Sorry for the lack of pictures, I just really didn’t think to take any. Shame on me!

My first Gardendale Christmas came and went in a blur! We actually started Christmas back in October with a series of location shoots. In a successful effort to really enhance the drama you see on stage we shoot some scenes on location and intertwine that with live drama. It works out really well and is a neat thing.  That folded itself into our weekly routine and I never really felt that CPBO (Christmas Production Burn-Out) Disease.  For the actual Christmas Production my Boss and I shared FOH duties and miraculously didn’t step on each other.  It was a fun three nights, and we think the program touched a lot of people.

My favorite thing about Gardendale was the Christmas Eve service. The service started at 5:30 but by 4:45 it was hard to find a seat on the main floor, and a comfortable seat in the balcony. By 5:15 it was Standing Room Only in the HALLS! Did I mention we packed the choir loft, and a few chairs in the orchestra as well? I was blown away. It was a sweet service that had the feel of the church I grew up. Very small feeling, considering there were 2100 of our closets friends here!

Christmas Morning I hopped on the first Continental flight out of Birmingham headed to Houston to spend the day, and rest of the week with my parents and brother.  We had a great time. One of the neat things I got to do in Houston was visiting Houston’s First Baptist Church where my friend Brad Duryea is the Technical Director. HFBC recently underwent a 17 million dollar worship center renovation project which forced them into using there gym, chapel, and fellowship halls for 3 services on Sunday Mornings for a while.  I moved before they ever moved back into the worship center so I was excited to how the project turned out. I was very blown away by the renovation, and the new look and feel the room had. You can see some pictures of the room on HFBC’s website.  I got to see for the first time Cameron Ware’s implementation of architectural projection and it’s actually quite cool! Its neat to see that set up, and how once configured/templates built easy it was to utilize.  The all Meyer audio system was very smooth, but admittedly Brad mentioned there were a few things still to work out in the new year.  If you’ve been to Willow Creek then you have an idea of how the room sounds as the same people did the design at HFBC.  It was a neat experience, since I had kind of kept up with the project through friends on staff start to finish. 

I celebrated New Years here in Birmingham, and it is almost 1 month down in 2009.

2009 I’m praying will be a good year for our ministry and for our church. We’re embarking on a new worship center project. It’s very exciting, especially as we get closer and closer to it! I’m praying for a year of growth in our ministry. We’ve got many faithful volunteers, but it never hurts to have a few more, right?! We recently rolled out a new look in a new year for our broadcast which catches up to the live side this week.  Our currently look has been around for some time, so it’ll be interesting to see the feedback we get on the new look! The new Broadcast format has already gotten some good marks.

So all in all, I’m looking forward to a great 2009 here, and wish the same for you!

Don’t forget the ON button,

John

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?  

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.

The DigiCo is in. I’m up there at the top plugging in power and MADI lines, while Rick is cleaning up some of the wiring underneath.   But there it is! It’s been a fun week or so.  We found large amounts of water in the conduit running under our worship center, so we chose the safe road, and took all of our wiring to the air.  We brought in our rigger who walked it across  the iron from where we’ve put our stage racks to FOH.

 So far it has been seamless though rehearsal was crazy on  Wednesday. I’m getting to mix the maiden voyage, which is fun, but still stressful.  The cards are slightly stacked against us for reasons I won’t go into, but I had a tough time getting the right kind of rehearsal on Wednesday night.  Everyone just walked in, plugged in and started. Luckily there were somethings I had left over from Edge rehearsal the night before.  But I feel like I’ve got a good base to build on before Sunday AMs rehearsals which will last an hour before our services.  :Fingers crossed:

 A few challanges we’ve already overcome:

Wrong multi-pins

Our current system was built with expansion in mind.  There are 48 inputs on stage, and another 12 elsewhere through out the room.  The system was built in with a monitor split as well, untransformered, but a split none the less.  This was  exciting because all we needed was two Elco runs from this panel to our stage racks with break out cables to patch into the racks.  Well ProCo uses two standards on Elco connectors. Ours were built initially with the first standard, and they sent us the second. more updated. No fear. Our vendor for that aspect of the project hooked us up with some 16 channel sub-snakes to get us what we needed till the rebuilt Elcos arrive.

Bad Output Card

Kind of a bummer, but right out of the box our local (MiniRack) had a bad output card. I swapped it out with one from the stage racks, and all was well. Allan Nichols our rep at DiGiCo overnighted us a new one, and the bad one is back in route to DiGiCo.

Backordered Aviom Systems

We got an Aviom output card for the DiGiCo.  Well, our ordered got back orderd as we had to update all of our mixers to Aviom II mixers as they’ve changed some of the codecs in which they encode/decode the signals. Two 8 Channel  XLR-F to TRS-M snakes and relocating the input brain to the stage racks has remedied this problem.

 Our volunteers have warmed up to the console. I don’t expect to have to mix a whole lot past each rotations first Sunday.  I’ve got one volunteer who’s writing up a list of questions which is nice, because it’s helping me make sure I explain the things that are needed to be explained, and not just ramble on about the obvious. 

 I’ll be posting an update on Sunday after the first Sunday. I’m sure it’ll be a great one. 

Sugar Creek, for the last 8 or so years has had two Soundcraft Vienna II-40’s at FOH. While this was the right thing to do in its time, we have quickly moved beyond it’s capabilities. Sugar Creek has three services, each very distinctly from the other. There is a Traditions and Mosaic with the Orchestra, Mosaic band, and choir, then the Edge Service which is lead by Stephen Miller (LINK) and the Stephen Miller Band. The Edge Service shares the drum kit and thats it. There rehearsal is on Tuesday nights before all the other rehearsals, so usually anything you do then gets erased by the next crew. This makes for a crazy Sunday Morning as you have to line check and then take as long as Rick will let me get away with dialing stuff in. When I first came to The Creek I started making a separate set of channels for this service, which helped, but not totally.

We’ve also been having a lot of different outside events in our Worship Center which demand changes to the consoles, and what not, and these happen between Wednesday and Sunday. Thus, 8 months ago, my then boss Jeff Young sent me in search of the next thing for Sugar Creek. When Rick took over in August this became HIS priority, but I had already had my foot in so many doors. We quickly had demos scheduled, and were talking to those who had options available. I was oh-so in love with the PM1d which we had installed at The Met, but it’s got its limits. Sugar Creek really needed something versatile that would grow with the church, and where it was going. We wanted to easily be able to drop a second surface for Monitor World or Broadcast recording capabilities.

One of the first consoles we demo’d was Soundcraft’s new flag-ship console the Vi6. This is a great console, and since I’m sitting on a flight to Hawaii right now, I’ll write up a review sans pictures shortly. We also demo’d a DigiCo D5. My experience with DigiCo was null so I was excited when it arrived. Allan Nichols (AKA Rev. Al) has been nothing but super to work with. He came down an spent a day with us, going through the console, and getting us set up. I spent well over 50 hours in the course of the 4 days that we had the console going inside and out, starting from scratch several times with patching and what not. We demo’d the consoles in our LYF Center since its so easy to get things in and out of there, and it is the Student Building… They don’t mind me dropping new toys in there, specially when they look cool.

Now that our demos were done Rick had the almighty pleasure of dealing with the finance committee on this. Pastor had already made it a priority for us to get something done about the aging Viennas, so this was relatively easy. Well, Friday, Rick sent in the paperwork and purchase order for a DigiCo CS-D5. This is very exciting because it affords us so many opportunities to allow our volunteers to succeed. We’re doing a digital recording package that allow for virtual sound-checks which will really help get things write on the things we usually have limited rehearsal time with. We’re hoping to take delivery on March 28 so that we can begin the weeklong transition from analogue to digital. We’ve ordered ours with a center master section so that might take some extra time.

The Sunday after we take delivery, after the third service we’ll remove the slave vienna and put the Digico in its place. We’ll leave the master Vienna in place as a piece of mind tool to our Worship and Creative Arts team. I’ll mix the maiden voyage then we’ll start putting volunteers on it. I’ll be with them the whole way through, and until everyone is comfortable on it. I’ll be rather aggressive in getting them on the console. Best part is, there’s not a whole lot after the initial set up that will need tweaking. Hopefully we notice the same trend that I experienced at The Met, and thats a more consistent mix week to week, engineer to engineer.

So on the average Sunday, I arrive around 9am. I am the fortunate one who really doesn’t have an official service or task to knock out on Sunday AM. All my stuff takes place on Sunday and Wednesday nights. For reasons I won’t go into here, it’s not a tangible thing to invest in our volunteers in our Sunday morning services right now. Its a weird situation, that when I know how to approach without a whole lot of detail I’ll go into.

I make sure the LYF Center, our student building, is ready for the round-table/lecture style high school group. I just make sure whoever is presenting can get there laptop hooked up, make sure they know how to mute and unmute there body pack, and then I move on. I try to make it to our 9:30 service, and walk the room, make notes, and provide feed back to Rick to relay to the audio guys. We have a GREAT group of volunteers at Sugar Creek who take a lot of pride in their work. But they feel serving in the third service, our contemporary service, is too much for one Sunday.

We used to have two guys that rotated for the third service, but there jobs took them away too often. So I became the resident FOH engineer for that service. We’re starting to work some more volunteers in the mix, which is cool, because thats how should be, especially if your church believes in empowering those who wish to be a part of something.

Once our ‘Edge’ service is over with I get to crack-a-lackin for Sunday night. Our student ministry offers a Sunday night high school service, and a Wednesday night middle school service each week, which makes for a FULL week. I typically don’t get content till 2 hours before the service, so I try to get as much ready as I can, so that when the students who volunteer show up, I can work with them on being successful in the service. Around 9 o’clock, I walk into my apartment and do what a good friend of mine describes as a sheet dive.