To click or not to click... #2

I'm re-posting this because I only got a couple of responses. Are any of you using click tracks or loops on Sunday mornings? What suggestions do you have for us as we think about moving in this direction?

Victor @ The Wonderful Noise

Well, I finally got to meet my blogging buddy Victor at NYWC this year. We spoke for about 1 minute in total. It was good to put a face with a... or uh... I guess I've already seen his face... so it was just good to meet him in person.

Check out his blog... The Wonderful Noise

He's a lot taller than I thought.

NYWC - Francis Chan

Francis Chan by far shared the most moving message at NYWC last week. I was moved not only by his message but also by his 7 year old daughter (pictured here) who has obviously been impacted by her father's example of prayer.

For more on his message check out wakebirds blog titled "I cried today".

To click or not to click

I'm thinking about implementing loops into our worship. If for no other reason than to use as a click track that only the band hears.

What suggestions do you have?

Yamaha Click Station
Ableton live
Others???

So-Cal Fires

Please pray for my friend and mentor Larry Klein and his students in Jamul. He sent me this email today.

"If you have seen any of the news most of my school district has burned... Most of these people are currently being housed at Steele Canyon High School... A couple of teachers live out there and we are not sure if their houses are still standing. Probably will not know until the weekend when the fire fighters can get back into the area to assess the damage.
Last night on the news they interviewed a number of students at the Steele Canyon Evacuation center. It really hit me when I was able to put faces with the stories. Many of the Hispanic students that live down in Barrett Lake area have lost everything... I sat in my living room listening to a couple of my students telling about losing everything. That is when I basically lost it. Please pray for me. I need to have the strength to be a light and find ways to help my students. This is not going to be an easy task for any of us."

New music...

O.K. I discovered two new bands that I didn't really know anything about (what can I say, I've been out of Youth Ministry for almost 10 years), but they totally killed it yesterday and quickly became my new favorite bands... Family Force 5 (Chistian, 80's, Screamo, Punk-Rock) and Flatfoot 56 (Modern Irish Rock complete with bagpipes, kilts and Irish accents).

www.familyforce5.com

www.flatfoot56.com

Check them out!

NYWC

I'm working the main stage and it's almost done. If anyone wants to hook up for lunch or something, just ask Tic or one of the volunteers where Eric on Main Stage is and they should point you in the right direction.

Main stage is going to be incredible. 8 projectors (four up front) all run by the Spyder System which means you can do mulitple Picture-in-picture, manipulate them anyway you want and add multiple layers. Full line array system and a pretty cool stage setup.

Can't wait for the artists to get here!

My kids are amazing.

My kids are amazing and I'll miss them for the next week while I'm at NYWC. Hopefully this will get me through.

2 reasons not to use In-Ears...

O.K., so here's the deal. We won a 4 pack of AVIOM In-Ears last year at NAMM (yeah, can you believe it?). So some of the musicians are having trouble with the system. I love them, our drummers all love them, our sound guys swear by them, but some of the other musicians are not so hot on them yet. Have you guys experienced any of this? What have you done to help them out?

Here's my theory. I believe that there are only 2 major reasons not to use the in-ear systems. #1, you are so in love with the live sound that you have trouble playing to the processed, stereo sound. And #2 you don't know how to work the system.

I believe that a lot of musicians have spent so much time depending on the sound guys to dial in their mix that they struggle with figuring out just what they want in their monitors. Another issue is when a sound engineer changes the gain on a channel, it affects the monitor mix so if your sound guy is adjusting gains (for hopefully valid reasons), it can get very frustrating.

I think it all boils down to training your musicians to use them, and we've done... uh... well... let me see... pretty much... uh... no training at all! Dough!

What about you???

Worship Confessional 10/14

We had a great week. I've got some video but I'm not sure when it will go up as I'll be in San Diego all week for the National Youth Workers Convention.



So here's this weekend in a nutshell...

We've modified our Order of Service a little. Here's what we did.

Everlasting God (Brenton Brown)
Blessed be Your name (Matt and Beth Redman)
-message-
How Great (Chris Tomlin)
-offering-
Everlasting God

It was kind of cool to only do 3 songs this week. I know that sounds weird. As a worship leader I've always pushed for more time and more music. I think there was more freedom in not having to worry about time as much. I was able to hang out on some of the songs and the band was tighter due to the fact that we had more time to rehearse and sound check.

Now to the details...

Lots of people on stage this week.

Rick - vox
Alexis - vox
Stephanie - keys/vox
Dan - bass/vox
AJ - acoustic
Kevin - electric (finally someone with a tube amp!)
Brandon - drums
me - acoustic/vox

With that many vocals going, obviously there's some potential for train wreck seeing as how my specialty is not harmony. But these guys worked hard at finding harmonys and simply not singing when there's already enough going on.

There were lots of wedges being used too (we only have 4 sets of in-ears). We only used 3 sets of in-ears this week. Some people aren't digging the in-ears for some reason, so we had 4 wedges on stage which made for a loud stage. (see next post)

All in all it was a good week. Sounds getting better, musicians are getting more familiar with the tunes!

National Youth Workers Conference - S.D.

Only 2 weeks left. Anyone coming?

I'd love to hook up. Let me know...

Earthtones...

Ahhh... earthtones tend to give me a peaceful feeling.

What do you think?

MC Hammer

Ahhh... the things we find in the blogging world!

Some of the guys in the Youth Group are really getting into this dancing thing so I thought I'd look up my old dance mentor, MC Hammer.

Be careful, there are some explicit words left by crazy Hammer Haters. His content is quite interesting though.

I have to admit, I used to own a purple Hammer suit... You know you loved it!

Worship Confessional

There's no video this week because someone forgot to bring the camera... dough!

The women were away so we had "Blue Collar Sunday".

We rocked it...

Setlist
Party - Chris Tomlin
Awesome is the Lord - Chris Tomlin
Amazing - Matt Redman
-message-
Forever King (sung to the tune of "Sweet Home Alabam") - Todd Fields

Total Service time... 50 minutes!!!

We had a ton of time to hang out between services. It was great. And without the women there to drag their husbands home, our tear down crew was huge! We were out of there by 12:15...

I sent a ton of info on "sound in small rooms" to our sound guys this last week. Andy ate it up and he and Enrique made some pretty significant changes this week. I think it cleaned things up a little. I can't wait to see what they do this week.

Here are some of the links if you're interested...

http://www.ethanwiner.com/equalizers.html
http://www.kodachrome.org/salt/
http://www.lenardaudio.com/education/01_eduintro.html
www.billfitzmaurice.com
http://www.yorkville.com/default.asp?p1=6&p2=17&p_id=18
http://www.rightround.com/guides/dana/34/
http://www.sogospellovers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4544
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct03/articles/goinglive.htm?print=yes

Thanks to Andy Lumsden for some of these articles...

Enjoy!