Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Danny's Song Confessional

So this week was pretty amazing. Unfortunately, Pastor Dave and I both got that crazy chest cold thing that's been going around. Fortunately, I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics (only because my wife made me) and was about 90% by Sunday morning. Unfortunately, I think Pastor Dave's cold hit its peak about 9:00am Sunday morning.

We were all set to have him lead the first 2 songs and then decided to call that off because of his congestion. So I substituted a familiar song that we didn't practice, but the band nailed it because they're just cool like that... ;)

Here's what it looked like...

Band:
Me - agtr/vox
Dave - keys
Kevin - bass
Ross - drums
Daniel - egtr 1
Dalton - egtr 2

This was one of the first times that we ran 2 electric guitars (both of them High Schoolers). I think it went pretty well. We tried to work out parts and they played off of each other pretty well. I think they even kind of took turns playing lead and rhythm. I only remember one time when I looked over and saw them both playing the same chords, same frets, same patterns. We'll get there...

Here's the set:

Oh Praise Him (Crowder)
-welcome-
Here in Your Presence (Desperation)
Danny's Song (Loggins & Messina)
-message-
I'm coming Your way (Desperation)
-offering-
I'm coming Your way (Desperation)
dismissal-
I'm coming Your way (Desperation)

What can I say, we picked three really long songs.
Oh praise Him is about 7 minutes long, Here in Your presence is at least 8 and the version that we did of I'm coming your way (complete with verses... I never knew it had verses, but they fit so well with the message) was like more than 10 minutes long. So all in all, we probably did close to 30 minutes of music. That's crazy when you factor in that we finished the service in right around 60 minutes.

Another cool thing that we did this week was our first ever multi-track recording. I picked up a super cheap (less than $200) motu 828 interface on ebay. I set it up and was got it working for the 2nd service. So I was actually able to do some post-edit on the music and message without too much trouble.

Here's what it looks like...

Instruments to Snake (duh)
Snake to board (double duh)
Board to Aviom (aha!)
Aviom Thru to Motu Interface (double AHA!!!)
Motu to Macbook Pro via Firewire
Firewire to Audacity

It actually worked better than I thought it would. I honestly didn't expect to get a solid recording for another couple of weeks, but we did it! I honestly couldn't have done it without the fact that we had an incredible tech team this week thanks to Andi's scheduling skills! ;) In fact, I think I'll start including them in the confessional.

Here's what the team looked like:
Lead Audio - Enrique
Audio 1 - Richard
Lights/Audio - Chris
Lights/Everything - Bradley
ProPresenter/Scheduling - Andi

They rocked it... Great setup time and super smooth transitions.

How was your week? And if you were there, what did you think of ours?

Oh yeah, in case you were wondering what the heck Danny's Song is... here it is for you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

O Praise Him! Ha. Good memories of that song.

Lovin' seeing tech going smooth.

Jeff T. said...

I'm very interested in a similar recording rig. Are you limited to recording 8 inputs?

eric beeman said...

Hey Jeff. Right now I'm limited to 8 channels because I'm only using one Motu 828. If I purchased another one I could run up to 16 channels (I only have 16 coming from the Aviom system). I think I read somewhere that you can link up to 3 of them via firewire which would give you 24 channels.

I hope that helps...