micing creatively.

At the same gig as i just ranted about, we were very limited with mics and atge room etc. there fore there was no plan to mic amps or drum set or other instruments. ten i decided i would pull a small akg condenser (c430) mic that i have out and whacked it on a stand. it went awesome. we put it first on glocs, and it picked it up flawlessly, from about a foot above. Then we put it over the "band pit", which it worked well, not as well as the glocs though. Then, because the amps and drum weren't really carrying, i placeed it in front of the amps, about an equal distance from each amp, as well as from the drums, and it worked well, with no phase problems, and it picked up everything really well, from the lows of the kick, through the mds of the guitars and the highs of the cymbals. it was fantastic.

ja

People Never Learn

I went and mixed at a local school last night, not the first time for that school. Last time we went they gave me a run sheet, early, so that was good, but it had every item run together, without allowing time for a change over between acts, which meant, that after a late start, we were already running 20 minutes late after only 20 minutes. Last night was their end of year concert, and was almost entirely unrehearsed. This time for a six o'clock start, i was given a run sheet at 5 to 6, after reading through it quickly, i discovered that i didn't have half of the cd's needed, so at 5 past 6, after getting the cd's and not having done a check whether they worked, we started, to discover that the school cd player, which they provided didn't work, so already before starting we were ten minutes late. finally we started the program, with every 5 minute set, running the timing of the whole event back at least 2 minutes. I can live with shows running late and not running to time, thats just standard, but the fact that after the last gig, i sat down with the person in charge and explained to them (the same person as this time) that they needed to leave a small gap for changeovers led me to believe that some people never learn. The stage manager, one of the teachers was fantastic though, and chased up stuff that i needed, so that was fantastic. As we move towards Christmas and the shows we are putting on, i hope these things are things we do well.

Changing things

We have decided it was time to update some policies and bring some new ones online with summer holidays about to start here and bands wanting to practice, we have put some new policies in place governing this, which means there may be more demands on techos, as a band wanting to practice needs someone on the current roster to come and help them if they want to use any of our equipment. This has up and down sides. Upsides in that we know the stuff is being used responsibly, and our techos get some more hands on experience. The downside is it may become more time consuming for techs, particularly people like me.
But it should be good.
On another tech note thinking of starting a page, just for techs at church, so that i can communicate policies, and decisions and news from the industry, as well as each others thoughts etc on issues. We'll see how this goes.

ja

Foldbacks and training

Feel like I've neglected the blog for a while now.
I've been fairly busy. Currently I'm working on a few different projects, including working on a fold back solution for our current building that will not only tide us over to our new auditorium, but also, when the new auditorium is built will serve our current hall when it becomes the children's and youth hall sometime on the next 12 months hopefully.
the other is starting to develop training programs for the next 12 months and thinking about teams as we travel as a church towards our new building. This includes time schedules, when we will start training on the new gear in our current building so that when we move into our new building it will be a smooth transition.

ja

maintenance

Tonight warren and i got together to do some maintenance at church. we replaced the old globe in our main projector and you could notice a huge difference. videos especially are much clearer..
Also we repositioned the main spots as well as the left front of house speaker.
Over the coming weeks we have some other jobs lined up, as well as having other long term maintenance jobs that i'll do while at work.

willow creek leadership summit - Wesley theatre.

we went to willow creek leadership summit, at the wesley international congregation, in Pitt street Sydney. It was a really good conference. I'll blog about it soon, but i just want to blog about the room and tech.
It was really good. Overall, sound was just loud enough (just) Singers weren't mixed the greatest on Friday as it was hard to hear anyone other than the lead, and her only when the band was quite. The band was interesting on Friday, it was only keys, bass and drums, but the mix of hese was great. Audio was provide by cpc audio
They had placed 3 small Meyer line array speakers along the step of the stage for front fill, and the one on our side was sending sound up along the wall, and was reflecting out from the pier next to me, and right into my ear, about 1/2 a second behind the main front of house.
Lighting was by a LSC maxim 48/96 desk
Sound was on an Allen and Heath GL4000 (I've used one of these)
Vision was distributed by Edirol V - 440 HD video mixer (I've used one of these, there awesome)

All in all tech was good, with only some slight problems, with slides and cues for mics being missed regularly.

It's always good to go to other places and see tech there and how they do things.

Media team

Been toying with the idea of establishing a media team at my church. Here's the start of my idea document/report.

"As our church moves forward and reaches many new people in Dapto and surrounding areas, we will increasingly rely on different forms of media in all areas of our operation, from services, to outreach to day to day running of the church. As such, and to remove strain from team members I feel it is necessary to establish a team who's specific job is to handle our media, be it videos, website or even our bulletin design."

Let me know what you think. Its an interesting idea I've been working on for a couple of weeks.

 

ja

Testing out Office2007 functions

Just reading Josh's blog, and was reading that he tried out this feature of Word 2007 to post straight to the net from here. Interesting. I'll see what it's like.

 

ja

new mall

they opened the new mall across the road from church, been trying out the different food shops, to see which ones will receive my business in th future. The kebab shop was black listed, the sandwich shop thing gets a thumbs up, and guests is guests. Tried one of th coffee shops the other day, and was let down. Gloria jeans was good today. so its alright. i guess. there's some other shops that are also good.
so heres to the new mall.

ja

of cameras and other cool toys.

Just listening to the Church tech talk podcast this morning, and they were talking about a sweet camera from JVC, the JVC GY-HD250.
It's high definition and has some really awesome other features as well as having awesome colour abilities. Like shooting in real colour and then making it dull later, not shooting it dull.
Oh if i had a spare $13,000.

ja

What I've Done

corinthians 7

We had Corinthians 7 preached on the weekend. It was really good. just a few excerpts from the chapter that are funny out of context

• "It is good for a man not to marry"
• "It is good for them to remain single."
• "He should not become uncircumcised" (I'm interested as to how this is possible??)

some interesting quotes. stay tuned for the blog of the sermon.

Auditions

Yeah
just got a copy of adobe audition 2 today. its awesome software that i plan to use for recording and mastering and everything. awesome. All i need to do now is work out how to make it and my Edirol FA-101 talk to each other.

ja

kutless

sundays vol ???`

Well, its been a few weeks that i posted after a Sunday, so i thought I'd get back to it.
It was a rather relaxing day. i didn't go to church in the morning, instead heading out to the go karts and helped warren out with timing. I had fun out there. Then i had to leave early so that i could set up some extra recording stuff to do a special record at our youth service. It worked well early, but then at crunch time, because we were pressed for time as i had a meeting for an hour before the service, I didn't get to do a test record during sound check, so when it came to crunch time I've hit record and listened in the cans, and low and behold, the send from the splitter to my recording spot was bad. i think it was just a bad lead. So that didn't happen so i was pretty disgruntled by that. serve me right for no doing a test record.
715, I did mixing, and it was a good service, except for some booing bass, and also a preacher that kept coughing straight down into the lapel microphone, ouch!. Also we showed a video that was made recapping a previous series as we are coming back to it, using a kutless music video and overlaying it with some pictures from the last series. their was a problem however, and the audio track was patchy over the parts where images had been input. to me it seems like a software or encoding problem, when it was made. were going to have to work it out.
anyway. im up early to pick mum up fro the airport at 6 o'clock. ouch.

ja.

wow

Wow. Time has flown and i hadn't realized i hadn't blogged for over a week. Have to get on to that. Got some things i want to blog about so i'll put some posts up soon.

ja

Discipline

Last night we had our youth group planning meeting for next term and we talked about discipline and strategies to make it better, but also make it less needed.
We talked about how that immediate reactions to their actions weren't good or building up.

4 steps to discipline;

1. Look / Stop
2. Verbal - Positive peer pressure can come in at this step.
3. Time out
4. Go home, parent intervention

We also talked about how talking over them wasn't good. Another important thing is that after a child has had a timeout, it is important to reconcile with the youth.

ja

New building 1

Good news came to us yesterday. At church, the DA for our new building finally came out of council, which is fantastic. So theres heaps of building meetings going on this week to get the project underway. It's a really exciting time.
I'll keep you updated on the progress. We may even start a blog for the project.

ja

Sundays Vol 4

So, it's Monday, I'm sitting here watching Law and Order, and updating my blog.

Sunday was a good Sunday in general It was the last Sondaze of the term, it was good.
5pm rocked. It was ok, but the message really stood out. Mitch spoke, which is almost always great. This week he spoke on temptation, from Genesis 3. He likened temptation to a fine line that myou can cross to enter sin, or reject and stay away from sin.
Some other points were;

• We can be like children that forget the whole picture.
• Temptation is all about us
• Freedom in the world will enslave us
• Do not be deceived by temptation
• Temptation is when we doubt that God wants what's best for us.

715 was also good. We continued in our Holy Spirit series. (see more in coming days) Steve spoke, and he is sick, so it wasn't easy for him. He spoke from John 14 and 16. The key theme was what it means to be an authentic Christian. Verse 14:15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (ESV) He also explained, that they main way that God speaks to us is through the word (bible) and that if some people have "special" messages that contradict what is said in the gospels then they are probably mistaken, or even believing what they want to believe, saying it is from God, so that they can do and believe what they want. The danger may be for us that the voice we are applying to our lives may be our own, telling us what we want.

Quote of the weekend was Mitch at 5pm "God wants us to have sex... Not only have sex but have excellent sex"

ja

You Version

I heard about this net based bible, called You Version, that includes a lot of community, with communal postings, an online journal, and all other sorts of cool things. Its rumored to be going live next week, but i just got access to the beta now. Have only had a short play, but will do more over the coming days, and let you all know.

ja

links

Can i just say, i really don't appreciate websites who's links don't work.

ja

Bose 802

Talking to one of our assistant ministers today, and he pointed out that one of our speakers (Bose 802s) rattles or distorts at certain frequencies. I haven't actually noticed it, which means it's probably one of the left drivers of the speaker, which point away from the mixing position, and as he said it only happens at certain frequencies and then only when the keys play a certain couple of chords. It sounded to me like a proken driver, and when I rang up the guy we purchased them from he said the same thing. So know i have to pull it down and have a look at it.
yay.

ja

Sundays vol 3

Well this is a day late. Normally i post about sundays on mondays. But i forgot.
It was an interesting Sunday.
Firstly in the morning i was invited to go to a friend of mine's church, to consult on their tech gear.
Lets just say it was an interesting experience. It was a traditional style service, but the teaching was appalling. We had a reading from the word, but then a sermon with absolutely nothing to do with the word, but more on patting their own backs, and why their denomination (BRAND) was better than others.

So after that experience the Sunday got better.
I came home, and turned around to go and do a memorial service thingo for one of our youth who tragically passed away a year ago. It was a moving experience, to see youth group kids, kids who have come to youth group, her family etc all there.

5 rocked. It was a good feel, Pete's message was awesome. It was really good. I've been training up a volunteer and she's starting to come good. I hardly had to do anything on Sunday. Sound was ok. participation was good.

715 was also a great service. i didn't have to do anything at this service, so it was a bit odd. Sat with my girl, enjoyed the service. Shane's message was awesome, it was our second week of Hoy Spirit, and it was a great interpretation of the word.
If i could work out how to post just audio to the blog i'd put it up, but i'm currently working on something that means i can do that.

ja

broken guitars

we filmed a video for church on Sunday, the message is on psalm 150. We had one of our youth who is on our drama team pretend to be a musician, playing string and tambourine, and when it came to the cymbals he dropped the acoustic on the ground and the above pic is the results. Because he had broken the guitar we couldn't do another take, so it was hard to control our laughter while he continued with the end of his act.

ja

Holy Spirit Vol 2

So, we had bible study tonight which I love. And we discussed my question on the holy spirit (see HS VOL1) And i was reminded from John 14:16 which says - " And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever "
So i guess that answered my question about the singularity of the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes i forget stuff in the word, which reminds me i need to base my whole life in it.


ja

Holy Spirit Vol 1 / Sunday vol 2

Today was sunday again. Yay i love sundays. Sondaze this morning at the church plant was fantastic. We had some really good discussion.
5 was really good also. Cas did a great sermon from psalm 51 on purityfing your life, just as David had to do.
7:15 started a new sermon series that s been started in all our main services this week on the holy spirit. And it raised some interesting questions. Something that me and a couple of mates were talkiing about this morning is the singularity or personality of the Holy Spirit. Did the spirit really have its own personality, and is it event separate. Does the trinity actually exist, or that it is some doctrine left over from pre reformation. I'm a bit confused by it all and am working through it

ja

An interesting use of an NT3. Why put it in a stand and use it as an overhead when you can whack it on the floor, between a foot and a tambourine for an acoustic set?

ja

The 1 Minute Painting - The most popular videos are a click away

blessings abundant

Some stuff came up today, that could have had an effect on my relationship with my girl. I was around her house tonight, and i just felt like God was telling me to tell her everything that came up. so i did. I told her everything that came up in a conversation i had today, and she took it all in, and just showed me so much understanding and care and love. God has blessed me with a woman in my life who is wise and amazing and caring and everything in 1 person. I have to remember that she is really wise and hat i can share so much more with her. I love her so much and she is one of, if not the biggest blessing in my life.
I shared this verse with sev, for a video for epidemic on dating. It's from proverbs 19:14 "Houses and wealth are inherited from parents, s but a prudent wife is from the LORD"
I just really love how it says Houses and wealth are inherited, so basically things of this world are inherited, or worked for, but a "prudent wife", or a wife who is the one God meant for you, is a gift from God, just like grace. She is a woman that God meant for you to share your life with. This amazes me, and i believe God has given me this young amazing woman in my life.

ja

hefty

Just had a really deep conversation with a friend about some stuff that was fairly heft in both our lives. I hope and pray that God shows us both wisdom from this discussion and these times
I know and trust in him and this week have felt his presence evermore.

ja

sundays vol 1

Sunday was fantastic. It was fathers day, so we had a special service at Horsley in the morning that was themed. It was really good, even though not many people from the community came. Sunday afternoon was fantastic. 5 went well, good music, good participation, excellent message. Mitch delivered on of the best messages i have ever heard at 5. 7:15 was also great, we did something funky for the males, had some good music. The message was also really good, really touching.

We tried a new stage layout this week, supposedly, we're trying it for 3 months, although that seems like a long time for a trial. Had some feedback. Some of the singers like it, but many of the band members from different services didn't really like it that much. Might come up with some more ideas, and see where we get.

ja

the fight

It continues

KHS Scripture seminars.

Today, with soteria, we went to khs and did scripture seminars, this is basically where we go in to a school and bring the message of Christ into that school. Today's went really well, it only the second time we've been in K this in a couple of years, and we really enjoy it. then this afternoon we re skinned a drum kit (our spare one) fixed up a mix that ben had recorded and danny mixed, so it was a busy day. Music was good today. Didn't get a sound check, so the first seminar turned into a bit of a sound check, but other than that it was good. Ben did the talk. It was really good. good mix of stories, magic and truth.
All in all a fun day serving our maker.

ja.

The God of Gold and Glory

Just got home from XL tonight. It was awesome. XL is the young adults once monthly official get together dinner thing that we do at our church. Tonight was about God (surprise) and how he is the God of everything. We were also challenged about our thoughts on some issues, like Christians running the country, forced Christianity, pornographic shops etc. Will try and get some of the slides up on my flickr page.

Americans???

i saw this video on the news the other night, and it reminded me of a clip out of the dvd "Clarkson. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly" Where clarkson asks Americans in vegas where countries in Europe are and they have no idea, and then declares, how can Americans make good cars for a continent they have never heard of.

Ministry Mutiny

I just finished reading Ministry Mutiny.
I really loved it. After reading a lot of youth ministry books, about how we have to do all these new things to speak to youth today, this was a reminder that we really don't. All the principles of ministry no matter if its youth or not have been given to us in God's word. The principles that his people, and the principles Jesus based hiw ministry on are all we really need, and when we stray from that ministry becomes difficult.
Key learnings:

1. Listen for God's Whisper
2. Get Real
3. Go Wide
4. Go Deep
5. No More Outsourcing
6. Build on Values, Not Fads

All in all, a fantastic book 5 out of 5

ja

Of hanging Boards

Spent the afternoon hanging a bible study group board in the staffroom at church so that we can see who's in what home small group, and allowing us to easily link newcomers with groups that will cater for them, it is a really good idea i think and hopefully we see some fruit from it, although it is already out of date. oh well

ja

some serious blogging

So, I've had a blog thats sat here in the world wide web of internet land, and I've been reading some stuff lately and found some interesting things on the net, and have hence decided I'm going to make an attempt at blogging so here it goes