I haven’t gotten to this one yet but my pastor is reading it and is very impressed with the book, not just for teens! Do Hard Things. Their brother is the author of another excellent book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”.
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Do Hard Things – Another Excellent Book
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Raising A Modern-Day Knight
Monday, August 11th, 2008Many of the fathers in our church finished reading the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight” (and related materials – including the videos) recently.
I highly recommend this course (or just the book) to any father, whether young or old, there’s something in here for you.
Thoughts on Fatherhood
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008Many of the fathers in our church started on the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight” (and related materials) recently.
A nugget found in chapter 2 gives us a pattern right from God the Father, showing how He talked to and about his Son. Found in Matthew 3:17, it shows us that God affirmed His love for His Son, and His approval (we may say “pride”) of His Son; “And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” The book encourages a father to observe skills in their son and tell him “you are good at _____.” I found myself heartily nodding my head to this insight, especially the affirmation aspects of it. So far good stuff!
Techno-Babble[on]?
Thursday, June 5th, 2008Mike Sessler mentioned this podcast in a recent post of his, here’s the iTunes podcast URL for this episode from Mars Hill Church entitled “Spirituality of the Cellphone”, it’s a must. Below are my initial comments on Mike’s blog’
“Right on Mike. In a lot of ways I find technology further defining and making ever-so-blatant the distance (or on the better days the nearness) there is to other people. We have so many more options for communicating, and yet we don’t make use of them. It can make more plain to us those we are near to, and those we actually aren’t, even though we wouldn’t admit that. It makes the distance grow greater in a sense. I have asked myself this a time or two; does my gospel and my lifestyle work when “unplugged.” With digital photography now you could [almost] take 100 photos in your sleep, but when participating in family or church events I feel challenged to balance the “one for posterity” and the here-and-now when it’s much easier to just be the face behind the lens. Modern day scribes is what we could be called, recording sermons and capturing photos and video, it can give God material to work with in the future to show us where He’s taken us and where we’ve come from. Some of us maybe need to take it more seriously – the fact that we’re capturing the “yesterday’s” of tomorrow, some of us maybe need to not take it so seriously.”
Projection Priorities
Saturday, April 5th, 2008I had made a comment in a previous post about handling lyrics projection in a dynamic environment that may not follow a script. And I talked about folks being able to live with no projection for 5-10 seconds while you dig up the song the worship team popped on you. Well, I had a worst-case scenario the other day, and I have to admit that while I believe that can still work, because we do it frequently, that it can be a really bad thing. We were doing this song (a hymn to boot) for the first time and I placed a higher priority on assisting with the FOH mix momentarily, missing a screen change, and it was quite agonizing.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008A must-see movie this spring for anyone with an open mind:
Expelled. Use this handy Theater Locator.
R.C. Sproul Interviews Ben Stein
A post on Ben Stein meeting with Ken Ham.
Make A Difference In The Life Of A Child
Friday, March 21st, 2008Kids Against Hunger locally is headed up by my friend Tim Stromer.
(Some) Church Sound System Essentials Part 2
Monday, March 10th, 2008Topics for this post include Subgroups and AUX busses on mixing consoles. Subgroups can really simplify managing the mix, especially if your services are very dynamic. AUX busses are a necessity as well if you are running your monitor mixes from the same console as the FOH, and I will also elaborate on how I use AUX busses for my record mix.
Subgroups are smaller (sub – below a full mix) mixes within the main mix generally. Here’s how I use mine (on a Mackie SR32.4) and why: I assign my vocal mics (for singing) to subgroup 1 by first depressing the button on each vocal mic channel labeled 1-2, then turning the pan control to the left which narrows the scope of the signal down to subgroup 1. I assign my two speech mics to subgroup 2 by again depressing the 1-2 button and turning the pan control all the way to the right. I assign my instruments to subgroup 3 by depressing the 3-4 button and panning all the way left, and lastly I assign my six drum mics to subgroup 4 by depressing the 3-4 button and panning to the right. What this allows me to do is run most of the service with 5 or 6 fingers. Once I have established the balance of the vocal mics (by pressing the solo button on the Subgroup 1 master channel strip) I can adjust vocals as a whole with a single fader. Same with my instruments on subgroup 3, the speech mics (for speaking, a wireless Shure LX series handheld with SM87 head, and an old AT W series with 831c lav), and the drums on subgroup 4. Because of the way I have my record mix setup (or should I say I setup my record mix this way because) I can tweak the speech mic level going to the record mix by adjusting the channel fader for that mic, and while watching the level meters on the PMD570 recorder simultaneously trim subgroup 2 to maintain the appropriate level at FOH. If the voice (person) leading a given song changes I can always trim up that channel’s mic to bring it out in the mix, and I may pull back subgroup 2 as well, depending on what kind of level we’re already at and if the other vocalists will be coming in at all. But you get the general idea: make your fine mix adjustments with the individual channels (by using the solo button on the associated subgroup master channel strip), then make the coarse adjustments with the subgroup. And again, note that this allows my record mix through the AUX busses to work out the way I want which I’ll explain. One thing that I know generates confusion about AUX busses is the whole “pre-fade” and “post-fade” thing. What this means is that the signal feed to a given channel’s AUX 1 control (being pre-fade, for instance) is pulled from the channel before the channel fader. Which means what? You can jack the channel fader around all you want and the level of that channel’s signal going into the AUX 1 mix (presumably a monitor mix) will not change. Which is how we want it 99% of the time; we don’t want to mess up the person’s monitor mix when we make a change to the FOH mix. Post-fade is the opposite, the feed to that channel’s AUX buss 3-6 (on the Mackie, and 3-4 is switchable) comes after the channel fader. Which now means that it doesn’t matter how high you hack the AUX 3-6 send on that channel, if the fader is all the way down, the most you’re going to get is maybe a smidge of crosstalk. Post-fade sends (tech speak for AUX buss) are used for effects such as reverb and delay, and also for record mixes (at least in my setup.) My theory on this is that if I need to trim a vocal channel or the speech mic for the house, then I would also want to trim it for the record. The trick is getting the AUX level set for each channel so that that relationship works for both mixes within tolerance. But that’s also the beauty of it – I can setup a different mix for recording than I use for live, which means I can use ambiance mics for the record and just not assign them to the FOH mix. And I feed the PMD570 into the tape in on the console so that I can monitor the record mix from the console as well – including the processing I’m doing between the console and the recorder, a Behringer Ultramizer (which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.) It was a good idea in theory, but the hard compression that this unit applies means all it’s good for is a fancy limiter. Being 2 bands it does allow you to reduce some of the brutality by setting the crossover point just high enough that thumps and bumps and heavy low end don’t bring the entire mix to its knees. And why am I doing all of this? So that when I get home with the flash card I can have a good solid recording that only requires some simple edits in Fission, final MP3 encode and it’s ready to upload. See what you think of the results, our sermon downloads are here and here. Low bitrate versions are encoded with iTunes using this workflow. So, back on the main highway here, a very general guide is that you use pre-fade AUX busses for monitor mixes and post-fade busses for effects (but not processing devices such as compressors since in general they’re meant to be inline devices, not mixed in in a parallel fashion (as you typically would with reverb or delay), and to feed recording devices and/or even distributed sound speakers in the nursery or bathrooms. Our distributed feed is tapped off the output of the Ultramizer, which is feed by AUX 5 and 6. Which brings me to the last thing I want to cover, using a pair of AUX busses to generate a stereo mix for your recording device. I’d love to run a multitrack recording of our services, at least in theory, but that’s not a real need now and just another way to burn up 8 more hours of my precious time. So, for a time I was using AUX 5 and 6 for Left and Right channels, respectively, to generate a stereo mix for recording. What you do to “pan” a voice or an instrument is adjust the AUX 5 and 6 controls differently, for instance; to pan hard left you only turn up the AUX 5 control for this channel, and leave AUX 6 all the way down (and then feed AUX 5 to the left channel of your recorder, and AUX 6 to the right.) To pan in the middle just adjust 5 and 6 to be the same. And for somewhere in-between adjust one AUX slightly higher than the other. That’s the down and dirty way to pan. When we regularly had 2 guitarists playing it really added some nice width to the soundstage of the recording to pan each one fairly hard to one side and the other, and of course panning the cymbal mics and toms, and the vocals.
Living in Church Tech With Spirit-Lead Worship
Thursday, March 6th, 2008Mike Sessler started an interesting thread with his post titled “Worship Leaders – You’re Killing Us!”. Rather than burn up bandwidth on his blog I decided to post more of my thoughts here. The church (and circle of churches) I’m a part of are strongly convinced that every detail of how we spend our time together on Sunday morning (primarily) is entirely in Gods’ hands. Leadership is faithful to prepare and is ready to do what they feel God wants said and done, but that does not preclude them from completely changing things up if God is obviously going another direction when things get rolling for real. To us the idea of scripting in advance what Gods’ intentions are for a service doesn’t give Him complete Lordship and latitude to do as He wills in the moment. There is a general flow that’s a backdrop, it’s not a free-for-all, but we’re committed to listening for any subtle nuances or direction at any time. You have to ask yourself what the objective of the service is, is it to build ministry, or to build family? Are we performing for God, or are we sitting around Abba Father’s living room spending time together with Him. Assuming we don’t do 3 new songs every service, how badly do people really need lyrics that extra 10 seconds it might take to find the right song if the worship team changes things up? And if that screen is the only thing keeping them engaged with Jesus, can you call that heart-felt worship? Worship isn’t the song coming out of our mouth only, it’s where our heart and mind are as well. That worship should still be active even if we temporarily lose our visual aid while worshiping – our heart should still be corresponding. Are we going to sit back and watch worship, like a movie, or are we going to take part and be the active participants in what happens during worship? Our worship team strives to operate as a team, so when they deviate from the list they gave us in the booth, they deviate together, it just means the person running lyrics projection needs to be attentive. And that’s the primary thing about Oratorio I’ll plug right here is that it’s able to keep up with us in that setting. It’s easy to search the lyrics if they go to a song that’s not in your playlist already, and you can get some good sized thumbnails on a 17″ screen so it’s not hard to figure out which slide to present. My point with this post isn’t to argue one method over another, not to say that it can’t be done in other ways, but to simply state that there are church tech folks out there working very hard every Sunday to give God what they feel He deserves in a way that may be uncommon, and that what some may find technically outrageous is exactly where some of us live. And it really is a matter of what your leadership’s philosophy is – what is important, why do we do what we do? As our pastor often says, “we don’t have a lot of protocol or rules here, but our one imperative is that we meet with Jesus Christ today, that we find Him and engage Him.” I just have to raise my hand and say that I’m doing tech in an environment where it works.
Mixing in the Key of G
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008This past Sunday I was reminded of the place of the “soundman” (a.k.a. FOH engineer) as a part of the worship team, as previously blogged by Dave in this article. My point of reference for the demands and goals I’m going to speak about are of course influenced by the worship philosophy/methodology at my place of worship. I have also had visiting pastors comment that a [good] soundman was even more important than the singers; I’ll leave that for them to say. But in our times of worship my goal is to accentuate or facilitate the “mood” I sense happening at any given time. I’m not talking about hype, I’m not talking about emotional manipulation, I’m talking about sensing what the Holy Spirit is communicating through a given song and doing my part to represent that in the mix (not unlike what the worship leader is doing from his/her position.) There may be a particularly tender moment where everything needs to come down, and in our little space that often requires me to even pull back a monitor mix a touch, (I’m working through getting the keyboardists, mainly, to get a feel for this for themselves) to get the right “feel.” It may mean bringing up the kick and the sub in general on a song like “You are Good” in order to match what I sense happening spiritually, and that’s one way I’d like to portray it; matching sonically what you sense spiritually during worship. On some songs it might mean bringing up a pad voice on a keyboard to add “thickness” or density that doesn’t draw attention to itself, yet adds intensity. This is a poor example, but it’s the best that comes to mind and that is during the soundtrack of “Top Gun“, the scene after Goose gets killed and Maverick talks to Goose’s wife, there’s a nice crisp acoustic guitar (synth) sound providing the movement, but there’s a (brighter than some) pad voice that adds the density, that’s what I’m talking about; it adds an intensity without screaming for your attention. Again, I’m not talking about hype, I’m not talking about emulating a rock & roll gig (for the sake of doing so), I’m talking about responding to what the Spirit is “saying” at any given time during worship. It would be wonderful if you could set the faders once and leave it up to the band, but I don’t know that such a band exists – and from their vantage point they are not equipped to do so since they are not in front of the mains, they aren’t able to know how what they’re doing is coming off from the listener’s perspective (both by itself and it’s interaction with the people and the environment), which is precisely why the “soundman” (FOH engineer) needs to have control over the mix – because they are in that position physically and technically. It’s balancing sources, it’s adjusting texture, it’s adjusting level, it’s embellishing intensity, it’s exaggerating subtle nuances, especially in the quieter moments, at least in a small space like the one I live in, it’s helping people navigate the focus at any given time.