church

Anne was a "sound booth widow" this weekend. I spent most of the weekend associated with sound duties to support the church on Good Friday and Easter.
The auditorium was full on Friday night for the Good Friday service. We staged the orchestra, choir, soloists, and two narrators in the balcony of the church. This meant I had to run an audio snake to the balcony for sound and by-pass the normal patch bay. It was also tricky to put a dozen microphones in front of the house speakers – a challenge to avoid feedback. However, the results were really good. The performers had worked hard to prepare and the 80 page script went off without a hitch. It was really rewarding to be part of the performance. After the performance, many of the performers helped carry sound gear (microphones, stands, cables) back downstairs which saved me hours of time. Saturday I was back at the church to reset the soundboard back to "normal," pulling out the snake and re-patching the back of the system. I then had to set-up for Easter – soloists, orchestra, choir – back in their normal positions. Easter morning I was in the auditorium at 6:30 a.m. to light the fires. We added a third service and it was a good thing we did. All three services were busy. The middle service had so many attendees, that we had to send 120 people to our video overflow room. The services were great – excellent singing and preaching all around – and no feedback! The only negative aspect of the weekend: I didn’t get to work with my sound buddy, Mike. Mike was down with 101+ fever for several days last week, so I didn’t get to spend Easter with him.

This past weekend I helped to install a new video projection screen at our church. For many years we have shown our song lyrics and sermon notes using a projector, which was shown on a large blank wall. The new screen is 200 inches diagonally and weighs over 200 pounds. It’s a big screen. We used it on Sunday, but the difference (from just using a white wall) wasn’t as pronounced as we expected. The detail is a little clearer, and the colors seem a little richer, but we were hoping for something a little more dramatic. The consensus is that our projector is just too far from the screen (about 85 feet) to cause the rich presentation quality we’d like to have. .. and we discovered that one of the walls in the auditorium isn’t plumb… the best laid plans…

The annual church musical is "in the can" for another year. We completed our five performances, for about 3,000 people, last weekend. My friend Mike drove the mixing, while I drove the "mute groups". That means - he adjusted the volumes while I turned microphones on and off. It was challenging and fun to work with the cast, orchestra, and choir. Now I have to get my Christmas shopping done! YIKES!

It was about four years ago when I last worked as Sound Mixer for a service at Alderwood Community Church. Kenny and I had worked for several months to tweak the system with some assistance from Jessica. The relationships and opportunity to serve were really gratifying. I look back on that experience with great joy.
Since then, I've had the opportunity to spend oodles of time with my friends Billy and Kelli, in Port Saint Lucie, praising God at Calvary Chapel Port Saint Lucie. Each week we hauled the sound system into the building, Kelli would sing, Billy would play guitar or drums, and I would mix the sound. It was a smaller system than Alderwood's, but sounded wonderful nonetheless.
This Sunday, April 7th, I'm back at the helm of Alderwood's mighty Allen & Heath mixing board. Kenny probably won't be able to join me, as he works most Sundays. Jessica may be there though, and she's become quite a whiz with sound herself. Hopefully things will go well!