Weekend Review – Local Roundtable and Music Machine Rehearsal

I spent more time this past weekend directly working with technology in my own church than I have in a long time. It feels good to be getting back in the swing of things.

It began with our first local roundtable meeting and we made some key decisions. The primary decision was that Saturday morning was probably not an ideal time to meet. Bryson and I each talked to several different people who were interested in getting involved, but they were busy last Saturday. So, Bryson and I met and had some good conversation. We haven’t nailed down our next attempt at meeting but it will be sometime in July, possibly a Tuesday evening. Panera is probably still a good option because we want to meet at a neutral location, not a particular church.

Even I was double booked on Saturday morning, our kids had rehearsal for the Music Machine musical. Fortunately, there are 2 of us running sound and video for this, so he covered for me. I made it for the last hour of practice, then we hung around another hour or so continuing to fine tune the music. At that point, I still had a single 30 minute track, I almost finished splitting it early Saturday morning but didn’t quite make it. I finished right after the rehearsal and all that was left at that point was cleaning up the sound quality.

Sunday morning, one of the other sound guys had Adobe Audition on his laptop so we transferred the music from my laptop to his and he cleaned them. The end result wasn’t perfect but much better than what I started with. I messed around most of the afternoon in the sound booth getting everything straightened out, then we had practice again at 4.

We were supposed to go swimming as a church right after practice but the tornado sirens and massive downpour put a damper on that. We all got to know each other better in one of the inside rooms of the church, waiting for the sirens to stop.

It will be a fun musical. From my perspective, the music is basically ready, I’ve got 4 songs to tweak before Saturday morning, speed one up and slow 3 of them down.

This is our first musical, but there will be more in the future, our children’s pastor is very musically talented. He has done many musicals with kids at previous churches. I think we have learned some things, such as make sure we have the music in our hands before scheduling.

Hey Clif, I told the other sound guy that you thought you had the Music Machine on reel to reel, but couldn’t find it and he said he actually has a reel to reel machine! That would have been fun to work with that kind of media, but at this point, I’m just glad to have the music at the level it’s at.