Final Christmas Eve Stage Plot

Well this updated stage plot for Christmas Eve. I split the kids choir into two sections to help parents see there kids just a little better.

Sydney's Song

 Here is a song that friend of mine wrote after they lost their daughter four years ago. We recorded it here at DSC. Buy it here. Proceeds are going to the adoption fund at Desert Springs Church. Learn more about the journey of Byrd Family here.

Christmas, Christmas Time is Here!

Well it is Christmas time again and it is one of the most challenging ones I have had in my 16 years at DSC. Christmas is on a Sunday! This means we are doing our two Christmas Eve services on Saturday night and then turning around and doing two completely different services Sunday Morning. We see it as a great time to celebrate the birth of our savior and his resurrection from the dead in one weekend. Needless to say that means one mighty big weekend of music. Christmas Eve will be our regular band consisting of bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, percussion and 7 vocals rotating through, plus a string quartet, extra electric guitar, children's choir, twelve person ensemble.  Sunday Christmas Day we will be pairing back to our regular five piece band. Should be great fun and a lot of work. This a rough stage plot for Christmas Eve.

The Christmas Store

Here is our video for our annual Christmas Store project. It is video produce by our video team. You can see DSC videos on our You Tube Channel.

Cause for Praise Recap

Well it is over. Cause for Praise is finished and we are back to "normal" around here at DSC. The tech team had a great and busy couple of weeks. Here is a look back with some interesting stats:

Sunday was baptism Sunday so we had to shoot and edit seven testimony videos, get the baptistry ready, and of course have services. After we drained the baptistry, cleared the stage, moved the chairs on the floor (Cause for Praise was in the round on the floor of the worship Center), move the piano off the stage and set up the drums. 

Monday-Friday we set up the chairs in the round, set hung lights, decorated, picked up speakers, set up the band.

Here is a summary of what we set up:

26 inputs from the band

31 channels to the multitrack recorder (5 crowd mics on top of the band channels)

14 QSC K12's placed around the worship center.

4 subs (QSC 18's and EAW SB1000's)

Yamaha M7-48 running two Dante cards for recording and one Aviom.

12 Aviom units

15 sets of in ear monitors

6 Di's (Taylor K4, 2 Radial Pro Di, Aguilar Tube bass DI, Radial J48, CountrymanType 85)

25 Microphones SM57, 2 KSM9, 2 pro 35, 2 Micro D, 2 KSM 109, 2 KSM 32, 2 KSM 27, KSM 44, AKG414, AT350, Beta 52, D6, 2 E935, 2 E609, ATM 25, DPA 4061, 2 ATM 450

Friday night we took it all down. 

Saturday we reset the chairs and set up band for Sunday.

Sunday had our normal services. 

Wednesday we had a Elder Q and A, which was another challenge. Seven open over ear microphones at the same time. Great fun.

Thanks for all the volunteers who helped I could not have pulled it off without you.

Another look at the stage for Cause for Praise. We are getting close.

Psalterium and Cause for Praise

Well as I continue my posts on Cause for Praise I need to mention the CD we are releasing.  The CD is called Psalterium Vol. 1 and is a 5 song EP written from the Psalms. It will be available on Friday. You can preview it here.

Cause for Praise

Here is the first picture of the setup for Cause for Praise.

Cause for Praise '11

This will be the first post of I what hope are many on Cause for Praise '11. I thought a picture of the preliminary stage plot.

Drum Shield

Here at Desert Springs Church we purchased a new drum shield. Our old one has shifted to the you the room with a roof for some great isolation, and vastly improved sound. The new one in the Worship Center is a seamless from Whiteley solutions. They have developed the Phoenix Drum Enclosures, which are little drum condos with all types of features. They are pretty cool but were just to big for our stage, but they came out with the slim, just a seamless curved shield. It looks great and works even better. I would recommend checking them out at the above link and on Facebook.

VBS CD

Well it has been a while since my last post, so I thought I would show you how we recorded one recorded one of the songs for the VBS CD. We gave the kids a CD when they signed up for VBS so they would know the songs before VBS started. It really helped with the singing during the gathering time. Here are a couple photos from recording "I'll Fly Away". The fist one is looking out into the West Wing which is the big room off the control room. Our studio is multi purpose at DSC. My office is the control room, the tracking room holds chairs and tables for the West Wing which is used for classes and in this case a recording session. We recorded the instruments together trying to get a front porch kind of feeling to the song. We recorded the vocals separately from the instruments.

VBS Goes Vintage (sort of )

Well VBS was a great success at Desert Springs Church this last week. Here is the run down of Microphones used.
Skits
11- Shure and Audio Technica Wireless systems
We paired various types of microphones to those systems:
2- Countryman E6
1- Countryman E6s
3- Audio Technica BP892-TH MicroSet
1- DPA 4066
3- Samson SE50
1- Audio Technica Artist Elite® AE4100 Handheld.

 The Band
Kick: Shure Beta 52
Snare: Shure SM 57
HiHat: Shure KSM109
Rack Tom: Audix D4
Floor Tom: ATM 25
Ride and Crash: Pro 35's underneath
Bass: SansAmp DI
Acoustic Guitars: Radial ProDi
Washboard: Beta 98
Wash Tub Bass: Beta 91
Lead Vocal: Beta 87c
BGV's: Shure 55's of various types. 1-Super 55, 2-55SH, and my personal 1959 Shure 55. It was so sweet.

If it Worked once Try it again

Well I was having a dilemma. Los, our young adult minister/church planter, has been preaching the last few Sundays.  He does not want to wear an over ear mic like the E6 but also did not want a traditional lapel. Los also uses a large dynamic range when he teaches from very soft to very loud. The is to make him understood no matter how loud or quiet he is. The microphone we tried had been using on him for a while was the E6s which is shorter version of the normal Countryman E6. He liked it because it was easy to hide. The problem is it does not give, at least for Los, great clarity, so I went back to the well. Los wears glasses with a nice flat frame. So like I did with our Teaching Pastor Ryan, see post here, I taped the microphone to his glasses. With Ryan I use a Countryman EMW. I do not have a second one on hand so I used my Shure W93, which is a nice flat lapel like the EMW.  Wow what a difference. Los is clear and I have a ton of head room. Another reminder to keep your options open when trying to mic someone or something up.

Is That a Keyboard in Your Piano

Our PC88 in its costume for VBS.

Radial SGI

My previous post showed our isolation cabinets at DSC. I mentioned the Radial SGi. Here is a picture and some quick info on the SGi. This has been a great addition to our gear. It allows us to have electric guitars with the amps off stage isolated away so they can play loud, get that tone and not overwhelm the audience. I highly recommend this product if you have a long way to run signal to your guitar amps. Radial says you can get up to 300 feet with this product. Find out more here http://www.radialeng.com/re-products.htm
 

Electric Guitar Isolation

I just checked back through my archives and did not see any posts showing my guitar amplifier isolation case for our Worship Center Stage.  This is a case we packed on one of our trailers when we were portable. I reworked the inside of the cabinet and added some acoustic foam to help with the Isolation. I am able to put two combo amps in this case. I have a mic input, an input for the Radial SGI guitar interface, power, and a fan for each amp to keep things cool. Right now I have e609's on the amps. Check the photo.

Mic That Piano part 3

Well I got my Audio Technica ATM 450's in to try on the piano.  Let me just say they sound great. They fit right under the piano lid and look pretty cool, of course the lid is closed so except for this picture no one will really see them. They give a great over all piano sound, which is something I have been looking for lately. I have been using DPA 4061s but they just have not been cutting it with our current players. Our former Music minister Zach played a little heavier and the DPA's sounded great but they lost some of the natural sound with the lighter players we have now.  The AT mics did the job. I highly recommend these microphones and at half the price of the DPA's they are well worth the money.

New Drum Shield

Well we got our new Drum Shield. It is the Phoenix Slim from Whitley Solutions. I was looking for a seamless shield to replace our old Clear Sonic which we have had for about eleven years and was getting pretty banged up.  The new shield looks great and works great. This pic is from our first sound check with this beauty.

Sometimes it Helps to Think Outside the Box

It seems like everyone is moving to a Countryman E6 or other over the ear microphone for spoken word.  And why shouldn't you? They get greater gain before feedback and sound better than a microphone mounted clipped to a tie or coat.  The microphone stays in the proximity to the mouth instead of being to far away one minute and too close the next. Well what happens when you get resistance to the over the ear microphone craze. I had this problem with our teaching pastor Ryan Kelly. We had three issues: First he did not want to wear a "Brittney Spears" microphone. Second he did not like talking to people after services with the microphone on, and if he took it off it never went quite back where it belonged. Third they just did not stay on his head that well.  We tried single ear, double ear, DPA, Countryman, Audio Technica, Samson, but nothing stayed on his head. I really needed find something that would give me the constant microphone position I was looking for. Then one day it hit me! His glasses! I was using the Countryman EMW Omni Classic Lavalier, which I love because it sounds the most natural of the lavaliers I have tried in the past. It happens to be a flat microphone, and is just the width of Ryan's frames. I use two thin pieces of gaff tape to fasten the microphone to the glasses. The microphone is placed as close to the hinge as possible and taped just before the head of the microphone. The second piece of tape is placed just before the earpiece. I hope someday to have a second pair of glasses so we can just leave the microphone attached to the glasses. It only takes about 3 minutes to get the glasses wired up, so not a huge inconvenience. This method has solved all of the concerns we were having with the over ear microphones. His glasses fit his head, the microphone is always in the same spot if his glasses are on, he does not have to take it off to talk to people after service it is almost invisible even at normal conversation distance, and of course most important he does not feel like Brittany Spears. Below is a picture of the EMW microphone.

Change in How I Mic up the Drums

Well we changed how we mic the drums here at DSC.  Some of this was an experiment by me and some out of necessity because of our new favorite kick drum, lovingly called The Donkey. It is an old marching bass drum that our drummer Ian added some hoops and refinished it.  It sounds awesome. We have used it live and in our new recording space.  Let us start with my experiment. I changed how I mic the cymbals.  I was using SM81's overhead but decided to use a method I have used in the past for our VBS music when we want to blend the band into the set design a little more.  I replaced the 81's with Audio Technica Pro 35's placed under each cymbal. You can see them above in the picture from Easter. The other change was adding a Audix I5 to the beater side of the kick drum.  Usually I would put an Beta 91 inside but we don't have a hole in the kick drum head so that was not an option. The Beta 52 is still used on the outside for the bottom. I added the I5 to add a little attack to the tone. We hang it off the floor tom with an LP Claw, and what a great sound we get from this combo.

Clarus Pics

Easter Photos

Encouragement

Encouragement is not heard a lot around a sound booth. If some in is talking to you it usually is someone needing a monitor adjustment, someone telling you how the mix should be, or just telling you it is way to loud or to soft.  Today I had a great compliment.  My friend Matt was running 1st service today, he always does a great job, but a man came up and complimented him on the mix.  He said that we have the vocals very clear, you can understand the words.  He mentioned he had visited a couple of times and was impressed each time with this.  He said that we do get about as loud as he likes, no more please, but it was not just noise.  Two things I got out of this. First, Matt does a really good job 1st service. Second it goes off of how we build our mixes at DSC. I try and get the vocals right. In church we need to understand what the leaders are singing.  This does not mean you need to sacrifice a good bass or electric guitar tone, but places the priority first and everything else in the mix is there to support it.