okay, i had an interesting morning this morning and it inspired me to post a little note…
this sunday we were doing a special song ‘beauty from pain’ [by superchick]. my lovely and talented wife had prepared a video for this and so the band was playing ‘locked to video’ using a click track on one side of the video’s audio track playing into their in-ear monitors. [if you aren't sure what i mean with all this 'locked to video click track' nonsense, let me know and i'll elaborate]
okay, we’re good so far.
so we do the worship set, do the ‘bon jovi kid’s ministry recruitment parody’ [another blog post in and of itself], and roll into the offering. all is well. we then fade the offering backing music and drop the lights to roll video and go into our ‘special moment’.
except for one little problem. the cd playing from the offering was still playing in everyone’s in-ear monitors on stage. seems someone had errantly switched the aux on that channel to pre-fader so even though it was gone in the house, it was blaring away in the in-ears. and on the same input as the click track.
aarrgghh…
the miracle in this was that my beloved band and singers managed to play the entire song with another song [which wasn't even in the same time signature] playing in their ears and no one [including me since i wasn't playing on that song] ever knew a thing other than that they started a bit late so the video wasn’t perfectly synced. that my friends was impressive. if ever i wondered if i was blessed with some truly talented individuals, that sealed it.
so why am i blogging about this little happening on here? well, this is a perfect example of why you should always do a full runthrough of your service [minus the message] before you do it for real. and that means doing ALL the elements just as you would do them. you see, we got lazy and kinda skipped through the offering during our runthrough and didn’t ‘do it for real’. if we had done our runthrough like we’re supposed to, we would have caught the errant prefader send and fixed it.
so remember, if you want it to go as you expect it to go, rehearse it the way you want to do it. there is no other magic way to catch all the tiny little mistakes that add up to a less than stellar [and potentially technically distracting] sunday service.
okay, that’s all for now. i’ve got another 5 or 6 things that happened this morning to blog about, but i’ll save that for another day.
whew! it’s been an interesting week.
bfn,
brian
