Winds of Change

As I’m sure some of you have noticed, blog postings have become much more sparse in recent weeks. Sometimes there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes that can’t be shared in such a public forum, but here they are.

When we moved to Nashville to help launch UC, we knew that this assignment from the Lord was a short-term assignment. We expected about two years, but the Lord has seen fit to take us a different direction. About 8 weeks ago we began praying about our place within the leadership of UC. Something just didn’t “seem” right for us, and our only response was to pray. As time wore on, all of the emotions and reasoning were about more than either one of us could bear – so we did the thing we should have done from the beginning of the process and just listened to the Lord. His response to our prayers was that it was time for us to go.

Let me stop here immediately and let everyone know that we are on great terms with the staff of UpRising Church. No arguments, no anger, no bitterness. Some folks will believe what they want to, but we’re all in great standings with each other and love each other a lot. We received an amazing send-off today, but more will come on that later.

We’re at a holding spot I had hoped we would never be in. It’s so much easier when the Lord reveals exactly where He wants you to be. Today, it’s a matter of where we’re not supposed to be. That’s tough. Although UpRising is not our “baby,” we left everything we knew and grew up with to move to Nashvegas to help launch UC. All we know is that we’re taking this time to dedicate our extra time to fasting, prayer, spiritual growth, and serving. We’ve had some churches put some stuff out on the table, but we haven’t heard from the Lord that any one of these is right – at least not yet – so for today, we take our time and prepare for whatever God has waiting for us in the next season of our lives.

We’re remaining in Nashville and we’re going to start visiting churches in upcoming weeks (whenever we’re actually back in town). We don’t believe it’s time for us to leave yet – though everything inside of us wants to run home. We’ll find a place and get involved and serve until we hear a time when God gives us direction to be a “staff member.”

This morning’s music was awesome. We rocked it hard, had a great time, and ended on Bless the Lord with our typical good time. The new worship pastor, Dave Sims, led two songs today and did a great job (more on that later). Following a great service, we had a Sunday night service (our first ever). During the service, Pastor Joe ordained me and 4 other men from our church body. It was UC’s chance to “send” us to whatever our next assignment is. I cannot say enough thanks to the staff of UC – especially Joe and Pam. We had a great time tonight, and the support from the church is overwhelming!

It was also announced that Dave Sims, who has sung backup and played bass in recent months, will be taking over as Worship Pastor for UC. That’s incredibly exciting. I don’t know that there’s anybody else in the world I’d rather turn things over to. This guy knows he’s called to pastor, is passionate about doing it right, and is an amazing musician. Guitar, Bass, Keys, Vocals – this guy can do it. He’s run sound for us on multiple occasions, but plays bass most of the time. Over and above all that – we call the Sims’ our friends. We’re so excited for them as they begin this journey.

All that said – I can’t believe what an amazing year it’s been – full of ups and downs, but I wouldn’t take back a minute of it. We have been challenged and encouraged in amazing ways – each one pushing us to grow more and more.

I’ll post more tomorrow, but that’s all I’ve got for now. Continue to follow this transition here for now, and I’ll have more info about my blog later this week.

Mouthful, huh?

mjd

 

Mic Issues

Can anybody tell me why I would get better sound out of a 10-yr old wired $100 sm-58 than I would out of a $500 wireless shure or $500 senheisser mic? Anybody with similar problems? It is just a matter of eq-ing it?

mjd

 

How we do it: Lighting

We keep it simple:

For lights, we use a 12 channel light board (Lightronics) with 2 banks of 12 memory slots, 12 chase settings, and adjustable fade rate. We use two 4-channel dimmer packs (Lightroincs) powering 12 x 300-watt par cans and 2 x 750-watt ellipsoidal lights.

We use a 5-pin DMX cable between the dimmer packs and light board. We use our ellipsoidals as a white wash on our stage. They sit about 40 feet of the stage on opposite sides of the room on t-bars. We have to pipe the electricity for the lighting in from the control room of the theater. It runs down the wall – so all in all we probably have about 400 ft of 10-gauge cable to control all of our lighting. We pipe the electricity to 2 short trusses on the edge of the stages that have our colored par-cans (we use blue, red, and gold gels). The dimmer packs sit on the trusses, so we have to run a cable from the dimmer pack to the t-bar for the ellipsoidal lights.

When we’re able to purchase more dimmer packs, we’ll add at least two more ellipsoidals (which we already have) and another 10-12 par-cans (which we already have).

We use the theater’s lighting for general lighting. We keep them at 100% while people come in and during the message, 50% during worship, and black during all videos.

mjd

 

How we do it: Staging

We use a portable staging system by Stage Right. We use their Z-80/800 supports. We wanted some versatility in the height we could put the stage, so we purchased supports that can adjust in 2″ increments from 18″ – 24″. We purchased 10 of the 4′ x 8′ sections for a total of 320 sq ft of stage space. In the theater, we have limited space at the front, so we only use 9 of the 10 panels. In the YMCA, we adjusted the stages to different heights for affect. At the theater, we set all of our stage sections to 24″ so people on stage are easily viewed by people in the theater (the angle of flooring is not enough so that it’s easy to view from all of the seats in the auditorium). The higher the support, the less stable – but they have a fix for that…

These staging supports and panels are heavy and expensive, but we made that decision on purpose. We needed staging that could last us for the entirety of our time as a portable church – so we made a larger investment in our staging. We use velcro wraps to make things more stable. We’ve had a problem with one panel that crops up every once in a while as warped or slightly bent, but then we won’t have a problem again for weeks. I’m still not sure what causes that, but we usually don’t have time to troubleshoot between setup, rehearsal, and service.

Our drum kit usually takes a 8′ x 8′ (2 panels) and most of our other musicians only require a 4′ x 4′ section. We don’t have much room for set design, but we make do. Hope that helps someone!

mjd

 

Songselect?

Many of you worship leaders out there use songselect from CCLI? Do you find it helpful? Any of you tie it into planningcenteronline.com?

 

From the Sound Engineer

I’ve found some postings like this genuinely beneficial in the past, so I thought I’d add some of these here and there. These are some changes and challenges we’ve dealt with since the move to the movie theater. Here are Zach’s thoughts…

1. for our move to the theater, we bought a lexicon mx-300 effects unit. it has a ton of uses but we mainly use it to add reverb to the very dry signal that we get in the theater. right now we’re just using the #2 Small But Large preset. maybe one day i’ll sit down and really tweak a user preset for the theater but for right now this works pretty well. the way we hook it up to the mackie 32.4 is a little interesting. we use aux send 5 to send our signal to the unit and then bring it back into the stereo input for channels 31/32. this enables us to tweak the amount of reverb for each channel and then have a master fader for the wet signal coming back. i guess we could also EQ the wet signal but i choose to bypass EQ on that channel. having the fader is great for matthew and anybody else that switches between singing and speaking. while he’s singing, we have a fair amount of reverb on his voice, but when he starts to talk, we want it to be drier. so i just pull down the fader on the F/X channel to take more of the wet signal out of the mix. then when he kicks the band back in, i just slide it back up to Unity. that way i can leave the aux send level on his channel in the same position all the time and just use the fader. same is true for pastor joe. i have a tiny amount of reverb on his voice but it’s much easier to use the fader to adjust that then the aux knob.

2. stay away from unbalanced cables and adaptors as much as possible! we’re starting to be able to debug some problems in our system (mostly hisses and whatnot) and a lot of the problems come from mismatched cables or bad adaptors. anything that uses a 1/4″ connector (except mono instruments like guitars) should use a TRS cable. this includes anything that goes into the mixer, the interconnects from the mixer to the rack units and the monitor mixes from the snake to the amps or the powered monitors. also, we’ve had several adaptors go bad or just provide a bad connection. if you can afford to buy an adaptor, you can afford to buy, make or have someone make you the correct cable with the correct connectors.

3. when we first moved into the theater, we didn’t use our DriveRack unit at all. we went straight out from the mixer and plugged into the theater sound system. on a lark, i plugged the output of the mixer into the DriveRack and then out of that into the theater system. even on Full Range mode (no crossover, no compression, etc.) it gives us a fuller sound. it must do some internal magic that fattens out our sound. it also keeps our levels down as at first it was clipping pretty bad with our normal output. so i have to drop our main output from the board about 5dB from what we used to send.

Thanks Zach! If you have any questions or comments, drop them to me at matthew@uprisingchurch.org so I can pass them on to Zach.

 

Highly Technical

WARNING: The jargon below will be slightly technical for our typical reading audience, but hopefully someone will find this useful (it’s important to know that our theater seat 310):

VIDEO
Our inputs include the following: Live video feed, Keynote Presentation via Mac, and DVD player. These inputs run into a Videonics MX-1. The MX-1 feeds into a signal amplifier (we were told not to push S-video greater than 50 ft. without an amplifier). The signal amplifier pushes a signal about 80 ft. up to the theater’s projector (BNC Connectors to a Y-Connector running back into S-video) and down to an LCD TV we use on stage to prompt Pastor Joe and me with lyrics and points (also BNC connectors to a Y-connector running back into S-Video). Freddy (our media director) runs the Keynote Presentation and MX-1 switcher.

AUDIO
We’re now using a Mackie Onyx 32.4. We’re utilizing about 22 of those channels now (I think). We use a 16 channel 100′ snake to push our channels to the board. We also added a Lexicon 300 this weekend (and I love it!). We used the YMCA’s acoustics to give us our effects, but the sound absorption of the theater required us to buy an FX processor. I was really happy with our sound yesterday. It was really dry on the stage, but that’ll take some time to tweak. We run out of our board using L & R XLR and run stereo into the theater’s sound system which only takes RCA – which requires some conversion. Their system has a terrible buzz in it that was only amplified by how we pushed the system. Sean (our amazingly helpful contact at Regal – thanks again for your hard work this weekend, Sean) said that it should be fixed within the next week. Something’s definitely not grounded. I’m not sure about everyone else in the room, but it was deafening to me – but I tend to be slightly anal retentive at moments.

LIGHTING
We’re limited by two things – electricity and dimmer packs. We run 12 par cans (300 W/each) and 2 ellipsoidal (600 W/each) divided on 2 dimmer packs (Lightronics AS 42-D). These lights are controlled by a Lightronics 3012. We used the same system in the YMCA, but the room was so big it really got lost. The same system was quite overwhelming in the Regal from the stage. It was extremely difficult to see past the first 4 or 5 rows. We’re going to continue to tweak the system, hopefull adding 2 more dimmer packs to control lighting in the back of the room. Right now we run all of our par cans right over the stage (2 short light trusses angled to the stage) and we run our ellipsoidals as a wash of white on the stage (2 trees on opposite sides of the theater about 50 feet from the stage). We hope to add 6 more 500W par cans to the the two back light trees and 4 more 300W par cans on the short trusses to give us a greater wash on the stage. We’re going to have to really work to ensure our wash doesn’t bleed over onto our stage. We may use colored ellipsoidals on the back trees rather than par cans. We actually have 2 ellipsoidals and about 8 or so par cans we’re not using. The electricity and dimmer packs are really our limiting factors.

Okay, that’s all I can handle for now. I’m really not a technical person – which is why I’m so grateful for Zach, Chel, Dave, Freddy, Lincoln, and David McCaffrey and all they do. It’s an amazing thing to watch the setup each weekend!

mjd

 

Membership, huh?

Starting next month, we have some changes coming to the band, vocalists and tech crew. Because we’ve been a church plant with volunteers coming from other churches, we haven’t pushed the issue, but the time has come to ask for a commitment from each of the team members. The commitment is two-fold: be a member of UC, and regularly attend a Connect Group. Of course we’ll have subs in and out on occassion that won’t be members, but we’ll check into the spiritual life of each person before we allow them the public role on stage at UC.

Why?
Because before we put people on a mic, or behind some type of electronics that can influence the weekend service, we need to know they’re committed to God and growing in their relationship with Him (we do this through the accountability of Connect Groups) and that they’re committed to the vision of the church (we know this through membership). We want to make every stride we can to ensure that we’re like-minded. We’re not all the same, we don’t all share the same convictions, but we share the same belief system, and we must stand united to facilitate the music and media ministry at UC each weekend. We must all agree to submit to the spiritual authority of our pastor.

When I discussed this with another local worship leader, I got a really negative reaction. Asking for this level of commitment in Nashville is evidently taboo. I believe we must break that paradigm and encourage our musicians to be committed to the vision and leadership of one church.

Always changing (and hopefully for the better)…

mjd