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This Is Awesome…

Posted in Kinda Cool on April 22, 2012| 1 Comment »

This is awesome but I’ll admit that it also made me very sad. Screw you, Time. Just screw you.

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Okay, my sadness was somewhat relieved upon seeing this comment on the video.

I laughed out loud by myself for almost two minutes straight at that. Whew.

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Ramblings Of A Tired Man

Posted in Kinda Cool on August 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’m up way too late but I’m feeling pretty good. It’s such a rush for me when technology finally cooperates with my vision and helps me to execute a task at hand.

I’m doing some tracking today with my OneAmongMany guys and gal – nothing too complex, just something simple to help someone else know what we might sound like. We’re meeting at my church because that’s the only place we have access to drums that we can play as loud and as long as we like. I ideally wanted to have a recording that was just a step beyond a mix straight off the board at church – that’s usually never satisfying to me. I thought as a compromise, I could get the board mix and a room mix, both with my Zoom H4n, and track the essential components (i.e., vocals, whatever else I had room for) on my RME Fireface.

I take it back – I ideally would have liked to track each part of the band individually as they played together live (time constraints are keeping us from tracking each part separately) just so we could have a better time mixing. That notion was scrapped pretty early on because I only have eight inputs on my Fireface and I think our tracking needs exceed that. I hadn’t found that ultra-cheap/mint-condition Digimax on Craigslist yet so the additional eight tracks that would have come with that unit is nonexistent.

But then today happened. I remembered I still had an old Fostex VF-16, a 16 track digital multitrack recorder that I’ve had for years now. This was what I first learned to record with and I spent hours upon hours figuring out how to record, edit and mix all on this one unit with a 3 inch LCD screen. I managed to track quite a bit with it over the past 10 years and I believe I have a ton of recordings of friends, more talented than I, singing and playing that I can’t wait to listen to again.

Well, I found it again today and, after I blew all the dust off, I booted her up. After fumbling through menus for a bit I found my footing. With the VF-16 running into my Fireface via ADAT, I have eight more channels I can record with today that I didn’t have an hour ago. I didn’t even know that was possible with this thing! Granted, the preamps on the Fostex aren’t the greatest, it’s still nice to have additional inputs at my disposal.

Now, it’s just a matter of everything working again in a few hours when I set up at church.

Sorry for the boring gear talk this morning. I’ll try and keep down the noise.

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Global Force

Posted in Kinda Cool on April 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This past weekend, I had a chance to play again with Aaron David and this time we found ourselves at the Global Force Total Access Worship Night at Christian Tabernacle on the east side of town (whew, mouthful).

I used to live on this side of town many years ago so I vividly recall driving by the church every day yet never attending a service there. Aaron was one of three worship leaders invited to take part in the event, along with the Global Force band kicking things off for the night. Those guys are no joke! They’re more gospel, stylistically, and they can ~~sing~~ sang and play. Some real talent there, and their passion in worshiping comes across so strongly. They were sincerely a joy to worship with.

Ki Kyham took the stage next. He’s another talented worship leader from the city who also started his own record label, so he had some of the artists he signed singing along with him. Talented crew, for sure.

It was at this point that I questioned (with my inside voice) whether Aaron or Ben Donnelly (the final worship leader playing that evening) would fit in with the rest of the event. There had been a pretty solid gospel music theme running through the night and the crowd so I was unsure how receptive everyone would be to the two (seemingly) out-of-place rock n roll worship leaders included in the mix.

Oh, how mistaken I was.

I was floored by how passionate the congregation was with their worship. We did a four song set, three of which were Aaron’s originals so they obviously were not familiar with them, yet they seemed to sing along louder with these songs, they seemed to dance more, just go nuts more than they had the rest of the night. And that is just a testament to a church and crowd who were trained to worship with anything. They didn’t require perfection to worship. They didn’t require songs they were familiar with to worship. There were no prerequisites for them to worship God. And it was incredibly refreshing. And it was also humbling because I realize I’m not always that way. I’m a snob a lot of the time when it comes to music and it affects how freely I worship.

We ended our set with Tomlin’s “Our God” and everyone just lost it. I haven’t seen people just going for it in worship like that in a quite some time. It was crazy. And infectious. I remember noticing one guy jumping higher than I’ve ever seen someone jump in worship. I’m talking about jumping up and bringing your knees up to your chest kinda jumping. It was that kinda nuts out there.

Thank you, Global Force and Christian Tabernacle for providing a much needed breath of fresh air for me.

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