How Are We Doing?

If you attended the Leadership Conference with Rick White, you may recall that he said we should ask our fellow church members ‘How are we doing?’ I agree, and since I can’t talk to that many people to get a good feel, I’m asking each of you to ask your friends and associates ‘How are we doing?’ and report back to me. In the past month, many things have gone on, and we’ve made a number of changes – hopefully for the better. I’d like to get some feedback from the folks ‘out there’ and from youm about what we’ve done.

Most of you know we now have an arrangement with ASP-IS (they used to be Associated Sound Products) to act as a consulting company for us. Bob Blair is one of the two owners of ASP-IS and is also the Technical Director for Hope Community church in Cary. His specialty at ASP-IS is installed systems, while his partner – Bert Rogers- concentrates on the rental side of the house.

Bob has come in and adjusted gains and equalizations for the amps and speakers to try to improve our delivery. Thanks to his efforts, we have more headroom during our worship, but especially during the sermons. He has made a number of recommendations about things we can do to improve our sound quality and functionality. Some should be obvious – like making sure all cables are identified so that changes cam be accomplished quickly – to improvements in the physical environment. Some things cost money – some are things we can do as team projects. As these projects are planned, I will let you know and be asking for volunteers - be forewarned!

As Kurt noted in the last post the Soundcraft board was out for a week being serviced. All of the broken connectors were fixed, as were all of the features. It would have been nice to have all of the faders cleaned, but that would have been a massive effort and would have meant being without our board for a much longer time.

At the same time we re-installed the board, we re-worked some of the snake channels. (Thanks Fred!) The nine lines from the drum kit now use channels 1-10 (channel 2 is an odd ball on the snake). The wired vocals are also grouped. A list of the snake channel to board channel assignments has been posted over the snake head. It also shows a listing of the normal instrument or vocal assigned to that board channel. This should cut down on channel swapping at the board end.

We need to continue this labeling and standardization to the booth area. I’ve asked Jordon to prepare a list of what he wants to be assigned to each Aviom channel so that we can standardize those connections. The desire is to have each instrument or vocal assigned to its own channel. The reality is that we are limited to 16 channels on the Aviom, so we must take some feeds from groups instead of individual channels.

Beginning with Groundbreaking Weekend, the new service times will allow us some flexibility in scheduling. I am experimenting with having one person work both days, and having the second person switch off between Saturday and Sunday. Let me know what you think.

In case you didn’t catch it in the meeting last Wednesday – we will be having guests the weekend of 23-24: Jason Ryder and the LateNite band from Healing Place Church will be leading worship for all four services and will also be performing for the youth Sunday night as part of the ‘See You At The Pole’ (S.Y.A.T.P.) rally. He will be bringing his own engineer, so our involvement will be minimal. It should be an awesome weekend! If you don't have the Healing Place CD/DVD - pick up a copy in the Resource Center.

Many thanks to Kurt who has obtained some contact cleaner and lubricant for our cable connections. He has been going through them and getting rid of the dirt build up and oxidation. Once he’s done, we should not have problems caused by dirty contacts for a while. He told me what he paid for this stuff, and it is a significant donation to the church. It is being safely stored so that we can be good stewards of God's resources.

Our next Arts meeting will be on Tuesday, September 12. We will have a time to go over things specific to the Tech teams and to the Sound Team. This is a great time to ask questions and learn. Since we strive for excellence in what we do, what can we do to help you be better for Him? Let me know what you would like to talk about or what areas you need more information about. If you have a need in an area, I can assure you that someone else on the team needs to hear the same thing. Don’t be shy – let me know what we can do to help.

I still believe that the C3 Sound Team is one of the best there is. I know that no other team I have ever seen can compare to your hearts for hurting people. We do what we do not for the accolades of men, but to help those who need help come closer to God. Keep up the GREAT work!

God bless you all.