Topeka Bible Church seeks Tech Director position

With five weekend worship times, three different venue locations, two synchronized bands, and a huge list of other audio/visual, IT, and tech team management needs - Topeka Bible Church is seeking a new "Tech Director" role. You can read that last "TBC Worship Matters" (worship arts family eNewsletter) to see what Nat said about this position.

Anyone interested in seeing the position description or submitting a resume can drop me a line. Pray that God would line up Topeka Bible Church with a perfect match so His kingdom would expand.

Video of two worship bands synchronized playing in different locations at the same time

Here's a quick new of this last weeks rehearsal with the Main Auditorium (MA) band and Lower Auditorium (LA) band.

Click-Track production prank with musicians at the Topeka Bible Church light show

Here's a little something that will prime your pump for this year's Light Show at Topeka Bible Church.

What do you get when 16 musicians (that can't see or hear each other) are playing to a click track that speeds up? The following is the result from last year.



The production crew simply couldn't wait to unleash the musicians on this prank click-track that gradually sped up. What you are hearing in the video are the actual musicians playing along. What fun to hear them try to keep up.

Worship Tip and Rewind: October 11, 2009 #sundaysetlist #sundaysetlists

(If you are reading this in your RSS feed, then you'll want to hit the actual site to catch the video.) Topics in this week's worship tip & rewind (have two separate roles on stage - worship leader & band leader, put vocal team/choir in columns in front of mics). Get past the dork and listen to the content.

Subscribe to my YouTube stream to catch all future tips automatically.

SET LIST:

• Today Is the Day > Brewster
• Sing To The King > Foote, Home
• From The Inside Out > Houston
• You Are My King > Foote
• I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go > Roun­se­fell, Brown, Prior

Watch/listen to last weekend's message

Links to other setlists:

• Fred McKinnon
• Rick Kirkpatrick
• Twitter #sundaysetlists or #sundaysetlist
  

How and Why to Use Click-Tracks in Worship

If you are looking for the 100+ library of worship click tracks and audio loops - click here. But if you've wondered what in the world the musicians are listening to in their ears... read on. You can listen to an example of one of the custom click/loop tracks we used this past weekend at TBC for two of the songs (Sing to the King + Revelation Song). You'll hear click/cue track on the left (sent to the musicians' in ear monitor) and the loop/ambient track on the right (sent to the front of house system). By the way, a thank you to John Bowes for loaning me the eBay special electro-harmonix "Voice Box" he temporarily bought - very nice vocoder effect on Sing to the King. It's the "robot voice effect" you hear on the chorus.

WHAT is a click-track? A click-track is a metronome beat that follows the tempo and time signature of a song.

WHY use a click-track? There are a number of great reasons to use a click-track.

1. The tempo remains steady through the entire song. No fudging. Makes rehearsals less of a headache. No more comments like, "Hey, slow down...this ain't no freight train." "We are slowing down...speed up."
   
2. The tempos from rehearsal to worship are consistent.
3. Frequent use develops a sense of inner beat among musicians.
4. Musicians know at what tempo they'll need to play their intro, riffs, outro (especially the drummer).
5. There's no annoying "drummer-stick-click" - an' a one, an' a two...to get the song going.
6. If cuing is used, the vocalists can sing the beginning of each section with confiendence - rather than wondering (do I come in now...how about now...now?).
7. You can flow from one song to the next with no dead time - smooth patching of music sets.
8. You can sync up to a music video anytime you need to or want to (iWorship DVD sets, audio loops & click tracks, or a custom video that needs to have the band synchronized, or even synchronize two bands together).
9. Your band will be set for the recording studio when the time comes.
10. You can put together a 3-story drive-in light show with live musicians in windows who can neither see or hear each other in separate rooms.
    

WHAT is a loop? A loop is extra "spice" on top of what a drummer is playing. Sometimes it's a repeatability beat pattern with a high pass EQ. Sometimes it includes synth and other ambient "icing on the cake" elements that augment the band (and difficult to reproduce in real-time, unless you are an Ableton Live freak on the stage).

WHY use a loop? It can bring studio production elements into a live music setting with ease. It also can augment your band if you are missing an instrument.

There are some cons to using click/loops. You can lose of spontaneity (unless Ableton Live MIDI triggering is used), or you might have a drummer with their time keeping pride, or the time it takes to learn/train, or even the monitoring system it costs to make it happen. But that's for another post. If you've got questions about click/loops, let us know - we live with these clicks/loops on every song and every week. Many musicians have been saying, "I'd never go back now that we are here."

Check out this virtual choir on YouTube by Eric Whitacre

Well done.

Create nice blown up musician floor worship outlines using Planning Center Online

As a musician, maybe you need bigger font/keys if you aren't using music, music stand, or you place it on the floor. If you use www.planningcenteronline.com and you've wanted an outline that you can put on the floor to see the songs and keys in bold...here's what you've been looking for. Thanks to the awesome people at www.planningcenteronline.com for the great tool they've created for us.

The coding file can be found here.

And a PDF example can be found here.

Email me with questions on implementation.

Do your musicians care about the technicians?

Some musicians take the stage rarely having the thought about who set up the equipment to support them or even the staging they stand on. Other musicians know exactly what went into everything to get the material in place. And some special musicians notice enough to take action to say "thank you" in a tangible way.

Listen to this pleasant little song showing our love for audio guys and gals.

Check out this story from Grace Church (Lititz, PA) where Matt McElravy is the worship leader.

FROM THE WORSHIP TEAM TO THE AUDIO TEAM
A few weeks ago, Zach Ford, one of our electric guitarists, approached me with an idea. He noticed that our audio techs in the monitor room were sitting on a metal folding chair during Sunday services. He proposed that the members of the Worship Team pull together to buy the Audio Team a nice leather chair, since they sit back there for all 3 of our morning services.

I thought this was a fantastic idea, and I was quite impressed with Zach taking the initiative to see this need and suggest a solution for it. So, Zach drafted an email to all the members on the current worship team cycle and I distributed it. The funds graciously began streaming in from our Worship Team.

Then, several days later Mike Smucker contacted me with an idea of his own. He had just recently purchased a brand new leather chair that he no longer needed. He suggested donating the chair to the Audio Team to meet their need. This was excellent!

I spoke to Zach about the chair, and he agreed that it was perfect. We also agreed that, since Mike purchased a brand new chair out of his own funds, that we would take the monies we had raised and bless Mike with them as a way of saying "thank you" for his generous gift. I was able to present this gift to Mike this past Wednesday at rehearsal.

And I'm happy to report that there is now a beautiful new chair for the audio techs in the monitor room! What a beautiful thing it is when the body of Christ joins together to encourage and build one another up!

My sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone who donated funds and made this gift possible!

Drum Loop - "Majesty" (Charlie Hall) - 75 BPM, split track

Just finished creating a drum loop for Charlie Hall's "Majesty" (Passion version) - click to listen. The road map is shorter than the recording (intro, v1, pc, c, v2, pc, c, c, outro). Loop is split L (click/cue) and R (loop). Travelling at 75 BPM. Lame by itself, perfect with a live band. Enjoy. We'll use it this weekend at Topeka Bible Church with our two synched bands.

How to plot on a map where people live who come to your church

Ever wondered where people live who attend your church? Ever need to figure out who lives in your neighborhood and attends the same church? Maybe you could use the data to start a Bible study in your neighborhood. Or maybe use the map to find the unreached people groups in your city.

If you've got a tab delimited database - then head over to http://www.batchgeocode.com/ and let it go to town. Try it out for your church. You might be surprised. Maybe you won't.

Check out the plot for Topeka Bible Church. Click on the images for the larger size.

• The "hole" you see in the middle of Topeka is the park/VA.
• We draw from SW of TBC mostly.
• We strong draw just SE of 470.
• TBC's "unreached people group" is in the triangle created between north of 470, Topeka Blvd (just East of TBC), and the Philip Billard Municipal Airport (North East).

How about you? Does Christ have a presence in your neighborhood?

I See TED People: 6th sense computer

You'll need to wait about a minute or two into the video to grasp what the concept is. I admit it's both freaky and marvelous at the same time. Very interesting concept. Thanks to the verizontal blog for tipping me to this.

:: what crutch are you labeling as a 'tool?'

Check out what the President used as a teleprompter below. [If you are reading this in an RSS feed reader...you'll need to open this puppy up.] When I lead worship, sometimes I get the reaction, "Wow, you know all those words by heart." Shaa right, no I don't! We have two teleprompter screens in the back of the Mulvane main upper auditorium location AND Mulvane lower auditorium (LA) location. That means what the worshipers see, I see as well.



So don't think I'm all cocky and know all the lyrics when leading worship. I don't. When it comes down to it - the video screen is leading us all in worship, including me. It's our digital hymnal. Now if there was only a way to get the music up there, too.

Unfortunately, like our modern-day Presidents, I rely on the teleprompter like a tool. Or is it a crutch?


QUESTION: What other potential crutches do we label as tools in worship? At work? In life?

PRAYER: Lord, help me identify areas in my life that I'm taking the easy road spiritually. Show me what is really a tool or simply a crutch to get by.

:: how to sync two bands together in two different rooms

We launched two simultaneous worship locations with two bands playing in time together with the exact same music. I mean, they start together, play electric guitar solos together, stop together, and transition together. You can download a chart of how this works. But first, let's talk about why this monster was created.

Problem:

1. We wanted live music in order to stay away from the feeling of an "overflow location."
2. With the new location (right below our main auditorium), the sound and vibration of music bleeding through the floor/ceiling would give us issues. We didn't have another room option with enough seating.
3. We needed to exactly time the announcements, videos, and message for a video switch over.

Solution:
Synchronize two live bands in the two separate rooms with a click track in order to clean up both audio and video switching seamlessly.

Does this really work?
This isn't theory folks, we did this last week. God prepared us with our December light show - where for the last two years God allowed us to put together a drive-in light show synchronized with 16 live musicians in 11 different windows via a low-power FM radio transmission to vehicles. God help us for creating these monsters.

What you'll need:
1. Double the musicians.
2. One new FOH audio operator (aka sound guy).
3. A crazy, but logical, in-ear-monitor setup played to click tracks (Aviom, Hearback, or the like)
4. Prayer

So how do you get the bands to sync up when they can't see each other?

1. Click track source. It's usually a metronome or a loop on laptop/iPod. We use a DB-90 Dr.Beat by BOSS and hook up a memory UP/DOWN pedal through a TRS (stereo) cable on a BOSS A/B floor pedal. All songs are programed with the tempo. Then there's a START/STOP pedal that cranks it up. The DB-90 Dr.Beat gives us a count in (usually 4 beats), then the bands start.
2. Click track is fed into Room 1's IEM (In Ear Monitor) system, per usual, so the band stays in time and can start and stop without any drummer stick clicks for worship leader mouth-off's.
3. Run a CAT5 cable from Room 1's IEM system to Room 2 and put another IEM Aviom/Hearback box at the FOH board. Use this IEM box to dump the click/loop/ and lead vocal (or instructions on mic) into a second separate IEM system that Room 2 will use.
4. Setup channel 1 in Room 2's IEM system (Aviom, Hearback) to have the feed from Room 1's IEM system. This gets the click from Room 1 into the ears of Room 2 musicians. Voila...they can now play with the band upstairs. But you aren't done yet, what about loops? Read on...
5. Use an aux send or send group from Room 1's FOH board down to Room 2's FOH board.
6. Setup a COM (communication) system so that when the leaders in Room 1 and 2 talk in their mics...they can hear each other. The way to accomplish this is to send from Room 2's FOH board back to Room 1's IEM system.

This will serve for your audio for any video, message, or anything else you can't duplicate in Room 1. This also gets any loops into a Room 2's hands from upstairs to blend with Room 2's band. Almost done, remember when you rehearse together or if there's a crash-and-burn in Room 1...Room 2 will need to know. You need a 2-way COM setup...
Download a visual layout here.

And you're done. Yes, there's lots more to it...but that's the quick run down.