New Views–New Everything

This is the new view from where I’ll be standing Sunday.  Exciting.  New place to host Upward…a phenomenally growing program to reach kids in our area with sports.  We’ve outgrown out current seating for the contemporary service.  So…our expansion meant, a gym. 

The sound system is cool.  Not that we can figure it out quite yet.  It’s on some sort of computerized delay so that the live sound hits the back of the room first and times itself to keep the echo — keeps bounce and natural delays to a minimum. 

See the ”baffles” hung on the walls (the dark squares seen here)…they take the bounce down to a minimum!  Amazing the difference. 

New touch sensitive keyboard for the grand piano guy that I played with a bit last night…very nice underscoring and invitation sounds on it.  Although I think the keys would fatigue my fingers as hard and long as we jam. 

New:  video feed.  Wow.  Playing on a cam.  Why does the thought of that make my stomach knot up?  Talk about being put on the spot.  But, ivery cool…”life” it will no doubt add. 

We will now see the words all the way up above the crows nest now rather than on TVs hung 20 feet away.  Better wear your specs!  Everything is so new and so high tech we can’t even figure out where the power button is. 

New:  earphone monitors where you can adjust everything you hear in the band on your own to get what YOU want and need.  We didn’t get nearly that far last night and probably won’t for Saturday.  I don’t know that I’ll like not hearing the congregation, and we don’t have crowd mics yet.  So…that will be a minus for me on that I’m sure.  No doubt we’ll be able to hear “us”…but it’s about response to “them”.  As long as the leader can hear them, we’ll probably be okay.  Any body else use them? 

I show up last night for our first sound board learning practice: new parking lots was laid, couldn’t find a place to park the lot was so full, and my orientation outside was totally off.  A gazillion people there for a funeral in the other sanctuary, yet we could still blow the roof off and have practice in the new place!   At least we didn’t have to take down the set for it and put it back up later in the week! 

More pics later…couldn’t interupt the funeral taking pics.

Marx at His Height

A Gift for the Keyboardists out there.  Very fun.  (3:00+; requires sound)

Chico Marx and Beer Barrel Polka.  He hammers it out with quite the entertaining flare!  

Keyboarding & Praise Band: Keyboarding, Metronomes, Floppy Disks Drives

• Buying a keyboard?

• Curious about electronic keyboards? Want to know more about the electronic keyboards and what they can do?
• What is a good low cost starter option for electronic keyboarding?
• What factors should I consider when comparison shopping?
• How I can use the metronome and recording feature on my keyboard to be a better keyboardist?

I tried to address questions people often ask me as I wrote the keyboard blog today. Click here to read more: Electric Keyboarding Considerations .