KEYS
SIMPLE FIXES TO ONGOING PROBLEMS | Ed Kerr
I ’ ve been involved in worship ministry for a long time . Ended on the 4 chord hundreds of times . Gone to 6 minor for a tag a ton . Concentrated on playing in time with a click track until it ’ s second nature to me . But you know what , all that experience wasn ’ t much help in my last service . During the opening song my mind was trying to settle down from a frustrating setup time .
I ’ m not sure about you or what your tolerance level is for craziness setting up equipment for worship , but this time I finally maxed out mine . Rather than being able to look at my congregation from a place of peace I was doing my best to hide the fact that inside I was beating myself up for letting setup problems from the weeks before continue and disrupt this week ’ s setup .
So , I finally did something about it . This Sunday at church I ’ ll be using a new workstation on my keyboard stand that holds my CP88 , my MacBook Pro running tracks , clicks and guides , an iPad for viewing my chord charts , and an audio interface with 4 outputs running to 2 stereo direct boxes going to a snake that connects to our sound system . Oh , and there ’ s a boom for my vocal mic . Simple , right ?
Yes ! This weekend as I set up all this gear at
church for the first time using my workstation it will be a bit of a challenge . I ’ ll write out some flow charts and notes and diagrams so that audio goes where it should and MIDI connections work properly . There may be a glitch or two with my setup , but I ’ m confident that things will go smoothly .
Why would I be confident when so much is new in my setup ? Because I ’ ve spent time preparing the setup and refining it . I ’ ve used
Arggh ! I needed to figure out what ’ s not working . My keyboard setup was a spaghetti bowl of cables . Tracking down a mic line from a direct box meant following a mic cable inch by inch through a mound of other cables piled on the floor by our stage box . Audio routing that had worked at my home studio didn ’ t work at church . The list of what didn ’ t work was long . Too long !