…because we’re not there yet

So this week I’m ramping up for our upcoming Drive conference. Drive is a conference we do every year for church leaders where we kind of open up about how we do church at North Point. This is my first year involved with it, but I’ve listened to past conferences and I’m very excited about it even though it is going to be a whole lot of extra hours on the production end. But it’s so worth it to if we can help one other church adopt an organizational principle that helps them move their foward in their mission. We kick off the conference one week from next Monday.

So in preparation for the music rehearsals that start this week, I’ve been deep in pre-production for the conference. The conference is made up of five sessions spread over three days. Aside from the main talk, each session also features a mix of music, video, and other creativeness from our Service Programming Division.

Last week I started on input lists for each session taking time to figure out exactly where to swap different singers, band members, speakers, etc. for the different sessions in order to maintain the easiest workload on our monitor engineers while maintaining the best channel layout for the consoles.

At FOH we decided we’re going to do the entire conference in one show on the Venue. The advantage is that as we get closer to the conference, things will be getting moved around so once we start mixing the rehearsals it will be easy to move things into different sessions if the need be. After I finished my first stab at the input list, I started programming the entire show in the D-Show standalone software. It’s going to be pretty crazy, but I think I’ve got a handle on it. One of the cool things about the Venue is I can program channel names and plugin assignments to change. This afternoon I got those programmed along with the channel layout. It seems like it should work pretty good. I’m not sure how exactly things will work if they move cues between sessions, but in theory it will all translate.

After Drive, I’m planning on recording something for theSoundBooth.com’s new podcast. I’m not sure if it will get used or not, but it will most likely be about pre-production-esque things. If it does get used, I’m going to release my Drive conference stuff to show how pre-production benefits everything from a large conference to a small service with a small band. More on that later…