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Author Micah Cambre

funniest hour of television is . . .

12 midnight MST. Why? Because the Cartoon Network features back to back episodes of Futurama and Family Guy.

Now to catch up on much needed sleep.

i haven’t been busier in a while

This weekend is has wiped me out. I think I’m going to keep this a little short and just go to bed soon.

Yesterday I spent in Boulder and vicinity. After my morning lab doing a surround sound project (we’re mixing audio and clips for a little scene in Jurrasic Park!), I made my way up to Boulder to go to Les Kahn’s place. We had everything ready to reconfigure my files so that they’d work with Pro Tools but found out that we had to get an authorization number before we could do anything. Simple enough . . . except that the Mackie website gave us an error. Man, that pissed both of us off. Now I’m going to have to drive there again, and it takes over an hour to get there from the house.

This adds to the bad news: I have until next Thursday to mix all of these files and make them sound professional quality like a CD. On top of that, the studio is booked up almost completely. I won’t really have ANY time until next week. So I don’t know what to do right now. I hope that there are a few mornings this week that I can snag because I sincerely need a LOT of time.

Today, I attended First Presbyterian Church in Boulder to play the piano with worship team at the regular contemporary service. This was the first time the college band has played at that service so people know what they sound like. It was nice to actually play an instrument instead of running the sound. I even tried singing a song or two while playing, and it was extremely difficult for me since I’d never done it before. The rest of the day was lunching with the band, setting up for rehersal, tryouts for new band members, and rehersal for Tuesday’s service. About 10 hours or more with the same people and at the church. It was tiring but fun.

I’ll get to sleep in tomorrow and I really hope it’s the last time this semester that I’m sleeping in because I’d like to be able to go into the studio every morning from now until the end of the semester to mix the CD. However, I don’t believe this will happen and I’m going to be so stressed trying to figure out what to do. Time to contact people in Houston to see if I can find a free Pro Tools rig for me to use.

I guess this was longer than I was planning. Go forth and get your fun on.

Nichole fever

I must be full of dumb luck. Why do I say that? I seem to run into dumb luck more than often. Tonight, I decided at the last minute that I was going to go to the Nichole Nordeman concert here in Denver. Tickets were $14 at the door and I was gonna give my last spare change to go. Well, I get to the door to buy the tickets when one of the vendors tells me there’s an extra ticket for me. I ask how much I owe and they said nothing. Say what?! I just happen to show up at the right time and get a free ticket!! What kind of dumb luck is that?!

The whole night I stood by the mixer and talked to the engineer. He travels with her tour so he’s very familiar with what happens during the night. I didn’t realize that every venue they perform they rent the equipment they use. They don’t have their own equipment that they carry to each place because their needs always change. Makes plenty of sense.

Andrew Peterson was the opening act and he did a really great job. I highly suggest you check him out because he was awesome.

In not as good news, I found out I only have 2 weeks until the studios close for the semester. This highly concerns me because I haven’t even seriously begun mixing the tracks yet and I have 12 songs to mix. I just hope everything works out.

it’s official

After months of preparation and persistance, it’s finally 100% go for the CD. I got my final yes last night at the Annex service from Bill (the director). He listened to my rough mixes that I made from some tracks on my PC and was initially very concerned because the vocals were too far in the background. After EQing the tracks a little and showing him the potential, he was impressed and plugged the CD later that night. There was pretty moderate interest right away and that’s a great thing. The best part about this CD is there’s potential that it’ll be sold on Amazon.com! How about that?!

This is the best news I could get and probably the biggest thrill for me almost ever. I’m really excited and can’t wait to spend time mixing everything. The bad part about it is that the CD won’t be finished until probably June at earliest which is after I’m back in Texas for the summer! But that’s just how everything has gone unfortunately. My worst enemy right now is time. There’s so much that needs to be done and I won’t have much time to complete these tasks.

Everyone that reads this, even if I don’t know you, you are now entitled to buy a CD to support the ministry. It’s only $10 a CD, extremely cheap and easy to buy. Remember, you are going to get a CD that sounds just like Third Day – Offerings or Michael W. Smith – Worship. The band really did a wonderful job!!

workin’ on da project

I have in my computer the live worship recording . . . time’s a wastin’ . . .

life post grad

It’s a little less than a month from no more school for the rest of my life. It’s been six long, hard, fun, boring, exciting, stressful, and on and on, years since I began my college career.

Thinking back to freshman year of college, I remember thinking how I knew so much. And I realize now how I knew so little. Freshman year wasn’t as much of a fresh start as I would have liked it to be since I wasn’t attending the college of my dreams. Then again, I didn’t have a college of my dreams. But I was so undecided with choosing a major that I guess anywhere would have been fine. I still sorta wish that I could have started college at a totally foreign place, maybe even different state. Or even started at a junior college. There was too much pressure for me to go to SMU. Well, the past is the past.

Now I’m at the point where I begin the next phase of life. I have no job leads, my life is sorta being turned upside down in a way since there’ll be some additions to the family soon, a new home for my dad, and another big change in where I’ll be living. I don’t really have a form of stability in the next few months ahead of me and I can tell it’s bugging me. Not only do I not care about anything at school right now, I’m thinking more and more about how difficult it will be out there without any job leads.

In more positive news about the coming months, I will be celebrating multiple times with my family and friends after graduation in Dallas and Houston. Hopefully making a little money to earn back since I’ve been spending too much, I’ll save enough for the big road trip in July! Road trip you ask? Yeah, here’s the small details:

About the 6th or 7th day of July, maybe earlier, Jonathan and I will be leaving from Houston or San Antonio to head west. The initial plan is to drive through New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, back to Cali, up through Oregon, Washington and then to Vancouver, back down through Idaho and Montana down through Colorado and possibly through Kansas and Oklahoma but maybe not those last two states. We hope to take exactly three weeks to make this trip. I’m mostly excited to travel to the Grand Canyon, Northern California, Vancouver and Montana. Obviously Colorado will be a great place! We haven’t detailed the trip yet but hopefully I’ll get on that really soon.

The last week of June I’ll be going to another fabulous UM ARMY camp helping with the programs staff of Rebecca and Brion! We were the same team at college camp last year and I think we had great chemistry even though there were a few rough spots. This camp hopefully will be even better than last because we’ll be more organized. Then in August is the big UM ARMY 25 year bash thrown at the AstroArena (or whatever the call it now…). Performers include Wayne Kerr, Chris Tomlin, and Matt Neely!! That is going to be a heck of a party if you ask me! Maybe I can get a hookup from Chris or Wayne to let me help them out and get some experience.

And speaking of Wayne, if you don’t know who he is, you’re missing out on a truly wonderful music minister. His website link is just to your right, go click it and join us at his CD kickoff party. I wish I could throw the UCF the same thing this summer… maybe I’ll make a surprise visit next fall and line up our band from this year to play some of the tunes. My understanding of why there’s such a hitch in the whole CD project is because of concern about selling 300 CDs to get all the money back. I’m confident that we can make our money back. Just give me the money to make the CD!

what happened?!!

On early Thursday morning, my whole website and e-mail address died. The web host I’ve been paying to use crashed. It was down the whole weekend and I didn’t have access to any of my incoming and outgoing e-mails! I have talked with the administrators of the host and I will hopefully be getting a month of free service for this inconvenience. I also got another gigabyte of transfer per month so I’m happy! Now let’s just hope that everything has been solved.

In better news, the CD project is almost in full force! Just a few more paths to cross and I’ll be on my way. It’s great!

CD project

It has been just over a month since I recorded the worship service live and what have I been able to do for this CD? Almost nothing. I’ve made a budget sheet, I’ve edited it a few times and hopefully and getting to a point where it’ll actually get going. I still have a million things to do once I get approval from the director and it’ll take a while for these million things to happen.

I know it’s greedy, but I WANNA make this CD! WAAAAHH!! Yeah, I’m being a big baby and trying to do anything to make this happen, but how awesome would it be to have a real CD that YOU produced and engineered and mastered and basically made?! Not many people can claim this.

So one big issue that was holding this project back was not even knowing if the recordings turned out decently. On Sunday evening, I was fortunate enough to listen to the tracks. 75% of it is completely workable and we even have a money song:: this means that we have one song which could potentially do something on the charts because it’s so good.

I’m excited about what happened and what can happen but it’s gonna take time. Our last service is two weeks from this past Tuesday so that’s another bad thing. But it can still happen with a LOT of work from me. And as soon as I get those tracks from the engineer, I’ll be spending all my time on them hopefully.

I update my computer and it decides to . . .

CRASH!

Last night, I installed some software on my computer. After reboot, WHAM, BAM, it wouldn’t load up. It BROKE! What a pain. I have recovered almost everything I lost so thank goodness. So now I have to spend another 8 hours updating and reinstalling everything on my computer. And now it’s past 3am because of Daylight Savings. This will make me sleep in once again and skip church because I hate getting too little sleep like I have the past few nights.

Ongoing subject

I am someone who likes to reminisce about the old days. I’ll probably do this in many of my posts just because it’s so much fun. So what is the reminisce of the day?

“Flight of the Navigator”

If there’s one movie in the world that has stuck with me in one form or another through the years, “Flight of the Navigator” would be it. I am impatiently awaiting until they finally release this on DVD because I’ll pay any price to get it. It’s on VHS and being sold on eBay for a lot of money because of it being out of print. Maybe I’ll finally win an auction and buy a copy.

So why is this movie so good? It’s not like it was nominated for any awards; it’s not like the actors and actresses should have been given an Oscar for their performance; the music definitely wasn’t your Star Wars soundtrack. However, this movie is just one of those movies that brings me back to those days on TBS back in the late 80’s when I’d watch it endlessly. I loved the whole alien from space theme (I had some G.I. Joe vehicles that were silver plated and I would imagine playing with them like I was in the movie or something), I thought the music was really cool for the movie theme (I’ll explain why in a sec), the whole concept was awesome! My favorite scene is when they are flying around and the Beach Boys tune “I Get Around” is playing in the background. It’s one of those scenes that brings a smile to my face because it looks like so much fun!

This movie has always come back in my mind for one reason or another. The first time I saw “The Sixth Sense” around the scene where Bruce Willis is trying to negotiate with the guy in the bathroom, the music in the background immediate reminded me of Flight of the Navigator. It was the progression of the song that triggered this thought. In fact, there are many movies with this same progression. Even “Unsolved Mysteries” has this progression. Basically, I should nickname this progression the “Alien Progression”. It’s always used in mystery, spacy kind of movies. I should try to figure out if it actually has a real name.

At parties where I hear “I Get Around”, the first thought that comes to mind is that scene. Seeing anything NASA brings back the movie. And just about any children’s movie around that time period, they all pretty much remind me of this movie. I sorta just clump them all together as nostaligia. I’ll write about more of these movies in the future.