I decided to change my picture. I took this picture at our last rehersal. I like how it came out. I won’t keep the picture up for too long but possibly for a few weeks. I need to give the worship team a copy of them.
I finally got something done for my senior seminar. Yay!
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.
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!!
I have in my computer the live worship recording . . . time’s a wastin’ . . .
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.
does my title make sense? i thought it sounds cool. Basically, it means I’m in the midst of a whelming time where I have papers, midterms, and trying to get my project turned into a CD. Then I’m off to LA, baby! Right in time for Oscar night!!! I doubt I’ll be in Hollywood that night but I might try to go if I can. I’ll have to talk to the people who are putting me up if they wanna go or not because right now they’re my ride.
As for my CD, so many things have to be done before I can even begin to get funding for it. I’m a little scared that it won’t happen and I’ll be upset about it because of all the money and preparation I’ve put into it. I think that there are a few things that I can share about it. I’m pretty sure that we have a good recording of everything. I’m pretty sure that we can use 10-14 songs from the whole recording and turn them into a CD. And I’m sure that the UCF can make back all of its money and earn a few thousand in profit no matter what. My roadblock at the current moment is time. I still have to get the recording, listen to it, approve the budget needs and time needs from Bill and his boss, and then mix and get it replicated. All this would take no less than a month unless I SPEED through the mixing and mastering process. It won’t be easy at all but I think it could be done. But obviously, politics and time are my obstacles.
Be really careful on eBay. Make sure you’re paying attention to who you’re bidding from because if they have no feedback, you might lose your money. It happened to me and I’m in the process of filing fraud charges.
I recorded the band last night. It went well. In fact, I got praise from Les. As I wrote a while ago, he won a grammy. So the fact that he praised me is definitely a good thing. It’s now a HUGE matter of licensing the songs for use, paying, producing, mixing, mastering, copying, stamping, and delivering. It also looks like we can produce no less than 1000 for financial and political reasons.
So my impressions of last night? The first two songs had feedback. Not a good way to start the recording. Maybe I can fix it and make it sound cool. That’ll be a nice challenge I don’t need. The rest of the songs went very well. Some weren’t as strong as I’d like but it’s no big deal. Everyone shined at one time or another performance-wise. Not knowing whether there would be enough room to re-record songs, we limited the number of songs to 14. There turned out to be enough room for at least another hour of music. So they re-performed the first song and I let them perform 3 more songs beyond that. We’ll see how all these tunes turn out.
I’m not very confident that the CD will actually get made right now because I’m positive they don’t want to spend the money. My biggest chance is to have as much information as I can about how much everything will cost; present a break even cost to the director and project how much of a profit we could make at different prices to sell the CDs. It definitely has potential if we can market it well enough and sell at least 500. I think it’s definitely doable but will take a lot of work.
In other news, I have 3 tests and 1 project to complete before spring break… and Oh crap, the Saturday following this one I’m going to Los Angeles for the week! Wow, time is just passing me by. I’ll be there visiting with an engineer, composer, and hopefully a few studios and such. Something I just thought about is the fact that I’ll be there when the Oscars are taking place!! Maybe I’ll go clubbing and meet some celebrities or something. That’s pretty cool to think about.
Oh yeah, speaking of all these trips and CDs and money issues, does anyone wanna pass some donations my way?! :D
It’s almost 4:30 am and I know I should be in bed but I just got back from Boulder from our “dress rehersal”. It wasn’t very smooth but at least we worked out most of the kinks of the songs. I don’t feel 100% confident but I’m sure it’ll be okay. If everything works out alright, the CD will hopefully be released middle of next month, no later if I can help it because I won’t be as busy until finals time.&br;&br;Now that I’m tired and ready to sleep, I think I will.
After a nice, long lock-in last night, I come home to sleep a little. When I wake up, I feel like yuck. I don’t know if it’s a fever or cold or what, but it’s not fun. Blowing your nose a million times, not having the desire to do anything, and now I’m hungry and don’t wanna fix something. I think I might just go to the grocery to pick up a little food but that means I’d have to get dressed!
You wanna know what makes writing a 1.5 hour e-mail so easy? Listening to Rachmaninov’s 2nd and 3rd piano concertos. It took me this long to e-mail the worship team about a meeting we had today and the whole time I was listening to Rach’s concertos. I think that music makes me work more efficiently and effectively. If you haven’t heard either concerto, go now and listen. You won’t regret it.
