I’ve always wanted to blog through the process of creating a loop and include folks along the way to get feedback at each portion. Then look back and see the evolution of the song as I made changes. So this post starts that journey.

Part 1. Main Groove

I’ve started to write a loop for an original arrangement of In Christ Alone by Stuart Townend. This arrangement may be pretty far out for those that know the traditional arrangements, but I hear it all coming together in my head well and if you’re a worth anything as a writer, you gotta trust that inner head arrangement. At this point I just have the main groove looping over the verse progression. This was done all in one session, total session time was probably 6 hours or so. I think I spent 3 hours on the drums alone, finding the right kick/snares and making tone adjustments and such. Spending time on each individual instrument’s (drums having many instruments -> kick, snare, toms, etc…) tone is so important.

Here’s how I organize my thoughts when searching for drum sounds. I make a list of all the candidates (all that I think may work) for each sound and then I go through each one comparing one to another and selecting the better of the 2. Repeat process until you only have one left and last sample standing wins!

So here’s what I have so far, just a few measures looped over. From here I’ll peel it back and get the instrumentation for the verse with vocals.

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I’ve been praying, contemplating and brainstorming ways to cultivate worship through music in our gospel communities(small groups) at Life Connection Church. Each of our communities has a different blend of people, giftings, weaknesses, background, not to mention gathering places. We don’t have gifted musicians in every group, that’s not even a concern of ours.

But what does concern me is that the only place we are gathering to sing songs of praise to Jesus is in the corporate Sunday morning gathering. I don’t want people to think that’s the only place where that kind of thing happens. Certainly worship is much more than song and we live our lives in scattered worship 7 days a week, but I’d like to see purposeful worship through song be part of that.

I’ll cut to the chase, here’s the idea. I’m going to visit each gospel community group when they meet in some one’s home and I’m going to bring some recording equipment with me. I’ll lead the group in a few songs and get a good recording of the vocals. I’ll lead the same songs in each group so I have a bunch of tracks from each community group singing the same songs(in the same time–using click).

I’ll take these tracks and mix them into the loops we use on Sunday morning so while we are worshipping as a unified body we hear and join with the praises sung in our scattered lives and scattered communities across the valley. I don’t want this to be an audio stunt of any kind, but an example of our Sunday morning worship continuing through our lives and our gatherings outside of the church. I’m excited to give it a try and see how it works.

How have you cultivated worship through song in small groups? Is it spontaneous or planned every week? How well does it work?

Thanks Brett for passing this onto me. This is a pretty sick display of ability by Ryan Leslie. It reminds me of what I look like when composing. I always dress in a full suit and wear sunglasses in my bedroom, dancin around, shouting out to the nonexistent crowd. My wife loves it.

Oh wait actually it’s more of me in my pj’s, haven’t taken a shower in a couple days, chained to my desk, pounding Hansen’s natural soda, wondering if I’ll ever have another creative thought in my life. Yeah, stark contrast. Watch and enjoy.

Record is Propellerhead’s latest software release that finally addresses the much requested feature of audio recording inside of Reason. But instead of adding it to Reason they created a new product. The price sounds right at $299 for all the features they’ve thrown in. Create Digital Music has a wonderful in depth review of Record and this video below gives a nice intro to the product as well. You can sign up for beta testing at www.record-you.com

In the last few months my church, Life Connection Church, has successfully setup a recording strategy that allows us to capture and track each channel before it gets to the board. This has many advantages over capturing board mixes. I wanted to share with you what we’ve done on truly a shoe-string budget.

What’s wrong with just recording the board mix?

The problems with a board mix are typically quality and flexibility. Starting with quality, your house mix is for just that, your house. This isn’t usually ideal for what sounds good in isolation(headphones) because you’re not mixing for isolation. You’ll find this especially true when mixing for small venues and have to deal with unruly stage volume.

Flexibility is lost when you just have a stereo recording and no tracks available to work with in post-production. There’s not many places to go with a stereo recording, you can do some EQ’ing perhaps but it’s all global, not individual instruments or vocals. So you can see how this impacts quality level.

How to capture tracks before the board

There are plenty of ways to do this but I’m going to show how we did it. For just over $400 we purchased the PreSonus FireStudio Project firewire recording interface. This has 8 XLR inputs and can be daisy chained with more units to satisfy however many channels you need to capture. So right from the snake we take the channels we want to capture and insert into the PreSonus and then use a 1/4″ patch cables out of the PreSonus unit into the board. Effectively using the PreSonus as an intercept unit, it does no processing (outside of the pre-amp) just passes the signal on to the board. So as far as the FOH is concerned there’s no change besides gain level with the PreSonus preamps.

One hurdle we had to clear was we didn’t have the funds to purchase more than one unit, yet we have about 15 channels in use that we needed to capture for live recording. Here’s where we had to get creative. 8 of those 15 channels were for the drums. So what we did was take the drum sub channel out into the PreSonus so now we take the board mix of the drums and have 1 channel of drums on the PreSonus. We have our drums on their own stereo sub channel on the board so this was as easy as taking the 1/4″ sub outs on the back of the board and routing them to the PreSonus. This isn’t ideal for the same reasons board mixes aren’t ideal, but has worked ok for us. Going forward we’d like to buy another unit dedicated for the drums.

What to use for recording the captured tracks

Being able to capture the tracks is one thing, but then what do you capture them to is the other part of the equation. There are numerous software recording tools you could use. PreSonus comes with Cubase but there’s also better options like Logic and Pro Tools. We use a free option, Garage Band for the mac. Eventually we’ll get another unit and then switch to Logic but presently for these demo mixes and for sermon podcasting this is suiting our quality needs just fine.

An important feature here is that this unit works whether you are plugged into a computer and recording or not. No rewiring is necessary when switching between the two.

What’s the bottom line cost?

PreSonus FireStudio Project = $425
1/4″ patch snake = $35
Recording software = $0 (Garage Band)

Total Cost: $460

You can listen to some of the mixes from our setup here and more recently here. You can hear the improvement in quality from the older sample to the more recent one as we get more use with the unit.

This is late, late Saturday night when what I thought would take me 3hrs to program is taking me 6hrs+. I hadn’t even started on guitar work yet, so I spared you the real mess. The problem when recording late at night is you settle for garbage. You get tired and settle, I hate that.

When are your creative sessions?