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It’s a section of this Substack containing videos of my choir’s anthems, along with my comments. A longer description can be found on the About page. If you subscribe to this Substack but don’t wish to receive notifications for this section, select Manage Subscription from the upper-right menu and turn this section off there.
Wonderful Words of Life
Our choir put this piece together last week during rehearsal, using a hymn from one of our hymnals (I wasn’t able to confirm which one it was). Our director presented us with a starting adaptation, and then we played around with different variations until we arrived at this one. I was quite happy with it, although I wasn’t singing—it was my week for running screens (slides).
There was a mishap in the livestream booth—somebody left the choir mics muted for a while at the start of the first verse, which was sung a capella. More about the audio below.
Behind the Scenes
Because I was running screens this week, from pre-service run-through onward I was sitting right next to the audio console, listening during the run-through using my headphones connected to directly to the mixer (via a Behringer P1, if anybody cares).
With my direct feed, I did not hear the livestream glitch, but I noticed the same peculiar distortion from the choir mics that was present in last week’s recording. I told the sound guys about it, and they were on it right away. It took three of them a while to find it, but they hunted it down and fixed it, an equalization issue. What a difference!
It was quite a surprise, then, when I returned home, downloaded the video, and discovered the choir mics being muted. I am glad they caught it early!
There were also problems with the livestream lyric captions. I don’t prepare the slides, I just correct and run them, and there were quite a few corrections to be made, affecting about half the songs. There was no time left after that to check the livestream captions, so that came as another surprise, and I don’t know what happened. I did check and fix captions for the various corrections that I made, but this song didn’t need any.
There is a lot of hardware and software involved in producing these services, and we are a medium-size church with resources to match, not a big-budget megachurch. I can think of two paid staffers on the team—the rest of us are volunteers. These things happen, and we resolve them as we are able. I am quite satisfied with how it is going.
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, February 2, 2025
Excerpted from this livestream.
I think y’all did a wonderful job!