Impromptu Family Weekend

This past weekend seems to have been family weekend at Veritas. 3 of the 5 band members' parents were in town, my dad was in town, my roommate's dad came down for church, the two band members who finally got their first day off from being in the band were with family--one here, one visiting them--and there was at least one other pair of parents--other than the usual families that come every week--at church on Sunday.

However, the "family weekend" is just a side note for this post. The main part of this post is in regards to tech for the service. It didn't start off very well. Shortly after arriving at the hotel and beginning set-up, the light people--which includes myself--noticed that two of the six light stands had been forgotten at the storage building. About an hour--and one text and one phone call--later, the other two light stands arrived. Setup went for the light people from then on.

The CG team--in charge of the projector and the "cheater screen" for lyrics--had their own problems with set-up. The room was oriented differently--we're still trying to find the "best" set-up for chairs and the stage--and the projector had to be really close to the screen, so they had to zoom in a lot.

Other than that, set-up was a breeze, and practice could begin. Around the hour-forty mark, one of the singers suggested that we needed a keyboard (it was an acoustic set--djembe, two acoustic guitars, a stand-up bass, and an electric guitar). Luckily, they had accidentally packed the keyboard that morning. However, this caused a couple minutes of delay to set it up and do sound check. Also, we had only 5 people on stage! No problem, we'll just have the djembe player also play the keyboard--sometimes both at once.

Things continued on with near constant tweaks on how to play the individual songs. The lights decided to stop listening to the light board at one point, causing confusion as to what was wrong and how to fix it--it fixed itself, and we still don't know what went wrong.

Around 10, the pastor that was speaking showed up with what he wanted to be projected on the screen during his message. This soon presented another problem. Because they had to zoom way in to get readable lyrics, the message slides wouldn't fit on the screen. The band was also still working on how to best play the songs.

At 10:15, the doors opened for people to come in and sit down. The screen problem was still being addressed, but the band had settled their discussion--mostly because there was no more time to practice.

The service went off without a hitch. God showed up at the right time, and all the problems were solved. If I hadn't been there for practice, I wouldn't have noticed anything wrong--or even that one of the band members was playing two instruments at once.