Volunteering

Volunteerism is the practice of volunteering one’s time or talents for charitable, educational, or other worthwhile activities, especially in one’s community. Since returning to Canada, I have been heavily involved in volunteering at our church. On a weekly basis I spend about 20 hours a week recording, mixing and producing the worship music for our livestream services. I’ve done 19 services over the past five months.

Here is one example:

We pre-record our musical parts before the video is captured. That way I can bring them into my Pro Tools rig and produce a good sounding mix for the livestream service. From the coach I record and add all of the electric guitar parts for every song we play each week at our church. So even though you might not see me in the above video, I am playing several different guitar parts in that song.

I mix all of the various parts — vocals, keys, bass, drums and other tracks — in the coach as well.

This is the setup that I use to mix the music. Obviously a bit of a challenge to mix to a professional standard in a motorcoach but it can be done.

When we present the livestream on Sunday morning, I work out of this temporary audio suite at our church. I use the console to mix the live sound sources for the service as well as the pre-recorded mixes that I have produced from the coach each week.

Over the past few months, I have been working on a new audio mix suite. I have been heavily involved in the construction and implementation of this new facility in addition to the ongoing livestream work.

Here is a short video which shows the start of the construction work.

I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I have poured into this project. And it is now starting to get close to being finished. I hope to have the new audio suite up and running next week and I will post the “after” video once it is all done.

Here is a sneak peek of the new audio mix suite. Very soon I will be mixing from this room as opposed to mixing from our coach.