Worship Techie

I’m really excited to make this announcement: Ministry Centered Technologies, the company behind Planning Center, has invited me to join their team and help develop their products.

It’s a great opportunity for me and my family, and I’m really excited to get to serve so many churches with what I do on a daily basis. In my seven years of being a full time technical director I’ve made lots of great relationships with tech directors from all over the country. I hope to keep building these friendships and to act as a liaison from the tech community as we develop a tool that so many of us use on a daily basis.

Leaving my current position was not an easy decision. I’m sad to move on, but excited for new opportunities and challenges. Rancho Community has been my home church since I was ten years old, and it will still be for the foreseeable future.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned on Twitter that I would love it if PCO did input lists. They replied:

This is my detailed reply. I post it here to encourage any feedback from other TDs.

The Goal

The end goal is to have a list of the mics we’ll be using and what channel they plug into. Since this depends on who is scheduled to be there, it would be perfect if it was integrated with PCO.

Here’s a shot of a portion of my input list:

So the goal would be to be able to arrange that and print it out with my stage layout and rundown every week.

I’ve put some thought into how I’d like it to work. There’s a couple different things that need to happen:

Creating Instruments

First, we need to define how many channels each musician needs, and of what types of mics. I’d like to see a new button when you mouse over a scheduled persons name. Example:

When you click on that microphone, you could edit that person’s instruments. A dialog would pop up that allows you to create as many different instruments for a person as you want (obviously you’d be able to edit / remove instruments as well). In this example, Chad would have a vocal mic (Beta 87) and a DI for his acoustic guitar. It’s important to note that at this point these aren’t actually assigned to a channel… we’re just defining what we need.

Instrument assignments should stick with a musician from week to week, plan to plan. Typically they don’t change much.

Building the List

The second step would be to actually assign the instruments to channels. I’d like to see something that works almost identically to the stage layout window, but instead of moving scheduled musicians to positions on a stage, we’d be moving scheduled instruments onto a spreadsheet.

The input list should remember where instruments were the previous week as well. If Chad was scheduled last week with his guitar in channel 17 and his vocal in 20, and he’s scheduled again this week, the spreadsheet should be pre-populated with where his instruments were last week.

Also, somewhere you’d need to be able to configure how many channels you have available.

That’s pretty much it. It was easy to write the email, but I know it’s a ton of work to implement. I hope you guys can make it happen, that would make us production people really happy!

(View a demo here. Access code is 1975).

Here’s a pretty sweet project that I recently finished up and want to share. (I was asked not to use the name of the company that I did this project for in the blog post, but it is an international company that everyone knows.)

There is a 400-seat theater in their global headquarters here in Southern California. It’s a very cool room that was built in the early 90s. Over the course of time, several contractors have come in and added various pieces of gear to their system… by now it was so complicated to run that they were constantly having troubles with it. That’s where this project comes in.

Basically, I built some custom control software that runs all of their video switchers, audio routers, playback devices (Blu-Ray and such), and the projector from a single touch-screen.

The heart of the system is an application called Girder. Girder is the software that sits between the user interface and the gear. It runs all the logic for the system and then sends out the appropriate RS-232 and IR commands to the devices.

The user interface was completely ran through Girder’s web server. It is nothing more than XHTML, CSS and Javascript (I used jQuery). I designed the general layout of the interface, and Alex McLean did an absolutely ridiculously awesome job making it look cool.

As far as hardware, the requirements were pretty minimal. We used a low-power pc from Polywell computers with an SSD drive in it. The great thing about it is that there are no moving parts in the computer, which should mean less support calls for us. There is a Global Cache GC-100 to provide the IR and relay outs, plus an 8-port USB to serial adaptor. For the screen, we used a 15″ Planar touchscreen.

I put up a demo of the interface so that you can check it out here. The access code is 1975. (I haven’t optimized any of it for web and there are a lot of high-res transparent PNGs, so you might experience some delay waiting for images to load.)

All in all, this interface controls 13 pieces of hardware: 4 video switchers, an audio router, projector, confidence monitor, a lighting controller, Blu-ray player, DVDR, a CD deck and a couple relays to turn amps on and off.

Update: Here’s some additional pics.

This is an update to this post now that WordPress 3 has come out.

I haven’t thoroughly tested this, but it’s working for me now. Also, this is for a multisite installation, so there are some tables that won’t exist if you have a single site.

SET @oldURL = 'oldsite.com';
SET @newURL = 'newsite.com';
update wp_comments set comment_content = replace(comment_content, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_comments set comment_author_url = replace(comment_author_url, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_links set link_url = replace(link_url, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_blogs set domain = replace(domain, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_site set domain = replace(domain, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_sitemeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_usermeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value, @oldURL, @newURL);

Just be sure to change the @oldURL and @newURL variables to your domains. Also, in your wp-config.php, don’t forget to change the line that says:

define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'yourdomain.com' );

to the new domain.

Hope this helps. Drop a comment if I missed anything.

This is a follow-up post to this.

First off, if you read that post and immediately stopped doing anything other than praying to get volunteers, I apologize. I think I was only half right. I was just being lazy for the Lord.

As great as that sounds, I was missing something. God causes the rain, but we still have to sow the seeds.

So lately I’ve added to my prayers a very targeted ad in the bulletin (“Looking for people with Adobe Creative Suite experience…”), and we’ve brought on three or four new volunteers in the last few weeks.

Let’s say you are moving your WordPress site from ‘example.com/blog’ to ‘example.com’. In your options panel, you can change your base URL and your site will more or less work, but any internal links inside of posts (including images) will be broken.

Here’s a quick SQL snippet I use for moving my WordPress sites to a new URL.

SET @oldURL = 'example.org/blog';
SET @newURL = 'example.org';
update wp_comments set comment_content = replace(comment_content, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_comments set comment_author_url = replace(comment_author_url, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, @oldURL, @newURL);
update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value, @oldURL, @newURL);

Change the URLs on the first two lines, then copy and past that into PHPMyAdmin and you’ll be good to go!

PS- If I’m missing anything, let me know in the comments.

This tweet sparked a lot of conversation this morning:

I got a lot of feedback, and it all seemed to land in two camps: either you love your avioms or you hate them.

Here’s some questions that would be great to have answered in the comments:

1) Which camp are you in? Love ‘em or Hate ‘em?

2) Does your entire band use them, or just some musicians?

3) How big is your room?

4) Analog or digital console?

5) How often does your input list change?

6) How do you connect your avioms? In-ears plugged into the back? Plugged direct into a powered wedge? Sent back to FOH console to route to IEMs or wedges? Something else?

I don’t remember who told me this, but it struck me. You never see people in the Bible doing volunteer fairs or anything like that to try to drum up volunteers. They prayed, and God provided what they needed.

While I can’t say that I’ve never done a bulletin announcement, I can say that every time I’ve had a real need for a volunteer (or an entire volunteer team), God has always provided them. My general philosophy is this: Once God stirs in a persons heart for them to volunteer, it’s my responsibility to train them, schedule them, and try to create an environment that makes them want to stick around (team-building, clear-communication, building friendships etc…). But I don’t even want a volunteer who has decided to help at his church for any reason other then God pushed them into it.

I’m sometimes afraid that this just comes across as an excuse to not spend time doing recruitment. What do you think?

I geeked out and bought the Motorola Droid last Friday. Overall it’s awesome. Here’s my thoughts on it, over my Posterous blog.

As the last post talked about, there’s several reasons that Alex and I decided to start over on the website. The second big factor was an entire new branding for Rancho.

Alex has been trying to update us from the old oak tree logo since the first day he was hired. Most of what he played with was iterations of the tree, but nothing ever really felt right. A logo is supposed to be a representation of who you are, and after months of working with our staff and pastors, Alex was able to capture that in a logo.

I wrote up a post over at tech.ranchocommunity.org talking about what the new brand meas