Celebrate Recovery Jamboree 08

Unfortunately this year we will not be participating in the CR jamboree at Pine Valley United Methodost. Part of the reason is the transition we are going through at the moment. The other part is that we dont have the personal monitor mixer we need to take our music on the road. With the addition of the backing drum tracks and click track, our in ear monitor mix has become critical, and it isnt exactally portable without this mixer.

Good news is, I got a laptop for a steal on ebay and will be able to use that for our backing tracks now. I think our backing track rig is not as critical as our monitor setup right now. We have what we need to make that work, we just dont have the portability we need. So the next step will most likely be the monitor mixing rig, which frankly, is too expensive so we most likely wont be playing out anywhere soon.

With that said, we dont need to be worrying about “playing out” anytime soon because we really need to get in some good practices and I need to get more of our songs setup with drum tracks. It seems to be working really well, but It takes me several hours per song to set it up, I only have 5 songs setup so far. It is going to be a slow process.

The newest member…

Ok, not officially a member of the band YET… but Christie and I have a little one on the way. Turns out she is about 5 weeks along so we are extreemly excited and blessed. Rest assured he/she will totally have my wifes voice and my rhythm. (Lets all pray it isnt the other way around… The child would have absolutely no musical ability)

 On a different note, we have consistantly incorporated the use of backing tracks via Ableton live over the last couple of weeks and I have to say it is going much more smoothly than I anticipated.  It turns out that my ebay aqquired copy of the full version was pirated, so we’ll be limited to what we can do with the lite version for a while.

If anyone feels lead to donate a laptop and/or money to purchase the equipment we need to make ableton live work for us, please contact me ASAP (or click the donate link on our homepage) LOL. I’m not sure how much longer Christies laptop is going to hold up. I underestimated how expensive this whole setup will be.
All the hardware we need is listed on this website http://www.interactiveworshiplive.com/store/ after the credits section: $300 for the Ableton live software (I can get an educational discount and an upgrade from lite version I already have), at least $500 for a decent laptop with firewire and 2GB of ram, $300 for a presonus firebox audio interface, $175 for an external hard drive for storage of the tracks, and $60 for the necessary cables (a Hosa 8 channel snake) . Add all that up and then subtract the money the band has and you come up with $1,335 (plus tax)….  or $1,035 if we just use the LE version I already have. 

We are just waiting on the Lord to bless us and meet these needs.