Church IT – Supporting ministry with IT

Why was I throwing myself at the mercy of Adobe’s automated ‘help’ last week?

Well I’ve been helping out moving the church website I used to administer over to a new design and platform. Joomla was just too capable for the parish and was putting people off. Myself included, trying to sort out both sections and categories for a relatively simple site became quite a headache.

Anyway, given the current situation a static website seemed the best plan with Dreamweaver the editor in use. I use Microsoft Expression Web myself so I sorted out the template first and then had a go at transferring it over.

To my delight it worked very well. The template file, .dwt, was opened without any comment and we got started creating pages very quickly.

Dreamweaver was pretty impressive just in some basic editing over a couple of hours, hence I considered the change. It’s a shame there’s no crossgrade path from Expression Web, £400 is just too much to make it a possible buy.

I’ve been writing about using software to create music to go with text and images in the Sheepdip, and here’s my first video.

It’s nothing spectacular but hopefully gives you an idea of what can quickly be achieved using software like Magix Music Maker 14. The music was generated from the samples included with Music Maker, I didn’t have to play any instruments. That’s for a later project…

I treated myself to a copy of MusicTech this month (it’s a choice between that, ComputerMusic or Sound on Sound). The decision was largely based on the samples on the cover DVDs.

I have to admit that the Summer Chill samples weren’t really to my taste, though I can’t fault the sound quality. The Ultimate Samples Collection Vol 3 was another matter however. Plenty of really good drum samples, both individual drums and patterns.

I’m looking forward to trying them out with some songs. If you’re interested I’m mostly using Magix Music Maker 14 these days. Very underrated software in my opinion and with some great features for playing live at church. I reviewed the previous version last year and thought it was pretty good. It was XXL version that comes with a MIDI/USB keyboard, which I’m still using.

This caught my eye in the Blogroll the other day. My first impressions are that Grou.ps is another DIY social networking services, not that that is in any way a bad thing. Setting up collaboration tools is not always easy and can quickly become a big distraction from the job in hand.

Registration is free and only requires an email address

As it was an All Age Worship (family) service this morning, I was operating OpenSong as well as the mixer.  Generally quite straightforward as there isn’t too much to have to react to, apart from some swapping around of radio mics.

The only snag was at the end of the service when the words I had entered for ‘The Spirit Lives to set us free’ turned out to be different from those in the hands of the singers. Luckily we have a second monitor that points towards the music group so they were able to switch to that without any problems.

Being a techie I find myself casting around for a solution that involves some form of electronic wizardry. Perhaps it is time to push harder for internet access in the church.  Then we could have a central place to store information about the service.

Another solution is to run through the service in more detail (or indeed at all) before Sunday, as per the excellent advice to be found in the podcasts of Creative Synergy. As much as I agree however, it is harder for a small parish church with a limited headcount.

Perhaps this also inspires a feature request for OpenSong. A portable version would allow me to carry it around on a USB key so I would always know exactly what is on the notebook. Part of the problem was the service organiser had looked on the notebook for the words but I had copied them straight from Junior Praise that included an extra verse.

Of course, as OpenSong is opensource, there’s no reason for me not to have a go myself, perhaps it’s time to stop just lurking in the forum.

Then again, maybe I’m dwelling too much on the negative. It was only one song, and the rest of the service went without any problems.

I’ve been playing around with Ableton Live for a little while now and I’m very impressed. I’ll post some more specific comments soon but in the meantime there are some informative posts over at Thoughts on drumming, programming and church . .

Also check out some of the videos on the page, especially those of  Abraham Laboriel Jr.