July 4th, 2008, llegada en alemania

Estamos bastantes cansados del largo viaje, pero poco a poco viene llegando la energia. Estamos en Neues Leben Zentrum, cerca de Colonia.

Update June 17th

Thanks to everyone that has and wants to contribute to the trip to Germany, especially my parents who have given 70% up to this point. The ticket price got slashed by $200, but I still don’t have quite enough together. The bar is updated, my dad’s Rosenort Credit Union account number is still 2199-0.

God Bless,

Cory

June 4th

I made a progress bar to show how much I still need for the Trip to Germany. It isn’t as easy as I thought to get the dough together but I know and trust God will provide. If your interested in making that bar go all red (I don’t mean to beg), my dad’s Rosenort Credit Union account number is 2199-0. Tax returns were an option but it’s really complicated.

Blessings,

Cory

June 3rd 2008

God’s way doesn’t = our way. It’s a proven and undisputed fact of life. Yet again and again our concept of God is that he is and thinks like us… In my case he’s been using kids and adolescents quite frequently to show me that He is awesome. (or like a good friend of mine said, “you think you know God and then he gives you kids”)

God somehow found a way for me to be on a plane to Germany on July 3^rd. It’s all the Lucero Youth Camps fault, really, this year the Music-team (which I wasn’t involved in at the time) hit it off awesomely with the Camp Speaker, and he invited them all to come play in a few camps in Germany this July… We thought he was joking. We thought wrong. God’s way again. Now I have basically paid my ticket with my parents dollars, which I fully intend and will somehow pay them back (God’s way). Oh, and yeah, in case you were wondering I am fully part of the music team (God’s way), doing whatever I can, being it sound, laptops, setting up, dragging gear, praying, etc. not actually playing an instrument, but as one person put it “being the glue”.

Here’s some interesting details:

There are 7 of us going, Silas, Christa, Alan and Eric Braun, Mera and Marcelo Hildebrand (a couple) and your humble glue. I love the people like family and they have all been tools from God that have molded me.

As far as I currently know, were involved in 3 full one-weak long camps, teaching English (that’s the hook with which they bait the youth that come), worship music, counseling and some other stuff we’ll probably only find out about when we get there.

Germany as about 4 weeks of warm summer so I hope we hit ‘em.

It’ll be very intense, main priority is ministering, not pleasure, but I think God’s way will combine those pretty good in the way of getting the most out of these experiences.

Each camp expects around 80 teens in each camp, last year they had 170. I believe they range between 13-17 in age.

We leave from Asunción on July 3^rd and return August 3^rd.

You may leave comments here on the blog or write me an email if there is anything you want to share, contribute, know, discuss, argue, point out or agree on. Be my guest.

More info should keep appearing on this blog pretty much every week until July, from out there I’ll try to update every few days with pictures…

God Bless,

Cory

Pictures below

Resurrection of a Blog

This here is the beginning of a lot of new info, since most online updates are on my facebook, you can check ‘em there if your interested, if not, I’ll just transfer some of the pictures to this and write some updates.

There’s 3 important things happening right now in my humble life:

1. Winter is virtually starting (it was 1C this morning).

2. I’m going to Germany on a Missionstrip. More about that in future posts.

3. Did I mention it was cold? yeah, but also as in people are getting colder… and I’m not about to sit arround while their getting spiritual frostbite, Got to get back to stocking the furnace…

From 6 to 19

Tonight are local tiny prayer gathering shot from 6 to 19 people…. Let that sink in, because I can’t yet. Last year we prayed for growth in quantity of peopl and now… YEAHHH!!! God’s so awesome!!!!!!

Music Part 2: Masterizing

Last time in Part 1 we covered Recording audio and now were gonna go with masterizing the resulting tracks.

Best is if you have recorded everything in individual tracks, especially if your using adobe audition or audacity, so you can set the track volume and pan and apply virtual effects to the track without affecting the files.

Arrange all your tracks so it results in a decent, continuing song, meaning not having abrupt changes, but also not long fade-out’s between different parts. This part basically relies on your ears and what you see when you zoom in.

Next, export the whole session to a wav file and open it in a separate editing session. Now you can compare what needs to be changed in the main session. You want the whole thing not only to be audibly appealing, but also visually. So if you see that the chorus has a whole different volume than the rest of the song, you have to adjust the volume settings on the tracks in the session until it’s pretty, with as little intensity variation as possible between the different sections of the song.

So let’s assume that you have done that and are happy with the overall volume. Now, listen to the individual voice tracks to see if it’s Ok like it is or if something is still missing. If it sounds distant, apply a compressor effect, with an attack rate of 2:1 and adjusting the other setting until it sounds good. You can do this with any track, even instruments, if that makes it sound better.

Next apply a Filter, specifically a frequency equalizer where you have a bunch of sliders to set the intensity of frequencies between 20khz and 20hz. You can apply this to different individual tracks, especially on the bass to give it a fuller sound, though not overdoing it as your song will probably get played full blast on stereo systems and might be over-saturated with bass if you mess up here.

Now you can export it again as wav and edit it. Here you want to apply that same filter, raising the higher frequencies to give more shine to the song, not to much though and ajust the rest of the frequencies to get the best possible sound. Generally the middle freq. are Ok by default.

Applying a compressor to the whole mixdown might improve the overall quality, play around with that. Use it to adjust the overall volume, so that it’s mostly under 0db, but allow for some fluctuations into higher levels. This is very important, especially if you have multiple songs, that you have them all with the same volume level, so that when you listening to them later, one after another, you won’t have to be adjusting your volume all the time.

These are the essential basics, applying different effects and stuff is important, but can vary so much across different music genres that it’s impossible to give suggestions.

Have fun!

Music Part 1: Recording

I decided I would make a simple guide for all you audio amateurs, on recording, editing, masterizing and applying some simple effects to the music you plan to record. I won’t get into details of the audio recording software, but just so you know, I use Adobe Audition and the Diamond Pack VST effects bundle and Sony Sound forge VST effects. I haven’t done any midi recording as yet.

Generally when recording a song, you would want to have the beat first and then record the rest of the instruments, but as most drummers find it very hard to play their drums without something  to play it to, I record an acoustic or electric guitar (or a piano) first, to which the  drummer can then play.

Let’s start with recording an acoustic guitar. You want to place one or two mics right below or above the body, not over the center, as the bass frequency’s are overwhelming there. I used two Shure voice mic, ideally I would use condenser mics. Place the first mic at the back end of the guitar, facing to the strings behind the hole, the other one I placed on the other side of the hole, also facing towards the strings and facing slightly downwards. Your mileage may vary.

Recording the electric guitar can be slightly harder, to get a decent sound out. As plugging it directly into the mixing console doesn’t result in decent sound, the best is to place a pic directly in front of the amp (the resulting quality depends heavily on the quality of the amp),  placing the mic about half a meter or slightly farther away as to not get a saturated sound. You might try various types of mics and the distance to the amp and volume of the amp may give different results.

The Bass guitar you can record the same way, or if your amp has an output, wire it to the mixing console, where you might have to play around with the volume and frequency settings to get a good sound.

Now for the drums. As we only had 3 mics available, we placed them so as to get the best possible sound. I placed one behind the Hi-Hat, slightly lower, another one between the Bass drum and snare. Then a more powerful mic above the whole set to catch the general resulting sound. Ideally, recording every sound separately would result in a better sound, but I didn’t want to waste than much time on that and neither did the band I was recording. So one or two more well placed mics would probably result in a more “complete and filled” sound.

For the keyboard you can just plug it in to the console or use midi.

Recording the voice can be tricky, especially if your singer has just had lunch and looks like he would rather take a nap than doing some vocal recording. Best if this is done in the morning. You might have to place a filter in front of the mic if the singer tends to pronounce his P’s pretty hard, at least a small thin filter in any case. He should sing with his mouth as close as possible (but not against) the filter to get a fuller sound. You probably will have to take multiple takes.

12hs on a Bus vs. 1h in a Tow truck

It’s been a full month, November. Last weekend we had a family gathering in Asunción and then I left for the Chaco, Filadelfia, on Monday. Was at Kalofoné Producciones every day then, learning different techniques for audio recoring, editing and masterizing. Then got on a Bus on Thursday which broke down half-way back to Asunción. Had to wait till the next bus came and stood in the passageway with smelly people and peopla who probably had gotten two seats just so they could actually sit without killing someone… well, after 3 hours I arrived in Asunción and took another bus to Campo9, which took way longer than I excpected. So all together I spent about 12hs in Buses. Then, after staying the noight in Campo9, I went to Ciudad del Este Friday moring to do tech shopping. On the way back we had car trouble and got towed back to Campo9, where the owner of the borrowed car took us home.

This afternoon I’ll be on the road again to Asunción for Marcelo and Mera’s wedding.

Anyways, the moral of the story is, avoid taking buses if at all possible and don’t focus on the problem, but on the solution. I like the river parable. Our problem’s are the river, the more we concentrate on it, the bigger it gets and it’s impossible to cross, but Jesus is the bridge and if we focus on the bridge and cross it, that river looks small in comparison.

So if anyone actually reads this, have beautiful day and keep your focus on the bridge.

What would happen…

What would happen if pastors, preachers, leaders, ministers and whatever other titles their maybe be for church leaders would put aside whatever they are teaching and focus on getting the message of God’s amazing grace and love across? Is it just me or are those topics somehow avoided?

Personally, I think if this would actually happen, with the full inspiration of the God’s Spirit of course, amazing things would happen. The churches would grow and mature so fast that they would have to expand drastically, Christians would put aside their egoism and self-centered pleasures of wealth and “toys” and focus totally on HIM.

OK, so what’s to stop this from happening? ummmmm… it’s aahh, well…yeah…OK, it’s Satan.

Oh, but it isn’t not nearly so direct as it sounds, he’s rather subtle… making leaders and their churches slip into the rut of organized religion, legalism and conformism, of course, with the occasional shove if it’s not to his likening. He especially loves it if the poisoned people get really mad at the ones that aren’t conforming to their type of lifestyle. Sing the same songs, same topics, same falling asleep to boring sermons heard for the upteench time about “thou shalt not do this and that”.

Now, let’s say there’s a group of people within the church that isn’t happy with how it is… I don’t mean the music worship style or songs or even the style of clothing or if we kneel, sit, stand or jump and shout when worshipping him in prayer. I’m talking about the subtle waves of feeling boxed-in in church, the sermons themes planned weeks, months or even a year ago, the not giving the Holy Spirit room to work, the demeaning looks of congregants when someone lifts up their hands in prayer or tells an experience that takes longer that two minutes to tell. I’m talking about youth attendance dropping as fast as their parents let them make up their own choice to go or not, about almost zero participation in Sunday schools, about old mister Y falling asleep every Sunday, about making a big deal for weeks if some local talent does a rap song in church, about condemning people that don’t come on Sunday without even knowing the reason why they didn’t coming, about… OK, you get the idea, I hope.

Now this is what I’ve experienced, not all in the same church, but definitely a feeling I’ve felt in different churches. I would sooner go to math class in a kilt than feel comfortable enough to share something with everyone in the church I go to.

Ain’t it sad? Now, a lot of the stuff I mentioned has to do with my own experience, but not only, a lot of friends of mine feel the same way. The services are planned, first a song, than a scripture reading followed by a short prayer and another song. Than Sunday School, followed by announcements and sharing by the congregation (usually the same people every Sunday), than another song or two, followed by the sermon and a prayer with an ending song and then WOOOOOOOOHHHHOOOOOO!! IT’S DONE!!!  The fact I can precisely tell you how it works is because it doesn’t change, never with extremely remote chances of being different than like that.

So, putting the negatives aside… I’ve learned not to be ticked off to much, I mean, look at history and you’ll see there has always been some killjoys along the way. No, just keep your focus on Jesus, showing his love and grace to the people you encounter whenever. All it takes is a smile, a word of encouragement, helping them with some project or inviting them over for terere (tee, coffee, coke, water, etc.) and just show them (doesn’t take much effort on your part) God’s love and let his Holy Spirit inspire you. YOU WILL BE AMAZED!

Live it! Live HIM!