Probably no podcast episode this week, as this spring break has turned out to be surprisingly busy. I picked up an Easter Sunday gig at a church in my area, and they use Ableton to help coordinate live performances. Awesome right? nice click track with nice cues.
One problem, they made production changes that didn’t make it down to the instrumental scores for the string quartet I am playing with. The instructions also on the web service they use to try to coordinate things also didn’t line up very well. Luckily the worship leader trusted me enough after I said that I teach Ableton in public school to look at his Ableton set and make it jive with our parts.
They ended up mashing two of the songs for the service together, and that was the problem, we had a whole bunch of repeats and other items that they just didn’t do. So I sat down at break and figured it out. Luckily the production team had labeled each and every verse, chorus and bridge. Made my life much easier. Took me about 5 minutes to verify things and cut out repeats and a few other parts that weren’t needed.
It all worked out. Just goes to show all of my classical musician friends that some basic DAW knowledge can go a long way, because there is no guarantee there will be a DAW/Traditional Music translator at paid gigs (particularly church gigs). I also want to challenge production leaders at churches especially, to have someone who is fluent in both DAW and traditional music notation look over your production before shipping parts out to traditional players. Saves a lot of unneeded frustration at rehearsal.
Bratschetech Baroque 