Any type of live production is fraught with peril.
There are a ton of tasks that need to be accomplished in the right order, at the right time, for the service or production to run smoothly.
Add in the pressures and complications of most church systems (often less that ideal) and working with non-professional volunteers (we love them, but it’s not what they do for a living), and it’s easy to forget a critical step and miss something.
We’ve run into that at Coast a time or two. Even though we can multi-track the whole service (and we do), we still run a CD of the 9 am service to have as an archive.
Most of the time we remember to hit record, but it’s amazing how many times that CD burner is empty when we do.
And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of the booth, down the stairs, through the lobby on my way to pre-service prayer only to realize I forgot to turn the lobby loudspeakers amp on. So back up I go.
Long-time readers will know I’m a fan of checklists, and we have checklists. But I think we’ve found a better way.
I’ve written before about a few AppleScripts I’ve written to automate the recording of our services. Those little beauties are fired from iCal events and arm the proper tracks and start Reaper recording.
No more missing the first half of the first song!
It occurred to me the other day that we could use the same logic for reminding us of other things we need to do.
