Chan's Personal Blog

You know how sometimes when you hear a song on the radio, you're reminded of a certain time period in your life? For example, a song brings you mentally back to a past summer, and you remember the people you were with, and the places you saw.

I talk about this because there's a song that I will probably permanently associate with this year's New Year's Event where I did sound. During the planning phase, we had a slight problem because six different bands were playing that evening. For each band, the stage equipment would have to be moved around, and the sound board settings would have to be re-configured. On top of that, as each band hooked into the sound system, we had to run sound checks and what not. On average, there would be a 10 minute gap between each performance.

The challenge was that a 10 minute gap was not good for the audience. You want to keep the audience in that intimate worship mood. A solution I came up with was to show a DVD of one of Delirious' live concerts inbetween each performance. The multimedia keeps people in the same mood, and it takes people's eyes away from the stage as we're setting up, and refocuses them to the screen where the video is playing. The idea was to minimize the amount of distraction we caused as we setup the next band.

As a band finished setting up, they started playing the song that the DVD was currently playing, and that led to a fairly smooth transition between each band. It worked out pretty well.

Anyway, here's a clip from the newest Delirious live concert DVD, "Now Is The Time," which we played that night. I associate the song "History Maker" with that worship service we had on New Year's Eve.


I really like some of the camera work that they do on the DVD. My favourite effect is at the beginning where they pan the camera behind the audience, and you see the band from the audience's perspective. Very neat.

It probably doesn't hurt that History Maker is a very powerful song as well.

I've been behind on blog posts this week because I have been sick. It all started with last week's crazy preparations for the New Year's Event at church. My sleeping and eating schedule had been all messed up because of that week. When you're doing sound technician stuff in variable work hours, you're forced to eat whenever you get a chance. On top of that, on New Year's Eve, I did a show between 5pm-5am pretty much non-stop. I helped setup six different bands for that show. In either case, New Year's day, I got home at around 5:30am, and slept until 2:30pm.

The next day, I was feeling okay until the evening. Then, I started getting stomach aches and such. I had food poisoning or something. Usually my immune system can take care of that with no problem, but probably with all the strain I had from the week earlier, I was at the breaking point. So, instead of going back to work on Wednesday, I had to take two days off to rest. It's always wierd being sick because I usually don't get sick. It had been 2.5 years since the last time I was sick. What a great way to start 2007.

I recall one of the board members coming up to the sound board on New Year's Eve and asked if I ever get tired, don't you ever need sleep? He mentioned that because he has seen me at the church for the last 5 days probably. I calmly replied, you don't get through university with a lot of sleep.

One of the annoying things that I got this week was a message with a long list of complaints about the New Year's Eve event. After doing all this, and I'm down for the count, here's an added kick to the side eh? I just let it roll because there's no sense kicking up a firestorm and responding with a massive verble barrage.

Anyway, I was back to 100% by Friday, but it was not a fun experience. One of my friends dropped by the office on Friday, and he looked awful. Apparently his girlfriend who he had a 5 year relationship dumped him for some other guy. That was the fun time he had for New Year's Eve. When we compare notes, maybe my start of 2007 wasn't so bad after all. He said he would gladly take food poisoning over being dumped. Poor guy