Big Day In

Sydney Anglican’s Big Day In happened on Sunday. It was a broadcast of a special service for all Sydney Anglican churches to tune into. It was a massive organisational and technical event. I thought there was no way this was going to work, but it did! There were a couple of small issues, but in the big scheme of things, these were pretty negligible. I work in broadcasting, and for this event to go so well was such a good effort and well executed. And for a first time effort, even better. The organisers need to be congratulated for pulling it together so well.

I was there to mix the broadcast audio of the music. Garage Hymnal were responsible for that and they did a superb job! It was a total walk in and mix gig. I didn’t plug in a single piece of equipment (except for my studio speakers) or run a single cable. The wonderful team from Crosstalk did it all and they did a great job. If I needed anything all I had to do was turn around and there was someone waiting there to take my instructions. It makes you feel like you’ve made it as a sound engineer when you do this sort of gig. Turn up, mix, go home again. And it was a privilege to be involved. It was quite a challenging mix actually. I do live to air music mixes all the time at work, but they are not usually this big. Bands this size we would normally multitrack and mix later. Garage Hymnal have eight members – drums, bass, 2 electric guitars, acoustic guitar, keyboards and 2 vocalists. So there were plenty of open mics to muddy everything up. In a live mix like that, the big challenge is to keep the clarity and not end up with a big pile of mush. And then on top of that you need to get a good balance and make it sound nice. I wasn't in a great acoustic space to hear what I was doing, butI think it turned out pretty well. A bit messy on the balance side in some places, but hey – it’s live, that what it’s like. No time to sit and make it perfect, just fly by the seat of your pants.

And the other thing of note – the weather. We were in Kellyville in western Sydney where the temperature was above 40 degrees celcius. RF’s car had no air con. Yep, that was fun travelling home in the middle of the day in an oven. But I stopped complaining when I got home and saw the news about the Victorian bushfires and all the tragedy surrounding them.