We had a video crew that came in before the concert to take some shots of the band in action as well as to profile a solo song for Rob.

We should have four videos from the concert in a commercial version which will likely take a couple of months to complete edits and post processing.

Here is another shot of me shooting the video crew shooting Rob. Fortunately, even with all of the shooting, no singers were harmed in the making of this video.

Michael East was kind enough to shoot the stills for the concert last night. And he did a terrific job. Here are a few shots of the band. On drums: Jeff Babcock.

On keyboards, vocals and percussion: Kori Francis. And on bass: Josh Cleaver.

Lead vocals: Rob Carnegie.

Charline Morrison and Laura Morrison on vocals.

Yours truly on lead guitar.

And a few more shots of the band in action.

Celebrate Christmas 2011 is complete. We shared a wonderful evening with a full house last night.

I am physically exhausted from several days of very little sleep but filled with the joy of sharing the music of Christmas.

The first of several late nights. It is almost 1am but we do have all the pipe and fabric set up on the platform. And it looks great.

Here are a few shots of how the staging was done. The crew started by laying out the sections of pipe. Fabric was then looped over the pipes and hoisted up to the ceiling.

Once the crew finished, we cleaned up the platform and started to get things looking like a Christmas concert.

Tomorrow I will be starting early to get the visual workstation setup and then the sound and lighting system will be coming in later in the afternoon.

I’d better get some sleep.

Celebrate Christmas 2011 will be taking place this coming Saturday evening at 7pm. This is the third year that I have produced a multimedia Christmas concert. It takes an incredible amount of work to pull everything together.

In reviewing the final production run, I am really pleased with the overall creative work — the multimedia and video elements look terrific and the arrangements of Christmas songs are unique yet familiar.

Turns out we will have a video crew out for the event. Should provide a better visual than the stationary HD camera I used last year.

The physical work starts this evening. Q Design will be coming out to the site to install the piping and fabric. Tomorrow we will be spending the time loading in all of the lighting, sound and visual equipment. Saturday morning we will finish up any technical activities — likely finishing up the programming for the intelligent lighting and tuning up the sound system — and go through our dress rehearsals in the afternoon.

And, after hundreds of hours of work, we will run a 2-hour event.

I am so looking forward to this week-end.

Lots of little details surround the planning of a concert. I am in the middle of working through all of them. There are enough of these little tasks that I should actually create a formal project plan. Instead, I go through a process of asking myself: what is the next thing that needs to be done? And then I do the next thing which in this case was creating the stage plot and the input list for the event.

The stage plot helps the setup process. It identifies where each member of the team will stand and that helps the sound and lighting — for example, routing inputs and monitors. The input list — which is not shown in the above chart — identifies what order the inputs will follow on the sound board.

This week-end will be one of practice and rehearsal. One rehearsal Saturday morning, one rehearsal Sunday morning, one performance Sunday morning and another rehearsal Sunday afternoon. And where I am not rehearsing and playing, I will be practicing.

Ah yes. The player piano. A machine that could read a set of instructions and execute a musical performance.

A set list is a similar model. It provides a set of instructions and it helps the band to execute a musical performance. For some concerts, I produce not only a set list but also detailed production cues for rolling videos, lighting, backing tracks, sound cues.

The Christmas concert will be using the following set list. I prefer to keep track of keys and tempos especially if we are playing to a click.

Creating a musical program is inherently artistic although with quite a bit of structure. When I attend large venue concerts I am often amazed at the logistics required to put on a show. Although not to the same scale, smaller productions require a similar level of planning.

Three very long evenings and two very long days but a memory that will last a lifetime.

We shared the stage with Trevor at his Yahweh concert here in Kingston. An amazing group of musicians. I have worked with Trevor and his team for several years now but usually on the engineering front. It was terrific to be able to contribute as a musician.

Despite all of the planning and hard work that led up to the event, something really, really bad happened to the FOH engineer.

You see that console he is working on in the above picture? We had spent several hours fine-tuning the front-of-house sound as well as eight discrete monitor mixes. The board was a Presonus StudioLive 24-channel digital console. About ten minutes before the event opened, we went to save all the settings from the soundcheck. You know, just in case there was a power outage or some other incident. The equivalent to saving your work on a computer. Only this time, things did not get saved.

A member of the team went to start the save process. But what’s this? What happened to all of the settings? All of the compressors, gates, eq and monitor levels. All of their settings were gone. The digital board had crashed and we lost all of that work.

Not good!

Trevor’s team took to the stage.

We managed to tame the technical issues in enough time for the downbeat and, aside from a bit of feedback on the top of the first song, without incident.

Although we were expecting to open for Trevor, he was kind enough to place our set just after first intermission.

We waited.

What were we thinking as we waited? Man, those guys are good. Like really, really good. I have to admit I was getting quite anxious about how we would do on our own set. I did not want to let Trevor or the audience down.

The team took to the stage at about 8:30 or so.

We had a great set even though all of our monitor mixes were way off from soundcheck. Jeff (drums) and Josh (bass) were both running on in-ear monitors. Rob and I were working from the same set of wedges. My rig was pointed sideways so I could not hear much guitar on the stage nor from the wedges. And the line arrays were engineered to push sound out. That said, I could tell the team was on the mark and we were able to enter in to our set. What a thrill. I have told my youngest son that the act of creating music, particularly with a skilled set of musicians, is an intensely spiritual moment and you can sense God through the music.

It was wonderful and humbling all at the same time.

Trevor and Brad came up to join us for our last song. The evening could not get any better than this.

A lot of hard work went into the planning and production. Over the past two nights I have managed on only a few hours of sleep. I did not get back from the concert last night until well past 1am and then I was up early this morning for another set of rehearsals.

I expect to get a full night’s rest tonight though. And the memories of playing with good friends and family — my one son on bass and my other son on lighting — continues to provide joy.