Crave

Thursday nights we do the weekly meeting for Campus Crusade for Christ at UCF. It's a rather large production including imag, lots of lights, full band, and about 3-8 video and graphics sources. Every week, we arrive at 5, and leave at midnight. Lots of fast setup and teardown for about an hour and a half of show. Everything went pretty smooth, and we've been experimenting a bunch with live video during the music. We used to use a bunch of video loops and moving backgrounds during the music, but recently moved to live video; and are working every event to make it more and more dynamic. I'm like seventeen posts behind, so I'll close this out and elaborate next thursday on This event, and will hopefully be back on schedule with these posts by then.

Parks Reese

Double post part 1.

Light night for Southside Christian Church in Kissimmee. We provided staging and audio for the event that held on the brink of rain the whole evening. About 1000 people showed up throughout the halloween night, and music was from Shades of Green, some close friends of REC TEC. Held in a chick-fil-a parking lot, the event posed a problem for power. Usually, we would use a three phase generator for power, but one was not in the budget this year. We tripped a few circuits early in the evening, so I'm sure a large generator is on the list for next year, now. Once we moved some power and spread it out, that took care of the power issues. Jeremy Tomlinson ran front of house for the night, and I was stagehand/assistant to him pulling cables and checking lines and giving 2 cents here and there. The night concluded with a quick packup and a not as quick drive home.

Poverty Branch

Tonight was Poverty Branch at Calvary Assembly in Winter Park. A halloween party and a concert. I like running sound there cause its always a quick setup and tear down. And, as of recently, the system was reconfigured by us here at REC TEC LIVE, and is now very organized. The band played well, sound was loud and proud and all went home happy. I added my own fx, cause the in house ones couldn't quite do the trick. I brought a TC Electronics M-1XL and a D-2, for reverb and delay, repectively. I have come to really enjoy these units over the years as I have consistently been able to get great sounds immediately from the presets, and had no trouble tweaking and saving my own settings to get exactly what I want to hear. I also brought in some extra compressors, a Presonus ACP88. for the drums, and guitars. Some dbx compressors were already in house. All in all, the night went well, and it's now late. Sometime, I'll manage to go in to more detail about some mixing techniques and the like, maybe come up with some nice way to display them here. Until next time.

Parks Reese

Buffington's Vintage apparel.

Today was the conclusion of the install at Buffington's Vintage Apparel in Valdosta GA. The wall mounted LCD's took some work as the wall they were on had been built onto what was the old exterior of the building some 60ish years ago I'm guessing. So, I sawed a channel out of the wall, and a smaller channel inside that one to hold the video cable in place. By saving the strip I cut from the wall, a patch job makes the wall look good as new. Elsewhere in the building we added distributed sound in the cafe, running off of airtunes, itunes wireless streaming, by running cables up the walls into the attic, and dropping lines to ceiling mounted speakers. The Apple airport express is used to receive the itunes stream, and the audio simply connects to a home receiver for the speakers' amplification, and volume control. In the front room, we mounted the Yamaha speakers, and bracketed them to the wall, neatly tucked the speakon cables against the molding, and organized a great deal of cables into the REC TEC LIVE style of wrapping and storing. You can find a cleanliness and level of care in projects like these that make the installation seamless. No-one notices anything, except how transparently the media blends with the surroundings in looks and in performance. I've got some pictures on my blackberry, but blogger is having trouble uploading them. Be on the lookout soon.

Parks Reese

New things.

Here we are at the first post, where not much significant will be said other than the recounts of another day in the life of a REC TEC LIVE employee. (www.recteclive.com). In an effort to create a more prominant online presence, these blogs will tell about what we do, where we do it, and hopefully, spark innovation and creativity in our industry. What is our industry you ask? Live production, I say, expanding our horizons into the world of media every day. And we're out to do it better than anyone else. Based in Winter Park, Florida, most of our jobs are close in proximity, but today, I'm writing from Valdosta, Georgia, where we've begun an A/V install in the soon to be opened "Buffington's" vintage clothing store that moonlights as a coffee shop with a musician platform that will keep you coming for more. Since live music is a large part of the store, we'll be mounting 2 Yamaha CM12V speakers for mains, and one for a monitor, with a fourth serving as a non-fixed monitor. Other additions include wall mounted LCDs for digital signage cleanly floating on the wall with no sign of power or video cables going to or from the screens. A little retrofitting included drilling into the wall a good bit and fishing the wires through the wall with fish stix, hiding the RG6 line in the wall, then under the baseboard, and tapping into existing powerlines in the wall. I'll try and post some pictures tomorrow, after the jobs done. Tomorrow should include lighting work, but audio is a priority as my time here is limited. Thats all for now, I'll update soon about the completion of this job as well as tips and techniques used here, and maybe an update from some other REC TEC employees and what they've been up to while I'm away.

Parks Reese