Lovely funeral

We had the funeral of long-time parishioner Peter Young this morning. It was quite complicated logistically as the service was held outside, livestreamed, and featured live music, so it gave me a few sleepless moments over the last week, but it all went very well with some lovely readings, a moving eulogy and a great homily from Kate.

We used the SlingStudio gear we used at the beginning of the pandemic livestreaming (before we got our Ross Carbonite/Pearl Mini/X32 set up in the church), which we have used to livestream our simple outdoor services this summer- it still amazes me what you can do with 4 old Pixel Phones, a Lumix superzoom, and an iPad! But what I was most satisfied with was the sound I got for the music…

The music was provided by the amazing duo of Bernie Williams and Gil Parris on guitar (what a phenomenally talented and nice to work with pair!) and I close mic’ed their shared amp with a C414 (cardioid, 40Hz bass cut, & 12dB pad) to feed into our speakers for those there in-person, and also used that signal for most of the sound for the livestream, but I also had a stereo pair of condenser mics about 40 feet away, behind the congregation, so I added a little of that too to give it some life and fullness. I also had my “Really Nice Compressor” across the feed to YouTube and just tickling to avoid their awful compression coming into play, and I’m very happy with the way it turned out 🙂

The whole thing is nice, but Dance With Me at 38:05, Bernie’s rendition of Take Me Out to the Ballgame at 51:03, and their postlude at 1:06:30 are particularly nice…