Over the past few nights, Catalyst has been working on recording the song “Bigger Than My Imagination” by Michael Gungor. Saturday it took about 3 hours to get the drums, guitar and djembe tracks down. Sunday night we finished up electric guitar, bass, keyboard and vocals in about 4 more hours.

• Pictures from Recording (11pics)

Then came mastering! David, Shawn and I set up some JBL speakers and took a few hours to EQ and mix over 41 tracks. Everything sounded incredible, and we finished about 2AM. We went home, and I mastered through the rest of the night. (I fell asleep in my chair at about 5AM while doing a listen-through.) Anyway, I woke up again and cleaned all the vocal tracks. By about 2PM Monday I had a finished master mixdown. Ran some last changes and cutting, and burned that baby.

• First Mixdown (9MB, 7min 19sec)
• Second Mixdown (9MB, 7min 18sec)

David Ball on drums and djembe, Shawn Sislo on guitar and lead vocal, Chris Linder on electric guitar, Levi LaPorte on bass, Spencer Newman on keyboard, Emily Ball vocal, Anna Larochelle vocal, and Jeff Sharkey engineer.

It sounds really good through several systems, but the vocals are still quiet. Shawn needs to be panned center and Emily and Anna to the sides. Other stuff will probably change too. E-mail me with what you think about how it sounds!

A few weeks ago our Physics class took a trip to MINOS, a large particle detector on in Tower, MN. The 6,000 ton detector lives a half-mile underground in the old Soudan mine. Our class spent the weeks leading up to the trip learning about Quantum Physics and exploring particle interactions.

• Pictures from MINOS Trip (10pics)

Anyway, I’m working on MINOS stuff over the summer. Our first project is to build a Hardware Database to track all the pieces and parts in the detector. More fun diving into PHP+MySQL! I can now install Apache+PHP+MySQL on any Windows XP box in less than eight minutes.

Catalyst is a youth ministry started by a group of youth. I’ve got a bunch of pictures from our events and people. There are some old pics to begin with, and some equipment pics toward the end.

• Catalyst Events and People (17pics)
• Mixdown using FirePods (6MB, 4min 34sec)

David Ball on drums, Spencer Newman on keyboard, and Jeff Sharkey engineer.

We’ve been blessed with an awesome sound system: over 6,000 watts of Crown power amps, and 7 JBL speakers (2 FOH, 4 mons, 1 sub). That system seriously kicks. I’ve also been working with my FirePod’s with them; we did a mixdown a few months ago that you can listen to above.