Posts by Nick Jackson

Weeknotes: Saturday 6 March 2021

Now that most of the physical work has been done for the cameras project and new desk, what have the tech team at Whitkirk been up to in the last week?

Less power!

We did some more maths on our tech desk’s total estimated power load and refined our numbers downwards. This meant we could swap some of the fuses for something even more conservative, bringing the already small risk of someone overloading the circuit in a dangerous way even lower.

“Il meglio è nemico del bene”

As Voltaire said(1), “perfect is the enemy of good”. The tech team always aim towards perfection, but we take a pragmatic view that most of the time “good enough” really is, and we can make improvements later.

Several years ago, when the Church website was redesigned into its current form, we made one of these “good enough” decisions about the look of our website header images. In doing so, we inadvertently left a bug lying around which would only manifest itself in a specific set of circumstances. Not a totally-breaking-things bug, but one which meant the website didn’t always look quite right. More specifically, if you uploaded an image that was narrower than a 9:2 ratio for the page header then it would be tiled incorrectly and look rubbish.

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References

References
↑1sort of, there was a bit of a translation error

The nature of a service

One of the trickiest bits of continuing to provide worship during the pandemic has been getting to grips with how we define “a service”. This might seem like a pretty clear-cut thing on the surface – it’s a time when we come together to worship, and there’s a set of words which are said.

When we were able to worship together, this was pretty easy to manage. We had an entry in the calendar so we knew when services were, there was a rota so we knew who was responsible for things, and we had some orders of service that people could follow.

And then the world turned upside down, and we found ourselves delivering almost every single aspect of our services in a whole new way. Most of these relied on some form of technology, and since we had to throw things together in a hurry what we ended up with was a bit of a tangled mess.

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It matters.


Sermon Year B – Lent 2
Genesis 12.1-7, 15-16, Mark 8.31-end
Revd. Matthew Peat

To understand more fully the Gospel we have just heard we need to read the verses before in which Jesus asks his disciples ‘”Who do people say that I am?”’ He goes on ‘”But who do you say that I am?”’ and Peter replies “You are the Messiah.”

Peter and the other disciples have journeyed with Jesus.
He called them and they followed.

And when they followed they saw healings.
They heard teaching with depth and authenticity.
They witnessed thousands fed with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.
They saw him walk on water.
They saw a girl restored to life.

Jesus asks ‘“who do you say that I am?”’ And Peter replies ‘“You are the Messiah.”’

That’s the backdrop to the scene described in today’s Gospel when Jesus unpacks what it means to affirm him as Messiah.

He speaks first of the journey, of how before him lies ‘great suffering’, rejection and death.
Peter cannot quite believe it.

And yet Jesus is clearsighted, painfully describing his companion as Satan and then going on to say more about what following him will look like for them.

He talks of taking up of the cross. Of losing life to save it. Challenging stuff that follows the question ‘”but who do you say that I am?”’

Of course, we are all on a journey with the question too and maybe we never quite feel able to answer as Peter does. Yet it is the question.

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Weeknotes: 27 February 2021

Things the technical team at St Mary’s have been doing or involved with this week.

Power!

Our tech desk has plenty of bits of equipment on it which need power, and we’re about to add even more. Up until now, power was distributed through a tangle of extension blocks which would invariably tie themselves in knots.

This was hard to make sense of, and annoying.

So we fixed it, making use of an off-cut from when we built our desk.

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Cables, cables everywhere…

This week our contractors Audioworks began the work of fitting cameras to the church building, as part of our Cameras Project.

One of the main goals is in this work is for the new equipment and cabling to be as discreet as possible, meaning most of the first morning was taken up with discussions and investigative work to find the best possible locations and routes.

Unfortunately, all the parts haven’t yet arrived to complete the system, but the team were able to finish all of the cabling work and fit two of the three cameras (one covering the font, and one ‘wedding cam’ with a unique angle on ceremonies). The cabling also involved going through the organ loft, so we could get some pictures of angles you’ve probably never seen before.

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Inside the organ

As part of our Cameras Project, we had to run some cables through the organ loft, and this gave us a chance to take some photographs from rarely-seen angles inside the organ case itself. We asked our director of music Giles to talk us through what the pictures show.

Although you can see fifteen of the organ pipes from the church floor, the instrument itself extends right the way back into the tower and contains over a thousand pipes (1,350 to be exact) measuring from a few inches to several feet. It also contains bellows, piping, and hundreds of wires to connect the console to the valves, which control the airflow. The organ even uses part of the floor above, which holds the pump to fill the bellows with air.

This photo is taken from just to one side of the console, with part of its casing removed. The narrow access corridor on the left leads to the tower steps, and has a set of wooden pipes running its length. At the bottom right hand side of the photograph are the back of the organ stop mechanisms. The grey-coloured corrugated tubing in the centre of this photograph carries the air from one of the bellows to one particular set of organ pipes.
These are the electro-magnets that operate the six ‘couplers’. Each of these couplers does a different job – for example, one of the couplers enables any stops selected on one of the manuals (keyboards) to also be played on the pedalboard. Another coupler enables the sounds on every key of one of the manuals (keyboards) to also play an extra note (at the same time) which is one octave higher. There are no computer chips or integrated circuits here – everything is copper wiring, soldered into place by hand.
In the foreground are some of the metal ‘diapason’ organ pipes, which give that familiar ‘church organ’ sound. In the background is a large enclosed wooden box which contains different ranks of organ pipes. By being placed in this enclosed space the volume of the sound produced by these organ pipes can be increased by opening the wooden louvre shutters (which you can see in the photograph) or decreased by closing the shutters.
A photograph showing several ranks of organ pipes. These pipes range in length from two inches up to sixteen feet at their longest. You can also see in the background on the left hand side of the photograph some of the wooden organ pipes which produce the soft flute-like sounds you may hear from time to time.

The organ itself mostly dates from 1931, but some of the pipes were originally made for an earlier organ built in 1869. The electronic parts were added in 1982, replacing an entirely mechanical set of linkages, and most recently in 2010 the entire instrument was repaired and rebuilt.

If you’re interested in helping us take care of the organ, then the best way is to send a donation and drop us a note saying that you’d like it to go towards our organ fund. We use this to cover the costs of annual maintenance and ongoing repairs, and to save towards future upgrades as the organ enters its 90th year of making music.

Weeknotes: 20 February 2021

Weeknotes are a short summary of what the Tech Team here at St Mary’s has been up to in the past seven days. We keep them as a way of sharing what we’ve been up to, as well as summarising our own progress on things.

Oh no!

We kicked off our Sunday Eucharist with a bit of an audio glitch – read about what it was and how we solved it.

Ash Wednesday

We made a brief return to pre-recorded services for Ash Wednesday, for the first time this year.

As part of this, we recorded a number of hymns and sung responses, which helped inform some of our plans for longer-term positioning of microphones in the building. It turns out that organs are really difficult to capture on their own, and this has some implications for how we plan to capture ambient congregational noise alongside the instrument itself once we return to in-person worship.

Cameras Project

As our Cameras Project continues we’ve been planning to move some equipment and wiring around the building. This poses a few tricky problems in a place where anything permanent needs to go through a sometimes complex and lengthy approvals process, and since it isn’t strictly speaking part of the work of installing the cameras we need to make sure whatever we do is temporary.

We build a new desk, and we wrote about how we did it.

The first step in this was creating a bespoke temporary desk which fits over and around our existing furniture, giving us a single place to control all the technology in the building from, both existing and in the future.

We’ve also shuffled around some of the many bits of wiring in the back corner, to make them tidier, simpler and more robust.

Building a new tech desk

As part of our Cameras Project, we’ll be getting some new bits of equipment which we need somewhere to put. As well as the equipment itself, the person who is looking after the technology during a service needs somewhere to sit and stand as well, plus somewhere to keep orders of service and hymn books.

During the first period of streaming services, this began with a temporary arrangement balanced in a pew. The downside was that this took an entire pew out of action and meant that there was always a tech team member who sat wearing headphones at the front of the church. At best, this looked far from the professional image we try to project, and at worst, it would actively distract other worshippers.

We’re great believers in making small improvements when we can, rather than putting them off in the hopes that we will eventually come up with something that solves all our problems at once. The next iteration of our setup moved the operator to the back of the church (underneath the organ loft), extending the video signal so that they no longer had to be physically close to the camera. This also meant they had more room to comfortably operate equipment and could also reach the audio mixer, allowing us finer control over the sounds which made it into a stream. It also meant that the operator was physically separate from the congregation, reducing transmission risk.

At this point, though, the equipment was balanced on the top of a cupboard which wasn’t really designed to handle it. Along with this the operator was forced to stand for the whole service, and they had to keep moving between two different spots to switch between adjusting audio and switching video. There was also no space left for any of the new equipment which would be arriving, and the whole collection of cables and boxes was not only unsightly but also took up a good chunk of a choir stall.

So we decided to fix a whole bunch of problems in one go, and build a purpose-designed ‘tech desk’ which would let us centralise everything we already did, and give us space to put our new video equipment when it turned up.

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