Well, our church had it's annual sunday school Christmas drama/presentation this sunday evening. I got called in pretty much last minute to run the tech side (since it was supposed to be last week but we got snowed out, and the person who was supposed to do it last week wasn't available this week). At about 1pm the director came to me with the script and a pile of CDs to use for the accompaniment tracks. Dress rehearsal was to start at 4pm. Since i also had to run the house PA, the monitor system, and videotape, i didn't want to count on being able to swap all the CDs in and cue them properly on the fly. That's when Vegas came to mind.
I ripped all the tracks to the hard drive as .wav files and placed each one on a track, all starting at 0:00 in order from top to bottom, and normalized & muted all the tracks. Then for rehearsal i soloed the first track and played it, when it was done a few clicks re-muted the top track and soloed the second track ready to be played in less than a second. Almost brainless and vasty faster and easier than swapping CDs. During rehearsal we found a few songs needed to be louder and some softer. Setting the volume in the track header too care of the job and i didn't have to remember the settings during the performance because Vegas remembered them for me.
It gets better yet! There were three songs they wanted to fade out early. It took a few seconds to find the fade point, drag the end of the event back to that spot, and add a fade out. In the rush of the performance, Vegas faded for me at the right time, no thought or effort required. We also had a problem with the 1st & 2nd graders wanting to sing the song faster than the accompaniment track. No problem, a simple Ctrl-Drag of the end of the event back to the left and the song played faster but still in the same key. Plenty of jaws dropped on this one!
Though we didn't need to do any of this, it would also have been nearly effortless to change pitch, cut out unwanted verses, use volume envelopes to fade in and out, segue, etc. and all on the fly and nondestructively. All things considered, i did a full show prep and live tweaks in less than an hour's worth of hands-on time. I even had spare time to get lunch! Without a tool like Vegas i would have needed a day to do all that work and still not have been able to do all the adjustments needed. Add to that the ease of playing the tracks back without CD swapping and it Vegas became an amazing assistant.
Vegas - never leave home without it!
I ripped all the tracks to the hard drive as .wav files and placed each one on a track, all starting at 0:00 in order from top to bottom, and normalized & muted all the tracks. Then for rehearsal i soloed the first track and played it, when it was done a few clicks re-muted the top track and soloed the second track ready to be played in less than a second. Almost brainless and vasty faster and easier than swapping CDs. During rehearsal we found a few songs needed to be louder and some softer. Setting the volume in the track header too care of the job and i didn't have to remember the settings during the performance because Vegas remembered them for me.
It gets better yet! There were three songs they wanted to fade out early. It took a few seconds to find the fade point, drag the end of the event back to that spot, and add a fade out. In the rush of the performance, Vegas faded for me at the right time, no thought or effort required. We also had a problem with the 1st & 2nd graders wanting to sing the song faster than the accompaniment track. No problem, a simple Ctrl-Drag of the end of the event back to the left and the song played faster but still in the same key. Plenty of jaws dropped on this one!
Though we didn't need to do any of this, it would also have been nearly effortless to change pitch, cut out unwanted verses, use volume envelopes to fade in and out, segue, etc. and all on the fly and nondestructively. All things considered, i did a full show prep and live tweaks in less than an hour's worth of hands-on time. I even had spare time to get lunch! Without a tool like Vegas i would have needed a day to do all that work and still not have been able to do all the adjustments needed. Add to that the ease of playing the tracks back without CD swapping and it Vegas became an amazing assistant.
Vegas - never leave home without it!