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 EDIROL Video Supports Integrity Music’s Don Moen & iWorship World Tours
An Interview with Integrity Music’s Chris Springer
By Randy Alberts
“Our goal with these live concert experiences is to heighten the audience’s adoration of the Creator, the King of Kings,” says Chris Springer, music director, performer, and producer on tour with Integrity Music’s artist Don Moen and the company’s global iWorship Tours. “Great musicianship, lighting, PAs, and video help us tell his story while enhancing the reason we’re all there to begin with—to worship God. The Edirol PR-50 plays a big role in helping us create these experiences all over the world. We need the PR-50 to do what we do as well as we do it.”
Creating devotional Christian worship DVDs, books, and software for home and church worshipers and releasing Dove- and Grammy-winning artist CDs since 1987, Integrity Music began staging their large-scale iWorship Tours in 2003. The company’s goal for the latter endeavor—to create genuine church worship experiences in live concert settings—is what sets Integrity’s iWorship Tours apart from other great multi-artist Christian concert tours today.
Springer, who also plays keyboards on the Don Moen and iWorship tours, uses his stage laptop to play instrumental backing tracks and trigger, from a MIDI start/stop track in Pro Tools, the digital video clips, graphic still images, and band’s click track embedded in Integrity’s various iWorship DVDs that are pre-loaded into his PR-50 before each tour.
 “The PR-50 is an incredible tool for us,” says Springer, who also handles A&R from Integrity Music’s Mobile, Alabama, headquarters. “Before the PR-50 arrived we struggled a hundred different ways trying to lock everything up while remaining free to change our set list from night to night—and nothing worked. Now we’re able to just simply load the iWorship DV files into the PR-50 before each tour, plug it in under my audio rack, click on any song’s Pro Tools session, and play! The ability to change our minds mid-set is very easy now with the PR-50. Before the PR-50 showed up, we didn’t have that kind of flexibility.“
Preferring to keep the PR-50 nearby in his onstage audio rack, Springer often found himself searching for costly, long S-Video cables to link the iWorship DVD content to a venue’s video gear located sometimes hundreds of feet off-stage at the front-of-house position. But since he and Chuck Harris, iWorship Tour’s production manager, devised a simple MIDI DIN-to-XLR connector solution that’s no longer an issue.
“Using two of the three unused pins in a 5-pin MIDI connector,” Springer explains, “we just wired up a pair of those to standard XLR cables—one at each end—and now run video from the onstage PR-50 down the XLR snake to the FOH video gear. We’ve run it upwards of 500 feet without any MIDI degradation. Last summer, at The Festival of Praise in Singapore, the stage manager there was amazed by our little $5 connectors. He said, ‘wow, why didn’t we think of that!’”
 Springer's Edirol PR-50, housed in a standard Pelican hard case, has logged thousands of frequent flier miles on the globe-encircling iWorship Tours. He trusts the PR-50's performance so much he doesn't tote a separate monitor for it. And at every venue, from South Africa to Singapore and back, his PR-50 is greeted with the local stage crew's amazement.
www.integritymusic.com
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