I work as a music director at a church in town, and was invited to attend a church creative conference with the rest of the church staff. I initially did not even consider the networking of this event, but the more I talked to others about what this upcoming event would be, the more excited I got to be able to use it as a networking event for this class. The conference had many masterclasses we had to attend over a variety of music and tech topics, but of course there were many people in similar positions to me from multiple churches from around the state. It ended up being a great event that I could share the things I had learned from my own experience, and also picked up some new tips from other directors. One of the main topics people seemed interested in talking about were the use of supplemental pre-recorded tracks for use in live performance, and strategies for live lighting and sound design from week to week. While these tools are not new to the music industry, they are just now being adopted for use in churches, so everyone has lots of questions and different ideas on how it should be done. Overall I think this event was pretty successful, but next time I’ll make sure to connect more with people closer to me. Many of the people I connected to live pretty far away, so I think next time it will be helpful to find some people more local to us.
