My office is becoming a studio again.

A peek in the room off the front door of the house reveals a rack of keyboards, a microphone, a mixing board, as well as a lot of clutter. Over the years, one by one, the equipment has come off line. It started with the logic audio software. Logic Audio is really a Mac program, but we bought the PC version in 1998. Ideally, it runs on Windows 98, and we’ve had problems with it since switching to windows 2000. It finally screeched to a halt around 2003. After that, I watched one of the children stomp my headphones to death (while I was screaming, “STOP!!!!” no less). And I basically shut everything else down to avoid their destruction. After a while, I forgot how to connect the synthesizer to the keyboard, and how to hook anything up to a speaker.

Most school mornings, we start off with praise and worship. Once upon a time, we held those sessions in the office. I’d be at the keyboard, back to the children, while they ran amuck behind my back. One day, I savagely turned all the keyboards around and attempted to rearrange the whole studio by myself so I could what the goings on during praise and worship. Curtis helped me, and we moved my computer to the spot previously occupied by the keyboards. Shortly thereafter, the studio shut down and we moved praise and worship to the piano.

Last year, Curtis bought an amp so we could try again with the plugged in worship. My little drum machine from 1990 was chugging along, and Yanni and Xay regarded it as a cool toy.

This fall I plugged the drum machine into the amp, and discovered that the drum machine had died. I thought back to that day when Xay was in my office reading, and I heard this terrible crash. He’d wondered what ‘that’ lever on the keyboard rack did. It collapsed the whole thing, with two keyboards (one of them full length) and the drum machine on top. I think that did the drum machine in.

One day last week, I asked Xay to help me plug the mixer into the amp, to tentatively try this studio thing again. I’ve been itching to hear our voices on tape, now that the older children can sing in parts. The mic worked, much to everyone’s fascination, and we were able to get the synthesizer to play demos, but we couldn’t get the keyboard to play.

Friday, a light bulb came on, and I realized that the keyboard wasn’t connected to the synthesizer. A dim memory of a broken midi chord, which meant I put all the chords away to prevent further damage, came to mind. That’s probably why we weren’t getting any sound when we pressed a note on the keyboard! I looked at the mixing board and saw no place to connect the proper chord, and then I decided to plug the chord directly into the synthesizer. The synthesizer is bolted into a rack with the tape deck and the mixing board, so Yanni had to tilt the rack and hold it there so I could hook up the chord.

We’d no sooner made the connection, than there was sound! Thousands of glorious sounds! I could hardly wait to try it all out.

Yesterday we had our first praise and worship in the studio in at least 3 years. Imani and Joy sang on the mic, and I could hear their little voices finally. I could tell when they needed help with lyrics or pitch. It was wonderful! Xay played his recorder solo on the mic, and it sounded smooth coming out of the amp.

I can’t wait til we start recording again!