Before Sunday
The monthly rota will have been E-mailed out with details of who's playing in the band for that service, so the sound guy knows what to expect.
The worship leader might send their proposed set list out in advance, too. Visuals guys love it when you do that :-)
Service -2 hours
Arrival and setup
In an ideal world, a small army of gnomes would ensure that all the required equipment is in place, working and connected before the band arrive. However, since gnomes have very fussy employment requirements, it falls to the lone sound guy to...
- ...put out required number of microphones - vocal or instrument mics
- ...put out required number of DI boxes
- ...make sure everything is plugged in to the right place and there are enough jack-to-jack leads for everyone
- ...put out required number of foldback monitors
- ...make sure everyone who needs it has power sockets available
The drum kit (in its own little cave of soundproofing) is left out and miked up permanently, because it takes ages to assemble and plug in all the mics. We're fortunate at St Aldates to have a permanent AV installation, but other churches may have to also lay out multicores, connect up amps and speakers, and so on.
As I say, ideally all this setup would be done before the band arrive, but realistically the band do help out too!
Service -1.5 hours
Pray
This is the point at which the sound and visuals engineers (the visuals person has turned up by now, right? That's for another post...) leave the sound desk and head down to the band to pray together. This is important! It also helps in getting rid of any partisanship between band and AV team; both need to be working together for the glory of God in the service.
Sound check
The sound engineer runs this part of the process. The aim is to check that everything is working, plugged in correctly, and is giving enough signal to the sound desk. It's useful if the sound engineer has a microphone at the sound desk to talk to the band via their monitors, if the sound desk is a distance away from the stage.
In turn, the sound engineer asks each of the musicians to play their instrument and/or sing into the microphone. (It's nice if you note down their names from the rota, so you can address them directly!) On the desk, the standard procedure is
- Unmute the channel
- Move fader to around -10 / -5dB
- Adjust the gain until the sound that you're hearing is at a decent level
Some sound engineers rely exclusively on the LED meters on their sound desk at this point. They're a useful guide but ears work best! Obviously, if something is peaking at the desk then you need to turn the gain down, regardless of what your ears say. You might need to ask the musicians to adjust the volume or EQ on their instruments in order to get a decent amount of signal. You might also need to encourage them to "give it some welly" - for vocalists this can be difficult early on as their voices won't have warmed up. If the lead worshipper is a guitarist, then get them to play and sing at once - since that's more natural for them.
The sound engineer might also apply some basic EQ at this point. I tend to not do much EQing at this stage, instead waiting until the practice (see below).
If the keys player is going to be using piano sounds and pad sounds, ask them to play both (not at once). Some fancy keyboards apparently let you split these over two channels to solve the issue - pads and pianos sound very different, and the sound engineer needs to make sure that both give a suitable level without peaking. Likewise, if the electric guitar player has a fancy set of effects pedals, try a few.
Once the engineer says s/he is happy with one instrument, they will ask the musician to stop playing/singing, and move on to the next. It's important at this stage that the rest of the band don't try and play over each other. (It's also very difficult to sound check when there are people having loud conversations in the room. O hai, Late Service setup!)
This is the time I normally remember to do an initial check of foldback levels. If you're lucky, then you'll be inheriting the desk in a sane state and only a few tweaks might be needed. If you're unlucky, then a completely different set of instruments were used last time and you need to do it all from scratch! It's really down to the preference of the musicians as to what they have in their foldback. In general:
- Worship leader: their guitar/keyboard, their vocal should be loudest. Maybe some kick/snare drum. Maybe a little backing vocals.
- Drummer: maybe their drums (we use in-ear monitors so that's not as daft as it sounds!). Lead instrument and vocal. Bass.
- Backing vocalists: Backing vocals loudest, leader vocals softer. Maybe some lead instrument. Maybe some kick/snare.
- Keys: The keyboard. In my experience, keys players find it universally impossible to hear themselves in foldback even when turned up so loud you don't need front-of-house. (Any suggestions, anyone?) Lead vocal and instrument. Electric guitar if there is one.
- Electric guitar: if they don't have their own amp they'll need to be in their foldback. Lead instrument and vocal. Bass, keys.
- Bass: if they don't have their own amp they'll need to be in their foldback. Lead instrument and vocal. Eguitar. Maybe kick/snare drum.
Those are really rough starting points, but we'll tweak them later. You also probably don't have that many channels of foldback - we certainly don't! - so there's some compromise needed based on who is sharing a monitor with whom.
Once all musicians have sound-checked, all the appropriate channels on the desk should be on and at about -5dB. In general things will be too loud right now - which is good. If you push levels in the service higher than they were in the sound check, then you risk feedback. The mix will also probably sound a bit naff because everything's at the same level.
At this point I like to make the handover very clear: the sound check is done, the band are free to get on with their rehearsal, so I say something like "OK, Rich, all yours" (where Rich is the worship leader). The whole sound check should take about 10-15 minutes at most.
Service -1.25 hours
Rehearsal
After the handover, the worship leader decides how things happen. It's usually useful for the band to play through one song, after which a flurry of foldback requests will be shouted at the sound engineer all at once. :-)
I use the rest of this time to work on EQ and on the front-of-house mix. My general approach with EQ is "fiddle until it sounds good" mixed with "less is more". One piece of wisdom that was passed on to me (via Dave, via Nolan) is that a fairly tight cut at 250Hz helps make vocals a bit clearer, so I normally apply that early on. I've yet to work out how to EQ the Nord to make it sound as good as our previous Triton (though I suspect all the keys players in church will want to make me suffer for that comment).
Occasionally, a member of church leadership will wander in during the sound check or rehearsal and make comments about the noise. It might be worth either the sound engineer or worship leader having a chat to them about this if it becomes a problem; particularly the point I make above about feedback. At Aldates, leadership will sometimes ask for front-of-house to be turned off once the engineer has a reasonable front-of-house mix, and although this changes how the band hear themselves and means I get less tweaking time before the service starts, I normally comply. And I always try to remind myself that I need humility in those situations where it's so easy to become annoyed at leadership!
Service -0.25 hours
Final setup
Once the band finish their rehearsal there's typically about 15 minutes before the start of the service. We normally put a worship CD on at a moderate level at this point, and I always see it as the last chance for a "bio-break" (trip to the bathroom!) before the service starts. Once done there, it's time to check battery levels in the handheld radio mics and put them at the front of church (making sure they're switched on!); prep one or more lavalier (clip-on/tie) mics depending on the speaker's preference; double check those battery levels; and pray over all the little technical details that will inevitably need to be sorted during the service.
Service +0 hours
End of the service
Have a CD cued and ready to play as the band finish. Make sure the song is appropriate to whatever's going on at the end of the service up front - if there's some intense prayer ministry happening and the band just finished on a quiet note then a loud guitar intro might not be the right thing to play!
Service +0.25 hours
Set-down
This is the part that people tend to forget! It entirely depends on what other services or activities are going on in church that day - for example, if there's another service starting soon with a similar band you won't want to put cables away only to get them out again.
If there are no more services or events that day, then the goal is to leave the stage and sound desk in the state you'd have preferred them to be in when you arrived. To me, this means a relatively blank stage (though I might leave foldback monitors set up): microphones and DI boxes put away; mic and music stands folded and put to one side; cables coiled, tied and hung up on the appropriate peg. We have an M7CL, so unless I've done something outlandish like softpatching I'll generally just leave the sound desk in whatever state it is at the end of the service.
1 comment:
Nice summary. I'd change "We have an M7CL" to "We have a digital sound desk with full settings recall facility (a Yamaha M7CL)" for people who don't know what "M7CL" means.
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