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The Sound of Sacred

The Sound of Sacred

At a time when churchgoing worldwide is on the decline, the stratospheric rise in attendance at Resurrection Life Church in Grandville, Mich., makes for a real study in contrasts.

Under the leadership of senior pastor Duane Vander Clok since 1984, this nondenominational Christian church has gone from 400 or so parishioners to serving thousands each weekend in every demographic–adults, children, teens, college-age, the elderly, as well as Spanish-speaking members from one main church campus and two satellite campuses. At present, weekend attendance hovers around 8,000 people, which puts them into the top 100 churches in the nation for attendance.

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Ego Check

The best disruption repair I ever saw didn't involve any human problem, but an electrical one. It was a blazing hot day at the Philly Folk Festival a while back. During an afternoon round robin at one of the side stages, among the performers was a "name" who obviously was none too happy to be playing to a bunch of hicks (comment: "If I knew I'd be doing workshops, I would have brought my knife so I could show you how to whittle.") and a fairly newly-established Susan Werner. Name brand had just finished a song, and Susan stepped up to the mic and launched into "So Heavy (When You're Holding Up the Ceiling)." About a minute into the song, something apparently shorted out in the amp, resulting in a 60Hz blast at about 120 dB. The soundman, after a brief attempt to correct the problem from the board, tore down behind the stage and pulled the plug, eliminating the noise, but leaving the stage 100% acoustic. When we could all hear again, we realized that Susan had waded out into the middle of the crowded hillside and was leading the multitudes in an a cappella chorus of "So Heavy". A minute or so later, the sound restored, she strolled back up to the stage and finished the song with amplification. She got a twominute screaming standing ovation. Name brand got polite applause and was not invited back.

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The Show Must Go On

Replacing a charismatic front man is never an easy task, and when that means someone with the vocal power and range and total command of the stage as the late Freddie Mercury, it looks impossible. Maybe it was a need to get back onstage or maybe the band just did not want the Broadway show We Will Rock You to be its last hurrah. (We Will Rock You did fairly poorly in a truncated Las Vegas run and closed earlier this year.) Side note: Yeah, the story line for We Will Rock You was silly–a quasi-sci-fi tale of a world without rock music and the rebels trying to revive it that did a passable job of stringing together the hits of Queen. But Mamma Mia! (a similar kind of show featuring the music of ABBA) is at least as silly, the music is not as cool and it remains a hit, running concurrent shows in London, Melbourne, New York and Las Vegas, and selling out seven years after its initial opening. Go figure.

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Midas XL8

"Digital Goes Midas." No, I didn't coin this phrase (nor did I have anything to do with the Matrixlike magazine ad). The phrase is the promotional tag Midas (Telex, Klark Teknik) hung on their new digital mixing console. I would have said "Midas puts the analog in digital." However, I am not an ad guy; I am simply a writer for FOH who found himself an invited guest of the Midas folks to witness the unveiling of XL8 digital desk.

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RSS S-4000 Digital Snake System

Anyone who does one-off or touring gigs has been there. It's late, it's been a long day and you have hundreds of feet of heavy snake to drag and coil into a box, which then weighs a ton, and you have to push it around to get it into the truck. Sometimes, if you are really lucky, the truck has no lift, so you get to muscle it up a ramp. It's one reason why we have been watching the development of digital snakes that transmit over fiber or CAT5 and fit in a case that you can carry onto an airplane without a sideways glance from the flight attendant.

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Small Rack, BIG SOUND

I love gadgets, buttons, knobs, faders, attenuators, meters and especially anything with blue LEDs on the front panel. What I never did enjoy was looking at a gaggle of wires behind the rack or actually ever having to move a rack full of stuff.

I understand the "need" for the confident and knowledgeable FOH person to have as much outboard gear as possible. All praise the elevated audio budget! But at some point, a 6-foot rack of processing for the fixed part of a fixed house system (or small portable system) just doesn't make sense anymore.

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Wireless Microphones, Part 2

In Part 1 of the Wireless Microphones piece, I described wireless mic limitations, preferred locations of mic and receiver, RF link budgets and antenna polarization. In Part 2, we'll cover radio frequency names, antenna patterns and compression/expansion circuits.

Superlatives

Us techno-geeks are quick to toss out acronyms like VHF and UHF without a care, hoping that no one will bother to ask why a user might choose VHF or UHF as the frequency band for transmission. Starting with HF (high frequency), we move up to VHF (very high frequency), then on to UHF (ultra high frequency), then to SHF (super high frequency) and, believe it or not, EHF (extremely high frequency). Each of these high-frequency superlatives stand for a range of frequencies, or bandwidth. HF has 3 megahertz to 30 megahertz, VHF has 30 megahertz to 300 megahertz, UHF has 300 megahertz to 3 gigahertz, SHF has 3 gigahertz to 30 gigahertz, and EHF has 30 gigahertz to 300 gigahertz. And these are all waves per second of radiated electromagnetic energy, better known as radio frequencies (RF).

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The Sound of The Color Purple

I was wondering how Alice Walker's deeply poignant and deeply disturbing drama The Color Purple would be interpreted as a Broadway musical, especially at a time when so many literary and filmic adaptations are gratuitously brought to the Great White Way, but I was pleasantly surprised. The wellwritten show has a magnetic lead in LaChanze, a highly talented ensemble cast, and a score that spans African music, R&B and blues. And the multilayered story–on its most basic level, about a woman named Celie who struggles through life with an abusive, controlling husband after having grown up with an abusive, controlling father–is incredibly powerful.

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OEM

When you hear that infectious fournote audio signature on television, you know without even consciously realizing it that there's "Intel inside." The makers of components of larger systems, who have tended to labor anonymously in years past, are waking up the need to market their own brands. It's a worldwide phenomenon that transcends market sectors: Siemens informs you that they may not make the television set, but they make the technology that makes it brighter; Boeing takes 30 seconds next to a Budweiser commercial during a football game to extol their aircraft despite the fact that most viewers aren't currently in the market for a $30-million 737.

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In The Trenches

Beth Gladen

Owner/engineer

Sweet Spot Audio Productions

Cleveland, OH

[email protected]

www.myspace.com/soundchic

Live sound, both medium and small scale. Sound, stages and lighting.

Clients:

New company! First year of going out and doing this on my own! Clients include The

Grog Shop, The Winchester and several other local bands.

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The Tax Men

Dear Anklebiters,

After working with other people's sound systems for a number of years, I decided last spring to invest in some equipment of my own. It's all decent gear, and with it and my existing contacts, I have been able to slowly build up enough clients to keep busy almost every weekend. But now it's tax time, and I'm wondering what I need to do on the business end of things to stay kosher and keep in good favor with our friends at the IRS.

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Trust Me…

Driving can be a dangerous thing. Not only for the obvious "the guy in the other car may be drunk, or an idiot, or both" reasons, but because long drives can lead to thinking–in my case, a very dangerous thing.

In this case, I was headed across Highway 166 from the central coast of California (specifically Pismo Beach) where I had done a weekend as a guitar sub for an '80s tribute act, headed for Bakersfield and then Highway 58 to Barstow and up the 15 home to Las Vegas. I was home for 36 hours before heading south again to the Timeless Communications headquarters for production on the issue you are reading now.

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