Sound Sanctuary

Who doesn’t want to upgrade their digital console? I always want the latest and greatest, newest digital console on the market. I’m always bored with my old, tired console, with failing faders and touch screens that just don’t calibrate the way they used to. It’s easy to tell yourself that, isn’t it? That having a brand new, shiny digital console would make your tech team so much better off? From my own experience, that’s not always the case.

As we enter the Lenten season, a common dilemma for the church technical director is deciding whether to buy or rent equipment for special services. When you’re in need of additional equipment for a special set of services, should you rent the equipment you need, should you buy it outright, or should you do a bit of each? My first inclination has always been to “buy, buy, buy,” but when you take a step back, buying is not always the best option in the long term. Carrying an inventory of expensive technical equipment costs money in maintenance and limits your long-term flexibility.

Managing low frequency energy is a notoriously difficult proposition. The very nature of low frequencies is that they are large (see Fig. 1), difficult to control from a directional perspective and difficult to treat from an acoustical perspective. If you mix in rooms that have little or no acoustic treatment (as many of us do), trying to get your low-end under control can be a real challenge.

Miking and mixing piano is one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of mixing audio at a house of worship. Over the decade that I’ve been working in churches, I’ve experimented with numerous different techniques for capturing the piano and ultimately placing it into my mixes.

In-ear monitoring systems are a very mature product in 2016. All types of musical performers, including those in houses of worship, have embraced in-ear monitoring as their go-to stage monitoring solution. The benefits of IEMs are well known, although there are many singers/vocalists who prefer wedge monitors. Without regurgitating what has already been written countless times about in-ear monitoring, here’s a quick overview of some of the pros and cons of IEMs in general, and we’ll examine some questions and issues that often arise when introducing IEMs into the H.O.W. environment.

Purchasing a new audio console is one of the most important decisions a church technical team can make. Sure, there are a handful churches that don’t flinch at the thought of purchasing a $100,000 board, but most of us struggle to convince church leadership to spend even a fraction of that amount. Even if you work at a church with big production and big budgets, every dollar counts, and you want to make sure that the console you purchase will meet your needs now and in the future.

The first time I heard the term “virtual sound check,” I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. In fact, the idea of using pre-recorded multi-tracks as sound check material goes way back. I’ve been playing back multi-track audio as a teaching tool for well over a decade, before I even heard the term “virtual sound check.” I have no idea who came up with this or who tried it first, but certainly it has been around for quite some time, going back to the days when brave souls toured with racks of Alesis ADATs and Tascam DA-88 tape drives.

If you have purchased a single piece of digital audio equipment over the past few years, you’ve likely had to consider audio networking when thinking about how it would connect or integrate into your sound reinforcement system. Sure, you could continue using analog audio interconnects, or even AES/EBU or MADI, but the ubiquitous nature of protocols like Dante and AES67 must have you wondering about their benefits. In fact, audio networking has come a long way since CobraNet’s heyday. Not only is networked audio more affordable than ever, it’s easier to configure, easier to manage and within reach of any sanctuary with a reasonable audio budget.

I have to be honest, choir miking, choir mixing, just dealing with our choir in general, is something that I’ve always struggled with. I’ve been struggling with it for the past 10 years. Maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but seriously, like many others, the church I work for suffers from some aging technology in our main sanctuary, and it seems like we’re always “just about to upgrade.” Not that I’m blaming the gear or the people, it’s actually a confluence of several factors that makes our choir particularly challenging. So perhaps by writing this article, I can get some of this off of my chest, and hopefully impart some wisdom and things I’ve learned.

An RTA (Real Time Analyzer) is a tool that most of us have used at some point in our audio careers. The proliferation of software-style RTA’s on phones, tablets and computers have made them ubiquitous. Practically every engineer has an RTA in their pocket, or at least has one close by. Although I feel that RTA’s are an invaluable tool for any audio engineer, I’ve also spent many years listening to people knock the use of RTA’s using that old refrain of “we never had RTA’s back when I was learning sound” or “don’t use an RTA, use your ears.” In fact, a simple RTA can be a very useful tool if you understand what influences its measurements and what its limitations are.

So your church has made that rather large investment in a digital mixing console. Are you using it to its full potential? One of the most misunderstood and overlooked aspects of digital consoles is snapshot automation. Ironically, over the past decade of teaching digital consoles, I’ve heard people say things like “snapshots are cheating” or “the console is mixing for you.” Those statements couldn’t be further from the truth. Snapshots allow you to focus more on your mix, and less on the tedious process of muting and unmuting channels and getting faders into position. Anything that allows you to “listen more and look less” is a great tool.