Producing great sound in a worship service can seem as elusive as finding a soloist who always sings on key. However, this doesn’t have to be.

Many factors influence the quality of sound: room acoustics, sound-system design and performance, operator experience, and quality of musical performance.

Here are some practical tips on how to tie all of that together to get the best sound.

Understand the Basics
To get the most out of a sound system, you must first understand how it works. Basically, acoustic energy, or the sound you make, is converted to electrical energy via a microphone, then colored or equalized via a mixer.

The mixer sends the sound through processing equipment (crossover, equalizer, signal delay), then to amplifiers to enhance the signal. Finally, the amplified signal goes to speakers, where it’s transferred back to acoustic energy.

The key components of sound-processors, amplifiers, and speakers-should be professionally designed and set in a church, then left alone. The mixing board is where you should make adjustments in tone and sound levels.

Build a Sound Team
A sound system won’t run by itself. It needs a sound crew to function to its true potential. Some ideas on recruiting and developing a good crew:

I like to recruit one-on-one, much like a hunter who goes to the woods looking for a specific target. The hunter may see ducks, squirrels, and turkeys, but he sits tight for a certain kind of deer. When he sees exactly what he’s looking for, he pursues it with vigor.

Be the same way when developing a sound team. Decide what kind of people you need, then recruit them vigorously.

You could also try the fishing-pond approach. That means recruiting candidates from a select gathering of people.

For example, when Marty O’Connor was at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, he and his video crew offered a yearly seminar on how to make movies with a video camera.

After the seminar, the crew would bring out their studio cameras and invite seminar attendees to try operating one of the “big boys.”

All the while they’d look for people in that “pond” with special aptitude for working on a video crew. Then they’d recruit them. Members of a sound crew might be found through a similar approach.

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