Producing great sound in a worship service can seem as elusive as finding a soloist who always sings on key. However, it need not 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. Here's how to recruit and develop such a crew... Pray for a team. In recruiting a team, pray daily that God will provide the right team members. Then develop a plan to attract workers.

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. 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, 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. Grow a team.

The acronym TEAM, meaning Together Everybody Achieves More, particularly applies to a sound crew. To be truly effective, team members must grow together on the job in knowledge and experience as well as in spirit and emotion. Make sure that you provide spiritual, emotional, and technical food for sound-team members. Every week, I spent about 30 minutes in prayer and devotions with my sound crew before our hour-plus sessions in sound training. That time helped unite us and focus our work.

It's also important to keep the team informed of what's happening in the sound industry. I kept my team supplied with current issues of magazines, Finally, to encourage ownership and 100 percent participation, every sound-crew member should be encouraged to make suggestions about the church's sound system. I took crew-member suggestions seriously on equipment purchases. The church sound system wasn't my ministry or even the church's ministry; it was theirs and the Lord's, I told them.

Thank the team. Saying thanks is powerful, but showing thanks is even better. My favorite way of showing gratitude to crew members was to send thank-you notes to them and their spouses. Typically, I'd write something like this:

Dear Jill,

Thanks for sacrificing Craig's time on Saturday. At the outreach concert, 15 people prayed to receive Christ. You helped make it possible.
Sincerely,
Gary

Keep notes short and focused. Share the credit, but remember that all praise belongs to God.

Aim for Consistency
"We are what we repeatedly do," Aristotle once wrote. "Therefore, excellence is a habit, not an act." Doing everything right with sound in a performance is hard enough, but repeating it can seem impossible, especially when different volunteers are involved. To raise the percentage of success, standardize the layout of your mixing console, label it, then get everyone to conform to it.

Example: I always lay out my mixing console with drums on the left, followed by bass, electric and acoustic guitar, then keyboards, and finally vocals. The lead vocal is always in the farthest right channel next to the subgroups and masters. I've been doing that for the past 15 years. My technical team follows this layout consistently.

How you lay out the board doesn't matter as long as it's logical and everyone follows it. The advantage of such a layout is that when something goes wrong or there's feedback, you know instinctively what to grab to fix it. Aim for consistency also with equipment storage. Organize cables, stands, and mikes so that even with last-minute changes, such as having to work with five singers instead of the four you had planned on, you can secure the proper equipment to keep a rehearsal moving.

Preparation, Preparation
When I was a sound technician, I was blessed with a worship leader who provided worship-service outlines weeks in advance. I used to kid him that the Spirit moved in him two weeks before it hit the congregation.

One lesson I learned from him is that someone who is well prepared is able to respond much better to last-minute complications than someone who wings it. I have served as a consultant to churches that supposedly had sound-system problems, only to discover that the real problem was poor preparation.

Example: A sound team shows up at 8 a.m. to set up for a 9:30 service in a temporary facility. By 9 a.m. the sound system is set up, and a CD is playing. Musicians begin arriving for a last-minute rehearsal. The service starts seven minutes late. That's bad enough, but what's worse is that there has been no time for sound checks and input testing. The service proceeds, accompanied by hums, cracks, pops, and a lousy sound mix.

Ninety minutes later, the sound crew is exhausted, the musicians disgusted, and the pastor fed up. He decides to call in a sound expert. He needn't have spent the money. Preparation would have alleviated most of the problems.

Preparation means sending information to your team well in advance of a service. Fax the order of worship for the Sunday service to crew members early in the week so they can get a jumpstart on what they'll need to do. Preparation also means doing sound checks with musicians prior to the service and testing all microphones.

Even if the same person leads worship every week, he or she may have a cold or feel insecure about a piece of music and need the sound turned up. The key is to show up early, anticipate the unexpected, and be prepared. You can't be too prepared.

Want to read more on this topic? We’ll be presenting part 2 of Gary’s informative article soon on PSW Church Talk. Check back soon!

Gary Zandstra is a veteran worship sound leader and technician, and is a systems integrator with Group Signal of Holland, MI. He can be reached at garyz@groupsignal.com.