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Church Sound Files: Isolating Instruments In Innovative Ways

Like many things in live sound, some isolation techniques are filled with compromises, but that's still better than doing nothing at all.
This article is provided by ChurchTechArts.

For our Good Friday/Easter stage set up, we really change things up from our normal set up.

Instead of the band being clustered in the middle of the stage, we opened them way up, and spread them out on varied height platforms all across the stage.

We did this because a key point of our Good Friday service centers around a very powerful dance during Lead Me To The Cross. It’s a good look, but it does create some problems.

We normally don’t have both woodwinds and percussion together on a normal weekend, but we do for Good Friday. Logistics dictate that percussion be right next to winds.

In the past, we’ve gotten away with it, but this year our winds player has changed up his micing, and with the addition of three toms at percussion, we had some issues.

When the percussionist laid into the toms, it actually started clipping the input on the winds player’s rig; and he was supposed to be playing sax at that point!

As seen from the Sax platform

This problem was aggravated by the fact that the percussion platform is a foot higher than the winds platform, putting the toms right at mic level.

This problem came up during rehearsal the night before the service, so we couldn’t re-configure. So we had to improvise. We have a giant, 6′ high drum shield that we don’t use that often (though we were using it around the Leslie cabinet), as well as some other, shorter shields.

We pulled two sections of the 6′ shield and found that they fit perfectly in place between the two platforms. However, since we didn’t have enough room to Z-fold it, it wouldn’t stay up. We tried one of our stage stands, but we didn’t have room for that either.

As seen from the Percussion platform.

Someone hit on the idea of pulling a few panels off the short stands and using them as “wings.” Since the shields are made by the same manufacturer, the hinges are compatible.

As you can see from the pictures, we used two short sections to fold onto the percussion platform, which added enough stability to hold it in place. Some quick testing showed it seemed to work pretty well, so we went with it.

I spoke to our winds player between rehearsal and the first service and asked him if it was better. His answer surprised me; he said, “It’s not better, it completely solved it!” So I guess that was a win.

Click to enlarge.

We did find that it effected the toms a little bit, since we were not close-mic’ing them. We wanted those to sound a little more distant, so I had an X-Y mic set up about a foot over the toms.

The shield created a bit of phasing and slightly effected the tone, but it was a trade off worth making.

If we had more time, I may have added some absorption to try to tame that, but we were under the gun.

Like many things in live sound, this was a compromise. However, I think the end result was better than had we done nothing at all.

So how about you? What creative means have you used to isolate instruments onstage? Feel free to let me know in the comments below!

Mike Sessler is the Technical Director at Coast Hills Community Church in Aliso Viejo, CA. He has been involved in live production for over 20 years and is the author of the blog, Church Tech Arts . He also hosts a weekly podcast called Church Tech Weekly on the TechArtsNetwork.

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