Church Sound: Have You Been Caught By These Five Production Surprises?

Second, what about monitoring needs? If you have an in-ear system, do you have an available unit for him to use?

Given the last-minute arrangement, he doesn’t have time to set a great monitor mix in the in-ears. He could go up and dial in a close approximation…which you’d want him to do.

If you have floor wedges, consider an existing floor wedge monitor he can use with a mix close to his needs, such as that of another guitarist.

Finally, you’ll need to set his gain. If at all possible, do this before the service. If you don’t have the time, tell him you’ll do it during the first song. In that case, make sure other musicians don’t have his channel in their monitor as you don’t want to throw off their mix.

If you do set the gain during the first song, let him know when you are done so he can set his in-ears if he’s using the in-ear system, or bring him up in his floor wedge if he has his own. There are a lot of variables in this situation. These are variables known only to you.

I will say this about those last-minute additions; don’t go for ideal, go for good. This would be true of his monitor mix and definitely your own mix. Now you are mixing in another instrument that wasn’t in the original mix during the practice.

I’d go with fitting this additional guitar into the existing mix compared to re-mixing everything. Cut out a bit of frequency space and fit the guitar in there. But then, as you know, every band and every song is different, so do what is best in your situation.

2) Equipment failure. A few weeks ago, I was following a twitter thread on a church that went acoustic because of a critical equipment failure. As you can see, equipment failures can be drastic or they can be as simple as a dead microphone battery.

Simple equipment failures would be problems like a dead microphone battery or a cable that stops working. In these cases, have equipment in place that can be quickly pulled into use.

For example, you could keep a spare vocal microphone (wired or wireless) on a stand which could be grabbed if a microphone went out during the service. In the case of cables, have a few spare cables at the ready so they could be swapped if necessary.

You can go the emergency route and keep a wired mic on a stand with a DI taped to the bottom, with cables at the ready. In case of an emergency stage equipment failure, you have a wired mic, DI, and tested cables available.

What about massive equipment failures? Mixer failure? Amp failure? You should have a plan in place for dealing with such issues.

If your mixing console dies, can you pull in a backup mixer or the mixer from the youth room? Would it work with your main sanctuary equipment? What is the least that you could do to make it work? Consider this thought; all you need on stage is one microphone.

In the worst case scenario, as long as you can get one microphone working on the stage and playing through the system, you’ve got enough to make it through the service.

Outside of the idea of spare equipment, what can you do to minimize the impact of an outage? I caught an article the other day by Ken DeLoria that spoke on this very idea. One idea Ken put forth was in arranging amplifiers so they powered house loudspeakers across different frequency ranges:

“The amps can then be circuited so that one unit can power LF [low frequency subs] and HF [high frequency speakers]; another LF and MF; another MF and HF, and then repeat as needed. Doing so offers three distinct advantages: First, if an amp fails, only a section of the system will go dark, rather than an entire bank of LF, MF, or HF drivers.

The third reason is that you’ll only need one amp model for spares, rather than several. While there is a cost penalty to configuring a system this way, the collective benefits may very well outweigh the added expense.”