This has proven to be a great thing, especially since we’re in the balcony 90 feet away from the stage.
I honestly have no idea what’s going on in their wedge, but cuing it up at front of house is wonderful. If they start to get out of control, and start asking for changes that don’t make sense, I can listen to their mix and hear what’s wrong.
One of the keys to making this work is calibrating the volume of the cue wedge to the volume of the wedges on stage. This is fairly easy if all the wedges are the same (which is the ideal situation anyway).
We calibrated ours by playing back some pink noise through a stage wedge, then measuring the level with an SPL meter. It doesn’t matter if it’s totally accurate or not; you just need a value. Then, go up to front of house and cue up that mix in the cue wedge. Adjust the amp driving the wedge to produce the same volume.
It’s critical that you keep the volume calibrated, so it’s not a bad idea to mark the master solo level and the amp levels in case they get moved. How you connect and bus everything is going to be dependent on your console, and it may take some experimentation to get it working optimally. Reading the manual or even calling tech support may help here. I won’t even try to explain it here as there are many ways consoles support this.
If you can get this up and running, you will find mixing monitors from front of house a much easier task. We placed our wedge in a location that allows it to be pulled out during sound check so we can hear it easily, then pushed back under the desk when we’re done.
Typically we’re not making many adjustments once the actual rehearsal gets going, so we move it out of the way.
While not completely ideal, mixing monitors from the house is what most of us in churches have to do. Having a cue wedge makes it a lot easier—give it a shot and see what you think!
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.