Is Your Worship Sound Too Loud? Sometimes It’s Hard To Be Quiet

Collaboration is the key here. That means coffee. Coffee with your service director, worship leader, producer, and anyone who is involved in creating the worship experience. You’ll need to develop a common language and become good at interpreting the words that less technical folks use.

It’s important to educate others about better ways to communicate their ideas about sound levels, as well as for us engineers to learn “normal speak.”

Saying “dB” in a sentence doesn’t solve anything, unless frustration is the goal. They will also need to understand that a number on an SPL meter can mean different things depending on content.

For instance, if music is midrange heavy it may cause a reaction of being way too loud compared to a low-end heavy section of music that actually reads higher on an SPL meter in C-weighting.

Also, the beginning of a musical piece will probably be received as too loud if it starts off at the same level as you’d typically find at the end of a long gradual climb in level.

It’s important to leave room for dynamics and to allow adequate time for the congregation to adjust to higher levels, if that’s where you are headed for maximum effectiveness.

Don’t use up all your headroom on the downbeat. If your room is half full, it will probably need to be quieter. But not so quiet as to weaken the intended impact of the program.

It truly is a delicate balance. I trust my leaders. They don’t have to worry about the 100 subtle sub-cues and anticipations of sound in every song.

And I don’t have to worry about the rest of the production universe outside of audio when I’m mixing, which is only one piece of a very big picture.

Volume Affects Response
Volume affects the congregation’s emotional response; 6 dB can literally raise a room to their feet or cause an awkward lack in participation.

For now, we’re not talking about personal style preferences. Personal preference could say a guitar “looks” too loud, but a pipe organ and a choir at 105 dB are righteous.

Taking out personal preference leaves what? Many things, including: The maturity of the congregation, the heart and effectiveness of the leader, the sensitivity and musicality of the band to follow, the maturity and musicality of the engineer, and anticipation.

And more physically and mechanically, the acoustics of the room, the noise floor, the quality of the PA, the dynamic responsiveness of the mix engineer, among many other things.

Many factors affect the environment, and the environment can either support or detract from a worship experience.

It is a phenomenon created by the pure number of people gathering in one place, and the culture determining what affective communication is, as well as their openness to God.

If I have two people come to my living room with an acoustic guitar, we can certainly worship with no equipment.