Why Most Churches Don’t Do Tech Rehearsals
They’re not fun. Tech rehearsals are long, slow and tedious for everyone except for the half-dozen people in the tech booth.
Sometimes, everyone has to hold their position for 5 minutes or more while the tech team works something out. However, the alternative is not getting that worked out and having a disaster come show night.
Tech is undervalued. Many churches will spend weeks or months rehearsing the actors and band, then give the tech team one rehearsal to learn/program/perfect the entire show, then expect it to all come off perfectly on show night (usually the next night).
This doesn’t work. As FOH engineer for Gunch!, I have more cues than any single actor on the stage. It takes time to get those written, dialed in and ready to hit perfectly. We need that time to get this right.
Making Tech Rehearsals Successful
For a tech rehearsal to be successful, the tech team must be prepared. The night of the rehearsal is not the time to start counting up how many wireless mics you should have available.
It’s also not the time to figure out where the lights should be hung. Ideally, you’ve already gone through the show and roughed in a lot of the programming.
Scenes should be written close to what they should be. Audio levels will need to be set, but the entire audio system should be patched and ready to go.
The tech team should have already read through the script (there is a script, right?) and made notes. There needs to be an easy way for the tech team to communicate to the actors and band, as well as the director.
The director needs to be completely supportive of the tech rehearsal for it to work. Our director went so far as to say to the entire cast before we started, “Tonight is all about tech. We may have to stand around for 5 minutes to give them time to do their thing. Relax and deal with it. They get to drive the pace tonight, not us.”
If you have the manpower, it’s helpful to have a few extra people in the booth just to take notes. My ATD Isaiah is TD for this show and he frantically scribbled notes throughout the night.
Next time, I will appoint someone else to take notes for audio, and I may even find another person or two to help with presentation and lighting. The workload is high for those few hours, having extra hands on deck is helpful.
Thursday, our dress rehearsal was 95% of an actual performance; in large part to the long tech rehearsal two nights earlier.
Heading into opening night, I had no doubt we’d nail it as we only had a few things to tweak.
I hope this will provide inspiration and encouragement for your church to consider doing a real tech rehearsal for you upcoming productions.
Mike Sessler has been involved with church sound and live production for than 25 years, and is the author of the Church Tech Arts blog. Based in Nashville, he serves as project lead for CCI Solutions, which provides design-build production solutions for churches and other facilities.