So in honor of my vacation and a favorite vacation activity, here’s a question I have for you guys that nobody ever seems to address. How do you stay awake when you’re mixing in a church? Seriously.

Music isn’t generally a problem because it’s an active sport for the FOH engineer. Videos aren’t generally active to mix, but they seem to have a little bit more going on to hold attention plus they tend to be relatively short. However, the preachers can get tough. I’ve had the privilege of mixing some great speakers, and the reality is that listening to the same guy give the same speech multiple times can be hard. Every once in a while I’ll get to mix a guy who tends to have a lot of dynamics requiring active mixing of the sermon, but by-and-large the fader goes up during the sermon and sits there until the end with maybe 2 or 3 adjustments throughout. While some of you may be extraordinarily gifted in attentiveness in spite of repetitiveness, I am not, and when take 2 of a long sermon collides with a shorter than normal night of sleep the challenge of mixing can easily be overwhelmed by the challenge of just staying awake.

Now, I don’t think I’ve ever actually fallen asleep, but I have on occasion skated on the line of bliss that sits between consciousness and unconsciousness; it’s thin ice, but it feels so good. While I have been fortunate riding the edge in the past, I would like to avoid completely falling asleep as I’ve heard enough stories to know that I don’t want to be that guy. In my previous church, I would sometimes slip into the atrium where I could still hear with my laptop wirelessly controlling FOH, but I wouldn’t dream of doing that now. In that scenario FOH was also located near an exit, but these days I sit among the people making an exit quite obtrusive and a reentering anything but subtle.

Several months ago I finally decided that it was more dangerous for me to potentially fall asleep at the wheel than to engage in some sort of alternate activity at FOH so I started bringing a book. This was a big help, but reading can get difficult for me at times because the guy talking on stage can be distracting. I know some guys might resort to fiddling with other things on the console, but I will never forget the time the lighting guy at my last church blacked out our pastor TWICE in the same service so I try to limit all console work to that which is necessary.

Lately my answer has come in the form of my relatively new acquisition of the iPhone. I can easily check RSS feeds, email, and I am also quite good at Solitaire. Last weekend I tried playing a little bit of air hockey on it before the service with our audio intern via wifi, but I quickly realized that would be a bad idea during a service based on our very audible reactions while playing. In all seriousness, though, the iPhone has come in rather handy at providing a low-distraction activity to allow me to keep just enough attention on the sound in the room along with enough variety to keep me awake. But I realize that not everyone has access to one of these so I’m curious. What are some of your favorite strategies for staying awake through multiple services? Please try and give us an idea of where you’re FOH is located as a more concealed FOH can offer a wider range of options.

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Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll on who mixes FOH at your church; as of this posting the poll is still up if you haven’t participated, yet. It was very cool and encouraging to see that there are so many volunteers out there. In all honesty, something that I have wrestled with is whether FOH should be manned by staff or volunteers. It is a high pressure position with a lot of demands from a lot of different directions, and I get concerned about loading up volunteers wit these things. But no matter how many times the discussion might come up, we always come back to having a strong desire to place volunteers in that position. AND our volunteers are always up for the challenge.

While I have the luxury of having some amazing FOH engineers serving with us, there are still training challenges. The nature of the role of FOH engineer isn’t a paint by numbers position. While there is definitely a measurable/scientific/technical side to it, there is also a subjective artistic side to it. A common phrase that gets thrown around is that the FOH engineer is another member of the band, and I would agree that should be the case.

If the FOH engineer is a member of the band, I would have to say his instrument is the mix itself. I’d like to take this a step further and compare “the Mix” to an instrument almost too common in churches: the piano. Piano keys are sort of static in nature where there is a key for each note that can be played. The piano notes are sort of akin to the controls on a channel strip of a mix console. In both instances, it is fairly easy and uncomplicated to teach someone how to work these. Press a piano key to play a note or move the fader or turn a pot on the mix console to change the sound.

Now, if you know anything about music–and I’m assuming you do if you’re taking a stab at this thing called audio–you know that there is a whole lot more to playing the piano than just pushing a key to make a note sound. There are millions of ways that those keys can be played based on different combinations of keys coupled with the rhythmic and dynamic components of how the keys are played. That dynamic component can’t really be quantified so let’s just call this “feel”. Feel is a very subjective thing, and something that is very difficult to teach. Some might say that feel is a natural kind of thing that you either have or don’t have. If you were to sit in on a children’s piano recital, you would invariably hear different levels of feel as it pertains to playing a piano. When I was playing in bands and auditioning members we would say that they either had or didn’t have “the rock”, but we were really talking about feel. It was an almost inherent, unquantifiable thing we were looking for; some guys got it and most didn’t.

I firmly believe there is also a “feel” component when it comes to playing our instrument, the Mix, and I would say feel plays a part in just about every component of the Mix from shaping tones to blending instruments to working transitions. People with a bit of aptitude can be taught the technical side of our instrument relatively easy. There are a lot of different buttons and slider things on a console, but given a bit of time I can teach someone what each knob/button/slider does just like a piano teacher can teach what each black and white lever and pedal on a piano does. But just like the piano, it’s not a knowledge of what each button, fader, and knob does that makes what comes out of our consoles and PA’s music. In our world it’s the feel of the engineer driving the Mix that makes it sound like music. And just like playing the piano–or any instrument for that matter–there are many different levels of feel that can make the Mix sound like it was played by a master or a brand new student or someone who simply has no business mixing at all.

The reason I’m talking about this is I think the feel side of mixing is largely being ignored while we geek out over the technology. We basically “ooo” and “ahhhh” over a bunch of pianos and maybe go to a class or seminar to talk about what each key does, but there isn’t a lot of talk about how to really play the thing. I can explain all the controls on a compressor and even give some good starting points, but that doesn’t really teach someone how to use it.

But I don’t think this is completely the fault of the available training seminars and workshops, though, because feel isn’t really something that can or should be taught in these environments through a systematic approach. How many 1st chair symphony players do you think received all their training from sitting in a classroom with other violinists? I would venture to guess the answer is a big, fat ZERO.

However, the fact that there seems to be very little talk and even less resources about nurturing feel concerns me. This is a big deal to me especially when related to mixing in churches because it’s feel that makes what we do music and not just a sonic blend of stuff. And it’s the music that the listeners ultimately will connect with on the emotional level. If worship is a heart thing, I think this is what where we want to be.

So let me bring this down from 30,000 feet to my own present reality. My training challenges at FOH largely lie in the feel category. All of our FOH volunteers have feel for the Mix, and with that they all bring their own tastes and feel to the table when they mix. They are also at different levels of refinement in their ability to apply feel to a mix using the tools at hand. My challenge is figuring out a way to take these different feels, help continue to refine them, and give them a certain consistency without completely losing the personality of the engineer. Add to the challenge that unlike a musician who can take his instrument home and practice everyday, our volunteers are largely only practicing every two to three weeks.

This year I have some new things I’m going to try to really take our mixes to a different level which will in turn aid in creating a great environment where folks can meet with God. This post ran a little long which is always the case when I start to rant so I’ll get into specific ideas in the future.

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It’s been a few weeks now, and looking back on the event I would say it was definitely a success. As far as I know they are working hard now to finish the album hopefully in time for a Christmas release. I’m attaching some of my documentation from the concert here including my input list and Venue show file if you’re interested. If you have any questions about any of this stuff, please feel free to ask and I’ll answer the best I can.

North Point Live Dox

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So I’m sitting in Atlanta International Airport waiting for a flight back to Chicago, and they have these cool things setup in the Delta terminal. At my gate there is a little station for like four people to sit at with a sign above that says “Recharge”. It’s a dedicated workstation for laptop power. Very nice. Now if only the Wi-Fi was free.

Today I have a couple of solutions to some small challenges we’ve had here. These are testament to the constant tweaking we are doing of our systems and organizational methods.

The first solution relates to keyboard use at FOH for computers and/or in our case the FOH console. This is version 3.0 of our attempts to make something work. My first solution used an old Quik-lok tape machine transport holder that would roll under the console. The problem was the wheels used to lock up on it, and the cable for our cans would get tangled up quite a bit. The next solution was a keyboard drawer that our intern put together over the summer. He did a great job, but unfortunately there is a huge support 2×4 that runs underneath the console; it’s deep enough in that you won’t ever come close to banging your knees, but it’s not deep enough that you can really get a drawer in. The solution for the drawer was to use some brackets to hang it extremely low so that it slid underneath the support. This looked like it was going to be great, but ended up being worse because everyone would slide the drawer out and end up removing the keyboard. So now we have this new solution. I think this one might stick. This is just a Ram mount I ordered from E-Mounts.com for about $70. The mount is just screwed into our countertop, and I used screws long enough to drive into that 2×4 below the console; nothing is going to pull that thing out. Then I just took a mini-keyboard donated by one of our volunteers. I popped the back off the keyboard, drilled a few holes into it, and zip-tied it to the other mount which is connected to the counter via a heavy-duty gooseneck. Great thing about this is you can put that keyboard wherever you want/need it to go, and it works standing or sitting down now. Downside is it bounces quite a bit when you type on it, but from my experimentation, it didn’t seem like it would be that bad where you wouldn’t want to use the thing. Time will tell if this lasts or if we have to go version 4.0.

Our next solution is a simple storage/organization solution for all our Countryman E6 microphones. We had an incident a couple months ago where we had a guest speaker visiting. When he went out to soundcheck, the mic that had worked during our line check earlier that morning suddenly had a ton of noise on it. Initially we thought it was RF related because that’s what it sounded like to me after soloing it in the cans. As we tried to troubleshoot the situation, things got crazy as we were just trying to put a mic on his head that actually worked. There were a lot of trips back to the amp room to grab new mic’s and transmitters, and my guess is that we probably tried the same thing a few times due to our disorganized efforts. So now we have an easy way to mic up guest speakers–our main dude has his own mic we keep isolated from the rest of the mic population, and he’s a little bit experienced so he puts it on himself with no problem.

Part of our problem that morning was due to our Countryman mic organization. All our other mics are all organized into nice drawers, but we were keeping our Countryman’s in their little pouches in the bottom drawer of an old filing cabinet. That drawer also has some other little miscellaneous mics and instrument pickups. I’d been meaning to do something about this, but it was never a big priority because the reality is we rarely have to go to our extra mic stock since we don’t do live dramas on Sundays anymore. Everything we use on a regular basis was being kept in a different location so when we ran into this snag on a Sunday morning 20 minutes before doors, it got a little rough having to dig out different mics.

So our new solution is so simple. It’s just a multi-compartment storage case I picked up at Target for $6. Cables on E6’s all pop off very easily so I just popped the cables off the mics and stuck our different colors into their own storage compartments. We have multiple systems here so we have two types of E6 cables and those are also sorted now. There are even compartments for the filter caps that we NEVER switch. So NOW if there are problems, we can easily bring all our parts right out onto the stage and quickly swap things instead of the back and forth madness we had a few months ago.

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