100 dB of church leaders

We finished the Drive ’06 Conference today after two weeks of music rehearsals, three days of full production rehearsals, and then five sessions spread over three days. I’ve done sound for church conferences before, but this was by far the most fun I’ve ever had doing one.

The worship was unreal for me. I honestly have never mixed in a situation like this where I didn’t have enough PA to get up over the audience which made things both very cool and challenging to mix. Next year I’m going to make sure we have more PA. After sitting through the rehearsals, the vibe of the room changed quite a bit compared to a typical Sunday situation. It was cool, but for my first time mixing the conference I hadn’t quite anticipated it. There were times it was really just a “push all the faders up” kind of thing and make sure the vocal is out enough to lead. It was a good “seat of the pants” mixing thing, though.

My favorite part of the conference, however, was the time right after each session when I got the chance to meet fellow techs and answer questions. It was very cool to meet so many other techies who are trying to make church relevant. I loved hearing how everybody is making things happen whether they were doing a portable church thing, just entering their first permanent building, or part of a “megachurch”. The passion of everyone there was amazing! These guys rock, and I feel honored to be a part of the club with them!

There were a lot of different questions asked, but the most common one was “How loud do we run things on Sundays?”. I like the way Chris Briley answered this: “3 dB below hurt.” Another common question was how do we like the Venue. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you already know that answer… If not, you can check out the goingto11.blogspot.com archives.

This conference was the most fulfilling conference I’ve ever worked. They showed a statistic at one point that through all the leaders in attendance, over 650,000 people would be impacted by the conference. To be a part of that was very special for me especially when I consider how I started as a techie doing sound for high school theatre. It’s hard to fathom how in three days you can be a part of something like that.

I wish I had had more time to talk and give tours so if you were one of the many who stopped by that I had to cut short on or was A.D.D. due to rehearsals and session preparation, I apologize. If you were there and still have questions feel free to ask away. You can also check out our production website that lists some of the technical info for North Point: www.npccproduction.org. The audio info at the website is a bit out of date, but we’ll try and get it updated soon.

I’ll try and do a behind-the-scenes followup on the conference in the next couple days. Thanks to everyone for stopping by and all the positive feedback on the audio side of things. I hope you had a great experience!

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