Lessening the Pain of Soundchecks

Soundcheck… Sometimes I want to get every church together to get some things straight about soundchecks. If you’re not doing a soundcheck regularly, you need to.

Seriously. You need to do a soundcheck. I went through a season of visiting churches where that was almost always my first big piece of advice.

For those of you who are doing them, let’s talk a little about making them more effective and potentially less painful.

I suppose this is a good problem to have, but I run into a lot of churches these days who actually soundcheck too much. They’ll do a full soundcheck at their midweek rehearsal and then do another full soundcheck on Sunday morning. And these are not quick affairs, either. They get pretty detailed going one instrument at a time.

Now, this is my opinion, but you probably only need to do ONE full soundcheck per week. There are cases for doing it all the time, but let’s talk about what I see most.

Most churches I work with these days are using digital consoles. They’re saving show files or scenes from Sundays and mid-week rehearsals and loading them up on Sunday morning. Their instrumentation and players are also all the same between rehearsal and Sunday morning.

You don’t really need to re-soundcheck in these cases. You only need to LINE CHECK and maybe have the band run a little bit of a song to check their monitors.

What’s a line check?

It’s simple: A line check is when you check to make sure the line works, and there’s no unexpected noise or issues. Line checking in these Sunday morning situations can look something like this: