Current Issue

May 2012

"A good audio system is like a puzzle:
without all of the pieces, it’s incomplete.”

Such is the case with live sound mixing. Not only must the engineer have the right tools and a well-designed room for the job, they must also possess the skills set to carry out the task at hand.

“If you don’t have the engineers there, it doesn’t matter what kind of equipment you have,” says Matt Wheeler, technical director at Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas. “The engineer makes or breaks you. With a really good engineer and good equipment, you can take it to another level.”

Dan Heins, mixing engineer and installation designer at MD Systems/Clair Brothers, a Nashville, Tennessee-based audiovisual contracting and rental company, believes that a good mix is the result of quality equipment, a well thought out systems design and an able engineer. “A bad engineer can make a good system sound bad,” he says. “A bad system is really going to be bad all the time. You don’t want to be limited by your system; you want to be limited by the talent of the people operating the system. A bad system will never get any better. Unfortunately, too many churches are hamstrung with bad systems or designs, and they are never going to achieve the things that they are capable of doing, and then end up blaming the sound guy. There are probably more bad systems out there than there are bad engineers.”

Oftentimes, a church may have purchased a high-quality system without paying attention to the acoustical make-up of the space in which the system was installed. A good acoustical design is a crucial component of a solid mix, according to Armando Fullwood, mixing engineer and president of Design 20/20, an audiovisual design firm. “Proper acoustics play as much, if not more of a role than proper equipment,” he says. “Give me great acoustics and O.K. gear, and I’ll get a better mix than with great gear and bad acoustics. As long as you know how to fundamentally set your system up, you can make average gear sound pretty good in a good room. I lean towards a balanced approach of good acoustics with good gear. I am more into having a good, controlled room than trying to spend $1 million on gear and still have a bad room.”

How much, then, should churches spend on a mixing console? Well, it depends.

“One of the things to remember is you get what you pay for,” Wheeler says. “There are a few consoles out there that give you a little bit more than what you pay for – the Yamaha M3000 is a really good deal, but it’s still a $13,000 console. It is not going to sound like an $80,000 Midas. You are going to get what you pay for.”

Shelling out an exorbitant amount of money doesn’t solve everything, either. First, you must decide exactly what types of functions you expect the console to perform. “You might have a good sounding console, but you might need more auxiliary sends than it has, or you may need more VCA’s than it has,” Wheeler points out. “The biggest thing about a console are the preamps. You may be able to cut back on your EQ section if you have really good preamps. If you have that, and you have a good performance, you may not need your 4-band fully parametric EQ – you might be able to get away with three. In audio, it’s all about the preamps.” Wheeler likes the preamps in the Midas and API Paragon mixing desks.

“Cost is always a big factor in the purchasing decision, but if they are not looking at cost first, churches should look for versatility and routing options,” Heins says. “Having a matrix section is very important for a church because they’ve got sends going everywhere; they are making recordings, and they are sending audio to many different places, be it the video system downstairs, or the lobby, or the pastor’s study.”

Heins favors consoles with direct outputs, too. “A lot of churches like to record or multitrack record, if not every Sunday, then maybe a dozen times a year during Easter or Christmas,” he adds. “They like to bring in [Tascam] DA88s or ProTools. Then they can just come right out of their direct outputs of the console. It makes it very simple. Direct outputs are wonderful for a church.”

Heins also recommends consoles that feature left-center-right (LCR) panning to complement the LCR loudspeaker configuration that is popular in many church audio system designs.

Purchasing new audio equipment presents another challenge to church sound engineers: convincing the purchasing committee that the new systems are necessary in order to achieve good sound. A committee that is unfamiliar with audio – and how much good systems cost – must trust the church’s a/v department before they are going to part with the necessary funds.

“If you are a good engineer and they start to trust you, you will get to a point where they won’t question you as much,” Wheeler says. “If they don’t trust you as an engineer, go and find somebody that they do trust. It always helps to have someone else come in – engineers and other technical people. [But] if you are going to spend all of that money, when the system is in there it better do what you said it was going to do, and they had better be able to hear it or the next time you need money, [you won’t get it]. It’s a trust factor, and it takes time.”

Heins suggests committee members visit other facilities for counsel. “The most successful projects I’ve been involved with were those where the committees actively sought out at least three or four different churches in the community so they could go and see for themselves some of the mistakes that other people have made, or some of the things that they liked about their systems,” he says. “That’s probably the best way to approach a committee that doesn’t understand the needs of audio – get them out and looking at other systems.”

Many churches must rely on a volunteer technical crew to mix audio during services – not professional audio engineers who have made careers of mixing live sound. Like the pros, volunteer engineers can practice tricks of the trade in order to improve upon their abilities.

“[One of the biggest mistakes that I see church sound engineers make] is in mixing vocals – the vocals are usually way too loud,” Wheeler observes. “The best thing to do, which has helped me more than anything, is just to listen. Get a good pair of studio monitors and listen to your favorite CD’s. Listen to where they place things and listen to the way things are EQ’d. The best thing that you can do is listen and try to recreate that [sound].” It doesn’t hurt to align yourself with a professional engineer and quiz them from time to time, Wheeler adds.

Heins notes that in many cases, a lack of preparation hampers the quality of a mix. “It’s not like [volunteer sound engineers] don’t have good ears. I see a lack of fundamentals,” he says. “I’ve met a lot of church sound engineers that do a really good job of mixing, but when it comes to changing something in the system they are hands-off. They don’t know how to patch the console or move the antenna to get better RF reception. Know your system and actively learn: How do I move from one snake channel to the next? How do I adjust to my situation instead of [calling someone in for help all the time]? I’ve gone into churches where the consoles aren’t even labeled – the engineer is mixing from memory. If someone else walked up to that board to mix, they wouldn’t know where to start. Preparation and labeling – they should really document their patches.”

While conscientious engineers will do everything possible to improve their mixes, it is important to remember that audio mixing is only one – albeit critical – link in the chain. If the performers aren’t giving it their all, the sound won’t be there, Wheeler warns. “You can only do so much with what you are given. It all comes down to the performance that is given on stage, and how good the sounds are that they are sending you. You can have perfect frequency response and really good gear, but if it’s a bad performance, it’s still a bad performance. Now, a really good engineer can take a mediocre performance and make it sound a lot better than it is – if you’ve got the right gear and the performers are pretty tight, you might be able to tighten them up a little bit and make them sound tighter than they really are. But if you’ve got bad sounds coming to you, it’s still going to be bad sound. You can just make it not quite as bad.”

Carolyn Heinze (carolyn@punchface.com) works from her media firm, Punchface Propaganda Machine.