Here is the scenario: you show up for worship team rehearsal on Thursday night to find that one of your main speakers is “dead”. No sound is coming out of the left side whatsoever. You have been suspicious that your aging mixer might be on its last legs, so after trying a few new cables, you set out the next morning to buy a replacement console. There is little time to waste in your mind, because there is an important special music Sunday and the system has to sound right. The only problem is that your mixer was not broken, your amplifier was. In the end you had to return the mixer you bought, and purchase a new amp, which could not be done before Sunday.
One of the most frequent mistakes made by small churches is poor troubleshooting. In our scenario, several important steps were skipped and the entire process was characterized by assumptions and fear. For many small churches, the person responsible for music (often not an experienced tech person) oversees production tech and there is a small budget with which to work. However, learning to do a basic troubleshoot is of the utmost importance for anyone responsible for church technology. Here are a few principles to help:
1) Clearly Identify the Symptoms – If you are not sure how the problem is presenting itself, you will not be able to troubleshoot it. For example, do you have a buzz or a hiss? A hiss likely comes from one element of your system being turned up to reach desired volume levels because another element is not sending sufficient signal to it. A buzz is some sort of electrical or other interference with your signal. You cannot even begin to get to the root of the symptom if it is not properly identified.
2) Eliminate Panic and Assumptions – Before you can accurately deduce what is causing the trouble, both panic and assumptions must be eliminated. Even though you may not trust a certain component, put this notion aside until you have been through the whole process. However urgent your situation may feel or be, rushing through a troubleshoot and replace cycle will usually leave you in much worse shape than you were in beforehand.
3) Start at the Beginning, or the End – Troubleshooting is essentially an experiment to determine which part of your system is malfunctioning. In our example above, the first point at which (if the inputs are the beginning) the signal is split left and right is likely somewhere inside the mixer. So the first thing to try would be to flip the output connections on the mixer. If the symptom is unaltered, then the issue is further on down the line (cable, processor, cable, amp, cable, speaker box). If sound is no longer present in the speaker that was formerly working, while now present in the one that was not working, then you have determined that your amp channels and further down the line are working fine and you should spend some more time investigating your mixer. The process must begin at either the first or last place in the signal chain from which the problem could logically be originating and move forward or backward, respectively. If you just start anywhere, you will likely get confused and lose track of what you know.
4) Introduce One Variable at a time – Quite simply, if you change more than one thing at a time, you will not know which one fixed the problem.
5) Take Your Time and Document – The more patience you have with the process, the more likely you are to reason through the evidence well. It can also be very helpful to write down everything you have done so that you can go back and look at the process as a whole. This can help if your first round of troubleshooting does not fix the problem or to help you learn for next time.
Related Articles:
Mistakes Small Churches Make: Confusing Good Stewardship with Being a Cheapskate
Mistakes Small Churches Make: Unhealthy and Unhelpful Comparisons With Others
A Five Point Plan for Avoiding Those “Uh Oh” Moments
