To see more images of Grace Church's self-made drum cage, please click here.
Grace Church in Minooka, Ill., faced a challenge that many churches share: stage volume from the band and on-stage monitors overwhelming the front-of-house sound reinforcement system in its worship center.
Creative Arts Director Justin Strode states that they began to address the issue through installing an Aviom personal monitor system, eliminating monitor speakers from the stage. This went a long way toward solving the problem, but the acoustic drums behind a basic drum shield were still too loud.
Strode looked into commercially available drum cages where the drummer is completely enclosed, but many of the options limited the visibility between the drummer and the rest of the band too much. One model they liked that didn't have the visibility limitations started at $10,000-far beyond their budget for the project.
Undaunted, the team decided to tackle building their own movable drum cage. "We had some sound panels sitting around the church, and we had a drum shield," says Strode. "We took some ideas from what we found on the Internet and came up with a plan."
They ordered a rolling riser from Quik Stage Inc. for the base. Existing drum shield panels formed the sides of the cage, and they custom ordered a 6-foot by 5.5-foot piece of Plexiglas from nearby Chicago for the front. To provide a little more headroom, they used Trex composite decking material along the top edges of the Plexiglas panels, routing a groove along the edges to allow the Plexiglas to fit into the decking. The re-purposed sound panels form the back and top of the cage, with the middle panel of the back attached to a framed door to allow easy access for the drummer to enter and leave.
Once built, they had one other challenge to deal with. "The stage lighting would only hit the drummer from his chest down," explains Strode. "So we added a small LED PAR fixture inside the cage, attached to the decking around the top of the cage, to illuminate the drummer, and then an American DJ Megabar LED light from behind to get some back lighting. Another PAR LED light is placed on the floor to light the drum kit."
After a couple weeks of lead-time for ordering the riser and Plexiglas panel, as well as a few hours of assembly, the Grace team had their new drum cage, and stage volume is now almost non-existent. The cost of the riser, Plexiglass front panel and decking came to about $1,900-a far cry from the $10,000+ cost of a commercially manufactured unit.
Do you have some stories on how your church saved money, or obtained better results by tackling a production problem yourselves in a safe and cost-effective manner? If so, we'd like to hear about it. Email us at editorial@churchproduction.com, and perhaps your solution may be featured in an upcoming issue of Church Production Magazine.
