Church Tech Arts

If you’ve just stumbled across this post directly, you should first go back and read Outfitting a Building. Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Alright, here we go.

Today, we’ll talk about the right way to outfit a church. That was a joke. You can laugh now. It would be quite presumptuous to think that A) there is a single “right” way to go about outfitting a church with A/V gear and B) that I know what it is and will now tell you. However, after being around churches and their A/V systems for some 20 years, and being the somewhat OCD thinker that I am, and having recently attended WFX where my thoughts were validated over and over, I would like to share some principles that I think are helpful when it comes to choosing A/V equipment for a church. Unfortunately, this process is hard; harder than just asking the GC for a quote, harder than hiring a consultant, and harder than leafing through the latest Sweetwater catalog. Which is why so few churches do it. But here we go.

Step 1: Figure out who you are as a church.
You were expecting, “Decide between digital and analog for FOH?” Sorry to disappoint. Here’s the deal: Your church is not NorthPoint. NorthPoint is not Saddleback. Saddleback is not Grainger. So often I find myself in conversations with pastors, tech guys or worship leaders who will say, “Dude, I just go back from [fill in the mega church here]. They have this awesome board at FOH, I think it’s a [fill in an awesome FOH desk here]. I think we need to look into that for our new building.” My first question is, “Why?” Very few churches really need a PM5D. In fact, for many churches, it would be gross overkill and a misallocation of ministry resources.

Back to the point. No two churches are the same. Your church needs to figure out who you are, who you are trying to reach and come up with the best way to do that. Depending on the answers to those questions (and a dozen more), you will start to get an idea of what the worship gathering should look like. You may find that going all Prestonwood (full rock band, orchestra, 8 vocalists and a 300+ choir) doesn’t really help fulfill your mission. On the other hand, it might.

You also need to evaluate your technical staff. Are they paid or volunteer? What is there skill and commitment level? What can they learn, and who will teach them? Same goes for the musicians. You need to determine the most effective to reach the type of people the church is missionally called to reach. For some churches, a huge band, choir and orchestra work great. For others, a piano and worship leader work far, far better. It all depends on who you are as a church.

Note also that these are not value judgements on a given style of worship. There is a place in the kingdom for mega churches, and there is a place for coffee house churches. Just don’t confuse the two.

Step 2: Determine what kind of facility you need to effectively reach your target market.
Sorry, we’re still not to picking out equipment yet. Why not? Because we don’t even know what kind of room we need to put it in yet. There are hundreds of questions that need to be considered here, and I won’t pretend to give you an exhaustive list. But think about a few of these and more will follow.

What should the worship space look like; traditional, modern, post-modern? Would a fan-shaped seating area work better, or does stadium seating help us better accomplish our mission? Do we need a room that enables us to pull off services that look like a Trans Siberian Orchestra show? Or do we need to bring together a more intimate “hanging out in the living room together” vibe? Does a big, elevated stage with some separation between the stage and seats work, or perhaps a more “theater in the round” concept?

Keep in mind, though I’m using two extremes to illustrate the point, there are hundreds, if not thousands of shades of grey in between. The point is that no one size fits all. I’ve heard of churches who currently have 100 people, more or less, showing up on Sunday that want to build a 5,000 seat auditorium. Even if they could afford it, which they can’t, do you have any idea how uncomfortable that would feel on opening Sunday?

The type of facility must match your mission. That may well be a huge auditorium. Or it may be a movie theater off the metro line. Or a coffee shop. Or another church you rent on Sunday nights. Just promise me you’ll think it through, OK?

Step 3: Determine the type of equipment that works best in your space, with your volunteers and within your budget.

Finally, we get to choose some gear. But notice that we’ve really done the hardest work up front. When equipment selection flows from missional direction and facility appropriateness, you will find yourself upgrading far less often.

Consider one model; an urban missional church dedicated to reproducing itself in a series of smaller, neighborhood-targeted churches. It’s really easy then to determine that spending $65K on a FOH desk is not an effective use of missional dollars. The church, especially if portable at the beginning may be far better served with a $10,000 RSS V-Mixing system. Or a $4,000 analog desk.

Or think about speakers for a second. Everyone wants line arrays right now (and every supplier wants to sell them). However, they really only work well (the operative word being well) in a fairly limited number of environments. And they’re really expensive. So don’t put them in your building just because Willow Creek has them. Go back to questions 1 and 2 and figure out what is the best use of ministry dollars. What helps further the mission of the church? A $200,000 line array that’s total overkill or a $50,000 distributed mono cluster?

While it may appear that I’m picking on churches for spending too much, other churches will spend too little. Both are mistakes. If you believe the mission of your church will be best served by building a large auditorium and going for a Willow/NorthPoint style of worship, then don’t cheap out on the gear. Because if you do, you will replace it not once, but twice. This frustrates the daylights out of me because churches do it over and over, and it’s so predictable. Seriously, do it once, and do it right. You will save tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

Now, I’ve been using sound systems here for most of my examples, but the exact same principles apply to lighting, video and presentation. Do you need to have 18×32 HD IMAG screens in a worship center that seats 300? Probably not. But in a 5,000 seat auditorium, you had better think about it. And know that it’s going to be expensive.

If your worship team consists of 4-5 players and a vocalist or two on a small stage, you probably don’t need to budget for 15 moving lights. In fact, depending on the mood you’re trying to create, a few simple fixtures with gels might be just what you need. Think it through.

We’re working through this process right now at Upper Room. As we work to figure out who we are and who we’re missionally called to reach, I’m beginning to make decisions on the kind of gear I’m interested in. For example, as much as I love the M7-CL 48 we currently get to mix on, we simply don’t need that big of a desk in our new iteration. And while it would be cool to go all wireless in-ears for our band, I’m thinking Aviom because we’ll get through sound check faster. Faster will be important in a portable church environment. I’d love to have access to a bunch of moving fixtures (mainly because they’re cool), but since we’ll likely be loading in, setting up and tearing down every week, those are out. In fact, I’m strongly considering going all LED because of their low power draw. Sure, they’re not as bright, but our worship style works best in low lighting anyway. We like to set a darker, more “candlelit” vibe. So I don’t need to throw 50,000 lux on the stage.

As much as possible, I’m making selections based on our mission, and the facility we will use to implement that mission. And I’m not bothered that NorthPoint uses a DigiDesign Venue in their facilities. That would be total overkill for us. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure a 24 channel analog board wouldn’t cut it for them.
Clearly this is not the be-all-end-all discussion on the matter. In fact, I hope this does nothing more than start a bunch of discussions. We can’t choose our equipment in a vacuum. We can’t choose it because it’s what some other church uses. We can’t choose it because it’s what the GC put in the last church he built. It needs to work for each individual church and their mission. Figure that stuff out first, and the church and the Kingdom will be better of.

It’s been a week since the FCC voted on the issue of White Spaces. The cynic in me believes that they chose Nov. 4 as their day to vote figuring the rest of the country would be earnestly following the other election, and they could escape any real critique. That may be, but the techies among us were just as concerned about what will happen to our wireless mic spectrum. 

Details are still coming out, but overall, it looks like generally good news for those of us who use wireless mics. I talked a bit with Chris Lyons of Shure and Kirk Longhoffer at WFX, and got a few more details. The short story is that the unlicensed white space devices will be limited to a few unused TV channels in each market, the will use spectrum sensing and geo-location to avoid other signals (which means churches can register their frequencies) and they are not allowed to use channels 14-20.

So overall, it’s good news. Kirk Longhoffer has a more detailed assessment that you can read at his site, TechnoPraxis. I just met Kirk and learned of his site at WFX, and I have to say, it’s a site to check out. Stay tuned for more details, particularly regarding the ruling on the 700 Mhz relocation plans. In the meantime, check out Kirk’s article.

If you didn’t guess today’s topic based on that fantastic pun for a title, we’re talking about one of my favorite pastimes: Soldering. More specifically, making your own cables. I think I bought my last pre-made audio cable about 15 years ago. Since then, I’ve made all my own. Mic cables, speaker cables, instrument cables, even patch cables and patch bays. If it carries audio, I’ve made it. I don’t think I’ve ever attended a church for any length of time and not ended up making audio cables. 

For today’s post, I’ll talk about why I make my own cables and what my favorite raw materials are. Upcoming posts will illustrate proper connection methods for various cable ends (1/4″, XLR, Speakon, even BNC). But first…

Why make your own cables?
I give several answers to that question. First, I like to control the materials I use. Building my own allows me to specify the cable, the connector and how they’re mated to one another. I have my favorite cable types for different applications (see below), and I really don’t like the cable they use in cheap music and instrument (MI) store cables. It doesn’t coil well, doesn’t feel good and doesn’t last.

Second, I like being able to control length. For example, in our current Upper Room setup, we have need for a bunch of 1′ mic cables to run between DIs and our sub-snake. Those are easy to make up. We also needed some 8′ cables for vocal mics. When I’m doing an installation, I like to make my cable exact length. It neatens the install, and makes it far easier to work on later on (and by exact length, I mean point A to point B, plus a service loop if needed). I’ve seen a stack of IEM transmitters sitting next to a mixer, literally 2′ away, all connected by 25′ cables. I wish I was making this up.

Third, there is significant cost savings. Whereas a high-quality 20′ mic cable might cost $30 or more, I can make that same cable for half that, and it only takes me 5 minutes (when I’m making more than one). If you only need 2 cables, making them yourself might not save you any money (though the first to arguments apply), but when you’re doing 10 or more, the cost savings really add up. And when you start looking at multi-channel cables, the savings really take off.

My Favorite Things
I’ve been buying nearly all of my connectors and wire from the same place for over 10 years. Markertek has a great selection of both (and a whole lot of other stuff), they ship fast and offer great customer service when needed. They’re prices are also hard to beat. I compare others every so often, and they remain competitive. You may be able to find a local source for these parts as well, but I find it easier to hit the ‘net, place my order and wait 3 days for the box to show up. Takes a little more planning, but I also stock standard components and cable in my office for emergencies.

So here’s what I like to use. For mic cable, it’s Mogami 2792 all the way. It is, hands down, the best mic cable made. It’s great to handle, coils wonderfully and is exceptionally low on noise. Because of the unique shielding method (which we’ll talk about when we make mic cables), it’s nearly impervious to noise. I’ve run these mic cables right next to AC lines (I know, you’re not supposed to) and never had a hum sneak in. It’s also a great bargain at $0.49/foot as of this writing. Some people might like the Canare Star-Quad, but I hate it. It’s incredibly hard to work with, isn’t nearly as flexible as the Mogami and is more expensive. I’ve used literally thousands of feet of 2792 and never had a cable go bad (except for the one that got run over by the piano…)

For instrument cables, it’s Mogami again, this time 2524. Though I’ve been known to use 2792 for it because that’s what I normally stock, 2792 is low impedance, while 2524 is high impedance. For a low cost, permanent install cable, I will often turn to West Penn 291. It’s a little harder to work with than some of the Mogami console cables (2944 for example), but it’s often quite a bit cheaper. When I’m doing a ton of install lines, I’m not as worried about flexibility of the cable, so I don’t mind using 291. And the $0.10/foot (or more) savings adds up over several hundred feet.

When it comes to connectors, there are several to choose from. One thing I don’t do, and neither should you, is use any connector you bought at Radio Shack. They’re junk. And expensive. Don’t do it. 

Now that we have that out of the way, for 1/4″ connections, I’m a Switchcraft man, all the way. Neutrik makes a good connector, but I don’t like assembling them. Their pads are too small, and they take too much time. And they’re big and expensive. Nope, give me a 280 for unbalanced lines and a 297 for balanced. I normally keep 10-20 of each on hand at all times.

For RCA, I won’t use anything but a Switchcraft 3502. Others make them, but I like Switchcraft’s. When it comes to XLR connectors, I’m divided. I was a long-time Neutrik addict, having soldered up literally hundreds of NC3MXs and NC3FXs. They also make a pretty trick IDC (insulation displacement contact) connector that doesn’t require soldering. You can throw on of these on the end of some 2792 and have a mic cable made up in about 2 minutes, and you don’t burn your fingers. But, I’m a cheapskate and they’re about a buck more than the solder ones. Not bad if you want 5, but I use a hundred or more a year. 

As much as I love 280s and 297s for 1/4″, I’ve never liked (not even a little) Switchcraft’s XLR connectors. Sure, they’re strong, but they are harder to put together than a kid’s Christmas present. All those parts and little screws for the strain relief…yuck! However, a few years ago, Switchcraft won me over with their new AAA series. While there are 4 parts to an NC3, the AAA has 2. The pins are integral to the shell, and the strain relief is built-in to the back housing. Slide the housing on the cable, strip the ends, solder it up, screw it together and bam! you’re done. Two minutes an end, tops. Best of all, they’re comparably priced with the NC3 series. 

I’ll still order NC3s if the AAAs are out of stock, but when I can get them I use AAAs. Always get the metal housings, too. Don’t cheap out and try the plastic to save a few cents. You will be disappointed. 

For speaker cables, you can’t beat the Neutrik Speakon series. Get rid of those 1/4″ cables on your wedges and go Speakon. You’ll have a lot fewer monitors coming unplugged accidentally…

Later, we’ll talk about making video cables, too; so I’ll throw in a plug for those parts. Again, I’m sold on one type of connector that I’ve used thousands of times. Kings 2065 series is the way I roll. You have to get the right connector to match your cable, but that’s not hard. I keep things simple and stock one cable, Canare LV-61S RG-59, and one connector 2065-7-9. LV-61 is the 2792 of video cable. 

So there you go. Order up a mess of those connectors and a few hundred feet of cable and we’ll get going. Onward, Christian Solder-ers!

Training is a great way to learn things. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of videos, read books, attended seminars and learned from real, live people. This is all very useful, but has the disadvantage of also being easily forgettable. Much like our own lives, the lessons that stick with us the best come when we are under pressure. It’s easy to forget God when things are going well; however difficulties tend to draw us close to Him. Likewise, it’s easy to learn a product feature in a seminar, but if you really want to sear it into your brain, wait for the day when the service is actually running and something goes wrong. That’s when you learn things.

Such was the case yesterday at church. We had a new lighting volunteer, though since he’s been observing for the last 4 weeks, he’s not really new. He had no trouble programming the cues for the service, and everything ran perfectly during run through. We thought we were all set for the beginning of the service. When it came time to dip to black for the intro video, all the lights stayed on. And the band lights (with color changers) actually looked brighter. What the heck?

Since the video was already running, I grabbed the grand master and pulled it down. I went into the blind and looked at the cue. It looked fine. All the fixtures were at 0. Now I was puzzled. But the video was ending and we needed to come back up. So we fired the next cue, pulled up the grand master and waited to see what happened. The lights came on, and everything appeared normal.

However, when we went to run the next video, the same thing happened. No lights were going down. We scrambled around for a bit, and used the grandmaster to get us in and out, but things were not right. The band lights were all up when just the speaker lights were supposed to be. I looked at the cue in the blind, re-recorded it and fired it during the prayer. Same thing. Band lights, and speaker lights. We managed to muck our way through the rest of the service, but it was not pretty.

Between gatherings, I started playing with it. We went to top of the cue list, and starting firing off cues. Same thing. Somehow, the lights just wouldn’t go down. I tried a whole bunch of things before I had the “Doh!” moment. Somehow, the operator accidently fired a cue in the C/D masters, and that took over most of the lights. Normally we run everything in the A/B masters, but since the C/D side already had most of the lights lit, all we were doing with the A/B side was bringing the color changers in and out. I hit clear on the C/D faders and everything returned to normal. Crisis averted, time for dinner.

Lessons Learned
So what can we learn from this? First of all, it’s important to realize that mistakes happen. I wouldn’t blame this on the light op, because I could just have easily hit “Go” on the C/D bus as on the A/B bus and had the same problem. Now that we know the result of that kind of mistake, we focused on prevention. We but a piece of board tape below the A/B Go button and drew a big arrow to it. That will help. If I really wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again, I could create some kind of cover for the C/D buttons to make sure they’re not hit. But that’s just prevention.

What about when something like that happens again. I’ve written about this before, but the first thing to do is not to panic. After you’re done not panicking, you need to quickly come up with a temporary fix to keep the service moving forward. We needed to take the lights to black, so I grabbed the grand master and pulled it down. That bought us time to think. Second, look at the big picture. Barring outright equipment failure (which happens less often than we initially think), most of the problems we encounter with our gear are man-made. We push the wrong button, assign the channel wrong, improperly place a mic. 

I initially blamed the board, and though it went out of control (I’m only partially justified in this, as our previous lighting system did occasionally go rouge). Had I taken a deeper breath and stood back and looked at the board, I would have seen that there was cue fired in the C/D bus, hit clear and we’d have been back in business before the video ended. To his credit, the new lighting op said he saw that, but didn’t know what it meant. Another point of training. He saw it and didn’t know what it meant; I didn’t see it, but would have known had I seen it. What was missing there was communication. If you’re troubleshooting with another person, speak what you see. You may not know the significance of it, but they might. And don’t assume that what you see is not significant, even if you have far less experience that the other person. Sometimes, problems are solved when one person says something that triggers a thought in another person and the trouble is found. Talk to each other (it’s a good rule in life, come to think about it…)

Get to know your equipment, and learn how it works. I’ve gotten pretty good at our lighting board, an ETC Expression 3, but I’ve not played with using the two master busses much. Had I spent more time with it, it would have been more obvious to me what the problem was. Next time it happens, I’ll know. The same thing can happen with other types of gear. One of the first times I mixed on the M7, I spent a good 2-3 minutes trying to figure out why the bass wasn’t coming through. I had input signal, but it wasn’t coming out anywhere. I checked my patching, the master, inserts, finally, “Doh!,” it was assigned to the wrong DCA, and that DCA was turned off. Had I glanced at the DCA assignments in the channel overview page, I would have checked that earlier.

Share your mistakes and solutions. One of the things I’ll take away from this experience is to make sure I go over this with the other lighting operators. I’ll show them exactly what happened (I may even simulate it, and have them try to solve it), so they’ll know too. The only thing worse than having a problem like that in a service is having it happen again because you didn’t train everyone on it. We all make mistakes. What separates good technicians from the great ones is that the great ones learn from mistakes–theirs and the mistakes of others. Perhaps, this article will help bail someone else out of a jam. That’s my hope anyway!

When I joined Upper Room, our tech booth was in need of, how to say, a little rennovation. There was a lot equipment packed into a small space. Some of it was hooked up, some not. Wires were coming in from all over the church; some labeled, some not. And there was some equipment that could best be described as “temporary.”

This is what I walked into when I started. (click on any of the photos to enlarge)

This is the view looking in from the doorway. Welcome to Minnesota!

The video control desk. I’m not even kidding, this is what it looked like.

I have nothing to say about this.

How about that lightboard. Yup–it says Behringer. And yes, those are cinder blocks.

The reason for the cramped table space was this huge rack,
with hardly anything in it. Part of the original deisgn-build.

Clearly I had some work to do. What you don’t see is some really bad wiring (BNC ends not crimped, but put on with heat shrink; DMX cable running next to fixtures with melted insulation; a DMX network with no splitter or DA; a single audio feed from FOH that had 9-count ‘em 9- Y-cords in it; etc.). For the first month, my main task every Sunday was just trying to make things work. I don’t like having to function in such a situation, so I decided to start tearing things apart, and making it better. I wanted to be like Ty and just blow it up. But they wouldn’t let me. So a rennovation was in order.

As the first step, we pulled all of the DMX cables and ran new ones. We had been having issues with lights turning on and off randomly, or not responding at all. Rather than mess with it, we ran new. I also installed a DMX DA to properly split the DMX signal to the 4 dimmer racks and color scroller. Contrary to popular wisdom, you’re not supposed to split a DMX signal without a splitter. Causes all kinds of relections and other bad stuff.

Next, we tackled the audio feed. I pulled all the Y-cords and used a proper DA (which, oddly enough was lying on the floor in a pile of cables…go figure). I also cleaned up the video table with a proper rack, and replaced the monitor. We moved the rack to a better part of the room, and added another table. In the process, we dumped the el-cheapo DJ style Behringer light board for an ETC Express 3 (which, also oddly enough, was sitting in a closet, unused–I wish I had good explanations for this…) Just doing this was a huge improvement.

You feel better already, don’t you?

It’s starting to look like a real tech booth now.

The video desk still has a big clump of wires on the floor, but at least you can put your feet under the desk now and not worry about turning the cameras off (that was a real issue before. I wish I was joking).

The extra table gives everyone room to spread out, and easily accommodates the new light board. I can now stand between the presentation tech and the light tech and see what’s going on in the room. There’s now an iMac on the left side as well, but I forgot to take a picture of that.

I call this phase, part 1. Clearly it’s an improvement, but I knew there was more work to do. It got us through the last half of the ministry year, however, and everyone just felt better coming in to do their thing. It’s amazing the difference the physical space has on how one performs their job. In the old space, which was clearly in chaos and not thought highly enough by anyone at the church to clean up and improve, the volunteers felt unappreciated and didn’t take their jobs too seriously. It was fun watching the looks on their faces when they came in the first time after phase 1. Not surprisingly, everyone’s game improved.

As I said, there was still work to do. Though Cat-5 cable was pulled all over the church, and video over Cat-5 baluns purchased, the system to route the video was a bit convoluted. This made for some challenging times at Easter and a later large funeral. Though we had a tie line between the stage and the booth, using it to send video (or SGA signals) down there was difficult. And we could not easily address the projectors and any other video destination separately.

Audio was also an ongoing challenge. Though I’ve taken to mixing our own mix remotely using Studio Manager (read about it here…), controlling the volume was a challenge. And I found we were sending too hot a signal to the DVD burner, which meant most of our recordings were distorted. While I had sorted out the big problems during phase 1, what we needed was a plan. A holistic plan to accomplish what we needed to, and make it easy. Here’s what I came up with. You can click to enlarge, or view a PDF of the file here.

This plan gives us a lot of options. We can send video to anywhere, in full RGBHV resolution, without effecting any other destination. I can address our sanctuary projectors independently, and can send sanctuary cameras, or computer, or DVD, to the multi-purpose room, fireside room or fellowship hall for overflow–all with the push of a button. Audio can now be controlled properly, and the booth volume no longer effects the record volume. Best of all, I’ve posted this diagram in the booth, so anyone can take a minute and figure out how to get video and audio where they need it.

I also went through and labeled all the cables. I’m a big proponent of labeled cable. It takes no time to do, and saves so much time down the road. One of the interesting things about this plan is that it required very little new gear. Most of the equipment on the diagram was already there, it just wasn’t utilized. Or it was in another room not being used. I did buy a new scan converter, a scaler, a BNC patcbay (so I can turn around our tie line to the stage and use it as an input or output), and I’ll be picking up a DBX 266 compressor to manage levels on the booth feed. Otherwise, my predesessors bought everything else.

After two really long days, this is how the booth turned out.

Finally, it looks like it should. It’s almost Zen-like now, wouldn’t you agree?

Oh, I forgot, I also bought the Alesis M1 powered speakers. And the hardware to wall-hang them. I’m very happy with those. There’s still a lot of wire running down the wall…I may wiremold that some time in the future.

What was once an unruly mess is now a comfortable workspace. I even left some desk space open to put my laptop on Sundays. There’s an 8 port network switch tucked back there, so I can go wired.

This rack used to be half-empty, and what was there was not all that effective. I’ve moved all of our RGBHV routing, switching and distribution here. This keeps the runs short, and makes it easy to wire. The Cat-5 video also leaves from this rack now. Future updates will include moving the Clear-Com base station up here (from FOH), and additional Cat-5 video baluns, as well as the aforementioned BNC patchbay.

So there you have it. Already, people who have seen it feel really good about it. It’s much easier to work in, and it just feels better. There’s so much to be said for having a workspace that feels productive. And when you raise the bar in your physical plant, the people who work in it will step up as well.

We still have some gear that could be upgraded. Our camera package is essentially a security camera system. Our video mixer, the MX-20, is getting a bit long in the tooth. And some real broadcast monitors would be nice. But given what we actaully do with video right now (which is not much more than archive), the current gear is fine. And I want a new PA first.

Personally, I feel really good about it. Many were thrilled with Phase 1, but I knew it was only 1/2 complete. Now that it’s done, I’m ready to go on to our next project. I’ll be telling you about that in the coming weeks. For now, I’ll just say that this was good practice.

ProSound Web issued a story on Tuesday that detailed an FCC proposal to ban all wireless mics operating in the 700 MHz band. You can read the whole story here. For even more information, click here to read the actual FCC news release in pdf format, or here to read the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Change order.

Having read through the article, the FCC news release and the NPRM (OK, I’m a geek…) a few times, here is my take. First, it’s still in the proposal stages. However, the writing is on the wall. I would guess it’s highly unlikely that this will get shot down. The dealine for comments is less than 30 days, and they have to reply in under 45. So my guess is that within a month or two, we’ll know for sure that all 700 MHz mics will need to be shut down on February 17, 2009.

But in my mind, that’s not the bad news. What worries me is the second half of the NPRM  which states the FCC will start investigating claims of false advertising against wireless mic manufacturers for leading the wireless mic buying public to believe that we could operate wireless mics without a license to do so. Huh?

Here’s the deal. The FCC requires all operators of RF transmitters (TV & radio stations, ham radios, wireless mics and IEMs) to have a license to operate on a given set of frequencies. I don’t know about you, but I know of no one who actually has a license to operate a wireless mic. This is because the transmitting power of a wireless mic is so much lower than a TV station that it’s laughable to think a wireless mic would cause interference. Since the only other devices operating in the same specturm as wireless mics were TV stations, and TV stations obviously have the power advantage, the FCC left us unlicensed (and technically illegal) wireless mic operators alone.

This could all change if the FCC decides to open up the “white spaces” (the open frequencies between TV stations in any given market) to other low-power RF devices (to deliver broadband internet, for example). Presumably these devices would be licensed by the manufacturer, and could be the victim of interference by a wireless mic.

Depending on the outcome of the investigation, and/or complaints filed against wireless mic operators by any new devices, we could be in a lot of trouble.

The uptake on all this is simple. If you have wireless mics operating in the 700 MHz band (that is from 698-806 MHz), you have about 173 days to get rid of them. And don’t wait until after the deadline to put them on ebay hoping people in South America will buy them because the rule prohibits the sale of 700 MHz equipment after the DTV transition date. Get the stuff listed now (thought it’s not likely to be worth much).

Also, be prepared to endure a possible licensing process or the restriction of your wireless spectrum. If you currently run a bunch of wirless channels every weekend, start thinking about how you can get back to some wired mics (they’ll sound better to boot!). We moved all our vocal mics to wired earlier this year, and I’m in the process of cutting our wireless mic inventory down from 16 channels to 8, and our IEMs from 9 to 4 (and adding 4 Aviom mixers to make up the gap).

I know the wireless manufacturers have been telling us it’s all going to be all right, just buy new gear and it will be fine. That’s good for them, as they’re selling tons of new wireless gear right now. But if the rules change again, which they might, we’ll be stuck with the tab (again).

Remember, a wired mic (with good cable anyway) is far less suseptable to RF interference and will almost always sound better than a wireless one. And you won’t (for the foreseeable future) need a license to operate it!

Today’s post is again inspired by an e-mail I got the other day (I get a lot of e-mails like this…). This time it was from a friend of mine who is a worship leader at a pretty good-sized church on the west coast. She was asking me at what point I would start hiring sound and lighting guys to run weekend services. Now first of all, I personally like having volunteers do this as much as possible. I know there are a lot of great churches out there with full-time, paid sound and lighting guys (and probably a few gals) and I have nothing at all against them (some days I even want to be them). But most of the time, from a philosophical standpoint, I really like building volunteer teams that can do sound, lights, presentation, video, etc. I’m not saying my way is right and any other way is wrong, it’s just the way I like to roll.

Back to the story. As the e-mail conversation developed, she started listing off the gear they had in house; PM5D-RH, a big Strand lighting console, an FSR video switcher, some pretty high-end stuff. Then she wrote the line that stopped me cold. It went something like this: “our technical staff is all volunteer except for a 1/4 time tech assistant and the other worship leader, oversees audio…he’s 1/2 time.”

I said, “HUH?? You have a PM5D and no full-time tech guy. Well there’s your problem!” It looks like someone drank the Koolaid. Don’t get me wrong, the PM5D is a great desk. It’s just not volunteer friendly–especially when there’s no full-time tech guy to make sure it’s set up and ready to rock every weekend. And after looking into the rest of the gear they have, I thought, “Wow, how did this happen?” 

Now, I don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess, I would suspect that the church went to a consultant as they were building the new building and said, “We want our sound, lighting and video to be state-of-the-art. Make it so!” And the consultant said, “Cool! Sign here.” My guess is that no one ever asked, “Who’s going to be running this gear? How will they be trained? Who will maintain it?”

And because the church doesn’t have a full-time tech guy, there was no one around to ask those questions. So once again, we have a church that spent a ton of money on gear that no one in-house can use effectively. I have to be honest–that really frustrates me. 

I’m all for churches using top quality equipment. And I’m all for having high production standards. However, at some point, you have to ask if you are putting in equipment that is hard for your volunteer staff to learn how to use. It comes down to philosophy of ministry. If you believe in using volunteers, you have to install equipment that’s easy for a non-professional tech to use once a month. 

Personally, I would never spec a PM5D for a church that doesn’t have a full-time sound guy (or at least a full-time tech guy who’s really good with audio). Again, it’s a great desk, but it’s too hard for a volunteer who mixes on it once a month. A M7CL would have been a far better choice, would in all honesty, likely provide more than enough functionality and would have saved $45,000. The same goes for lighting consoles and video switchers. Folks, we have to think this through. 

If your church is considering upgrading equipment, it is imperative that you evaluate each new piece of gear based on the staff (volunteer or paid) you have to run it. I think we can stretch people and encourage them to learn new things, but we have to be realistic. Most of our volunteers are not über-geeks. They don’t spend time reading FOH, Live Sound, Mix and EQ magazines every month. They don’t dream about different ways to automate the service using snapshots, or controlling the desk from their iPod Touch.

We need to be sure to set them up to succeed in what they do, not fail. I view my job as a Tech Arts Director as one who empowers volunteers to be successful and use and develop the skills and talents God gave them. To do that, I evaluate every piece of gear, every procedure, and everything I do during the week to see if it helps empower my team.

Church leaders, it’s up to you to not drink the consultant Koolaid. Now I understand there are a lot of great consultants out there who ask the right questions, and spec appropriate gear. But there a lot more who don’t. Ask them if the gear will be easy to use by your non-professional tech volunteers. If they respond with, “Oh, yeah, I use it all the time, it’s super-cool.” Keep pressing. Ask them if a guy or gal who does this once a month can learn how to use it effectively. If they stutter, keep pressing. If you’re still not sure, call me. I so hate to see churches spend money the wrong way.

In the media-driven society we live in, we need to have high standards for our production. We need to have quality gear. We need to be able to make is sound and look great. But it also needs to be easy to use by those who generously and often sacrificially give of their time each week. Don’t put in a Digidesign Venue just because they advertise in Church Production each month. Don’t buy a GrandMa just because it can control a bazillion moving lights while making your coffee.

Choose your gear wisely–you will probably save a lot of money, and you will get higher quality production because your volunteer staff will be more effective, more confident and better equipped to do a better job each weekend. Isn’t that what we really want from our technology?

The line check. It’s one of those things that most sound guys know they should do, or at least would like to have time to do, but often fail to get around to actually doing. Getting a line check done before the band arrives has saved me on several occasions. Not getting it done has cost us time (and when I say us, I mean the tech team, the band, the producer and everyone else in the room). So what is a line check? Just like it sounds, it’s a time to check each line from the stage to the soundboard (and back, if you have wired monitors). There are many ways to do it, and I’ll outline a few here. What’s really important is that you check each line, from it’s beginning–be that a mic, a DI or instrument cable–to the end, the soundboard. You’re checking not only that signal is passing correctly, but that each line is appearing where you expect it to on the board. In larger systems, or for those with digital consoles, this is important.

Line checks are always easiest when performed with 2 people (with one über-geeky exception, noted below). When we finish our setup each week, normally either I or our FOH engineer will go the board, while the other stands on stage. We will typically work from one side of the stage to the other, checking everything in our path. For us that means we start with the drums. I’ll get down on my hands and knees (hey, I didn’t say doing a line check was glamorous…) and I’ll shout into the kick mic. Then I’ll shout into the snare mic, the bottom snare mic, the hat mic, etc. I say shout intentionally because we have gates on all our drum mics. Simply talking often won’t pass a signal, and it’s tough to see if they’re working or not.

Normally, I’ll say the name of the mic I’m shouting into to double check that we’re dealing with the same mic. We don’t often patch the snare mic into the kick channel, but it’s happened, especially with new guys. So while I’m yelling, “KICK, KICK, KICK,” the engineer is cuing the kick channel and hearing my voice. All is well. Testing vocal mics is easier, normally I’ll just say (in a normal voice), “worship leader, worship leader.”

Testing DI lines can be a bit tricky, and we often short-cut it. Because DIs rarely go bad (though I did throw a bad one away 2 weeks ago…), we normally just check the line. I’ll unplug one of the vocal mics and plug it into the mic line coming out of the DI. It’s good to make sure you plug the cable back into the DI when you’re done. If you want to be extra thorough, you could pick up something like a Whirlwind Q-box or a Behringer cable tester that has a built-in tone generator. You can then plug your 1/4″ cable into the output of the tester and generate some tone. That tests not only the cable, but the DI as well.

So that’s the easy way to do it with 2 people. If you’re the only one around, you can do it yourself. Resist the temptation to open up all the channels at once, put them in the house and check the mics. You’ll find out if you have signal, but you won’t necessarily know where it’s going. If you have a really simple setup, you can get away with this, but throw in a snake, a sub-snake, some cross-patching and you can quickly find yourself chasing a fox through a cornfield. Plus, think of all the exercise you’ll get running back and forth between FOH and the stage to check each line. Or you can do them in groups of 2 or 3, then at least you’ll be close.

Now for the super-geek way to do it. I used this method last weekend–I was mixing, and I was also TD’ing–which meant I had no one around to help line check. Since our FOH position is up in the balcony, I didn’t relish running to the back and upstairs, then back down 18 times to check all the lines. Call me lazy. So I got my geek on. To make this work, you’ll need a few things: First, you’ll need a digital console you can control from a computer; a Yamaha M7 works well. Second, you’ll need said computer, a laptop, really as a desktop defeats the time savings, and the software to control said console. You’ll also need a wireless connection for your console. Finally, you’ll need something along the lines of a Rat Sniffer (mentioned in this post). 

To put this in play, unplug each line from it’s mic, plug in the Sniffer and use your laptop to turn on phantom power for that channel. If it’s normally on, turn it off. The sniffer picks up on phantom power and will tell you if you have a cable fault. When you turn on phantom, the lights will light up and you know you’re in business. Plug the line back into the mic, and move on to the next one. Work your way to the end, and you’ve done a line check without making a sound (make sure you set phantom back to the correct state for each channel when you’re done). Now sure, you could use the laptop to turn on each channel and shout into the mics, but where’s the geek cred in that? Using this method, I had the whole stage checked in just a few minutes, all by myself, without making a sound and without breaking a sweat. As my daughter would say, “Geek Squad…”

Now get out there, and check those lines…

Last fall I wrote a post on rechargeable batteries, which you can read in it’s entirety here. I know a lot of audio guys who don’t like them, or are leery of them (for good reason, they used to be less than worthless), but I’ve used them with great success now for almost 2 years. They work great as long as you observe some basic rules. I won’t repeat the original post (which is pretty good, I just re-read it), and I’ve updated it with some additional information.

If you’re at all interested in saving money in your ministry, you really should check them out. Last year, between CPC and Upper Room, we spent over $5,000 in batteries. This year, we’ll spend under $200 (and that’s only because people occasionally throw them away–I hate that!). The big upside to that is I now have $4,800 more in my budget for buying new gear, and not throwing it in the landfill. What’s not to love?

Check out the original post here.

Obsolescence. That’s a word we don’t really like in our society. To some extent, it’s a sad commentary on our culture that we fear obsolescence. We loathe working on  “obsolete” computers. Watching standard def TV on a CRT? Please. Even at church, we don’t like having A/V equipment that is obsolete. And that can be a problem. 

For this article, I’d like to define and contrast two different types of obsolescence; technological and functional. Technical Obsolescence (TO) happens when a piece of equipment becomes outdated by the introduction of a newer, more technologically advanced piece of gear. For example, a PowerMac G5 would be technologically obsolete because the MacPros are now out, with their spiffy new quad and octo Intel processors. A three-gun CRT video projector would be technologically obsolete with the advent of LCD, DLP and other, newer imaging systems. It’s really hard to avoid technological obsolescence because technology changes so fast. The first iPhone is only a year old, and the new 3G model made the old one obsolete (sorry early adopters!). You can spend a lot of money trying to stay ahead of that curve.

Functional Obsolescence (FO), on the other hand, happens when a piece of equipment no longer effectively performs it’s mission. Our previously mentioned PowerMac G5, while TO, might still be an excellent tool. In fact, I know of many post houses, recording studios and churches that use them every day. They work great, loaded up with RAM and a fast hard drive, you can edit all day long on them. And for recording audio, they bring plenty of power to the party.The aforementioned CRT projector however, is probably both TO and FO. When it was new, 800 lumens was as good as it got, but today, people expect brighter, sharper images that don’t need to be re-aligned every three weeks. Thus, it’s time for a replacement.

Here’s how I think this plays out for us in the Church. Us tech guys (and gals) can get pretty wrapped up in the latest and greatest technology. And it’s pretty easy to feel like we need that new MacPro, just because ours is now TO. Or Panasonic just released a new camera that makes our old one look not so wonderful (though it was the bee’s knees a year ago!). Or perhaps now that 7,500 lumen projectors are readily available, we feel we need to upgrade our 5,000 lumen ones.

This is where I think we can lean back on function. Does our current equipment still perform it’s stated mission well? If so, then there’s really no need to upgrade. Just because my Quad-core MacPro is now TO with the release of the Eight-core, I’m not planning on buying one (much as it would be cool). Why not? Because my Quad-core still performs just fine. The money not spent to upgrade a fully functional computer can be used to further other areas of the ministry. 

I started thinking about how much money the Church spends trying to avoid technological obsolescence. A lot of it has to do with the “use it or loose it” budgeting process (which is all-wrong for a church anyway, but that’s another post), but a lot of it is just buying stuff because we can. But what if we started looking at the big picture. What if instead of buying a new computer that we really don’t need, we took that money and partnered with a church in the third world (or another mission organization, take your pick). What if, instead of trying to figure out what stuff is merely TO (and not FO) and trying to find ways to spend that money, we used those dollars to help equip a church overseas that might not have say, chairs. Or a building. Or water. What if we actually cut back on our geek squad budgets, and gave more to others who have a lot less than we do. Instead of trying to keep up with NorthWillowGraingerBack (or insert your local mega-church here), we evaluated our A/V purchases based on Functional Obsolescence instead. How much more could we contribute to the Kingdom?

Now, keep in mind, I say all of this not to make anyone feel guilty. If you’re editing on a PowerMac G3, then it’s probably time to consider an upgrade. Or if you’re squinting to see the output of those 1,000 lumen projectors in the sanctuary, picking up some new 6K LCD projectors isn’t a bad thing. But think about what you’re upgrading and why. What could we accomplish for the Kingdom if we looked at technology through that lens instead? Just a thought…