Sometimes you just need a little help
I took Erich with me this afternoon to a church just west of Colorado Springs, CO whose sound system needed some love and a little attention. Their system was about 5 years old and installed by another integrator who did a great job but over time, and with volunteers, things just sorta.. drift. Some musicians come on board, some move on, and some pass on. New gear is added with varying degrees of success - sometimes great and sometimes it just needs a little extra help.
I met Clint on the phone and he highlighted three things he knew needed help :
- The P16 monitor system doesn't do what it is supposed to do - why?
- Drums don't come out of the left speaker (and the left speaker is buzzing) - more on this later
- The live stream clips and just doesn't sound right.
What we found
Well.. a lot. The crew at Living Word Community Church was such a fun and receptive group of people to spend the afternoon with. I spent a fair amount of time just listening to what they wanted to accomplish, taking a tour of all the things, and (if you know my personality) doing my best to let them identify the goals so that I could do what I'm good at - getting them there as quickly as possible.
Some help along the way
Erich and I were able to solve all 3 of the original needs and about 10 additional things we discovered along the way - computer feed to the sound board, dead mic cables, gain structure, and more. As far as the volunteers know, this Behringer X32 console was never hooked up to the network / Wifi so we helped them out with that as well - mixing from an iPad in the congregation seats will be a novelty for them this coming Sunday.
Oh.. and about that "drums don't come out of the left speaker" - when I was singing into a vocal mic, Erich found that I wasn't coming out of the left buzzing speaker. Digging a bit deeper, nothing was coming out of the left speaker except for an annoying buzz. We eliminated the possibilities down to the actual physical output of the X32, swapped the cable, changed the routing, and .. clean sound out of the left speaker again.
I took some time to cover some fundamentals of sound engineering - like what is a compressor and a gate and when you should and shouldn't use them.
We hooked up our MiPro TA-80s to SMAART 9 and dialed in the room to be a bit more mellow - there was some excess brightness around 8k and I know this will balance things out well for them.
In the end
Almost every sound system in a church needs a "tune up". When was the last time yours had one?