Weekend Sound Update

This week was different from normal church. We are finishing our series called "Give Love Away" (yes, we used the Exodus song). And this week we canceled church to go do events out in the community. One group helped do landscaping and trash clean-up at a local high school. Some women did sewing projects, while I and about 200 others put on a concert at The Brook. It's a homeless outreach in our community started by people in our church.

And being the resident sound guy I had to be McGuiver Thursday and Friday putting together a sound system from stuff that isn't broken and isn't currently being used – which rarely leaves anything usable. The PA consisted of a pair of 15 year old Ramsa speakers that can handle about 200 watts driven by a QSC 1310 watt stereo amp (I know, it's overkill but it's all we had). I even put together a back up PA just incase. Then there were 2 Peavey 115 stage monitors. One for the drummer, the other for the vocalists, driven by a 200 watt stereo Samson amplifier. I used an Ashly Audio 2-31 band EQ to balance the PA frequencies. Cut 2.5kHz by a million dB and it sounds pretty good. Mixing was done on a Mackie 16 channel rack-mount field mixer (probably from 1991). In all I was quite proud that I threw it all together and nothing went wrong or broke. We didn't even trip the breakers.

The venue was a metal roof gazebo facing a park. Mixing was quite interesting. It was me walking out to where people were sitting and then going back and turning the guitar amp's main volume knobs up and down to match the drums and the vocals in the PA (we didn't mic the guitar amps). And letting the musicians know ahead of time was smart as they didn't mind me massaging their overall volume so the audience could enjoy the music. Mostly I had to turn them up.

Rule of Thumb: If you are going to do an outdoor concert, double check that you have extras of some things: XLR cables, microphone stands, DIs. You never know what might go wrong.

Now I gotta get some sleep. I woke up at 5:45 to load up all the equipment for the park and we are doing a night of worship tonight that is going to be kicking sweet!