Understanding Your Church Sound Systems

Your church sound system may seem complicated, but when you understand how all the parts work together, it’s a lot simpler to understand.

Hey! If you're new here, my name is James and I help worship leaders and sound techs help eliminate the mystery and frustration around sound at church so that you can have a great meeting without having to think about the sound system. Today let's talk about how to get the most out of your church sound system.

How Is a Sound System Like a Bus?

The way that I like to explain a sound system to people that don't know sound systems, which is most of you, is that it's a lot like a bus. So we can use the analogy that we’re taking a bunch of people someplace and we need to do it smoothly, keep it between the lines on the road, and hopefully bump-free.

The first part we have to talk about with the sound system is leadership and inputs. Leadership, because we have to know where we're going and inputs because the sound system can't make a bad-sounding band sound better, just louder and maybe clearer. Between a big sound system and a small sound system, all the parts are the same. There's a little bit more complexity in certain situations, but really the biggest difference between a big sound system and a small sound system is how many people are going to get hurt if you run off the road. But before we even get onto the bus, we have to worry about that road itself.

Keep Your Bus Within the Road Lines

Parameters For a Great Mix

The leadership team must define what the lines on the road are. What makes a great mix for your church? What's going to help people engage in worship, not be distracted, and have an easy time jumping in and singing along? That's going to be really different from church to church, so you have to define what that is. And in this analogy, that's the lines on the road.

If you go over the lines, people get hurt, people get upset, you get angry emails. I get it. I've been there. I've gotten the angry emails before. If you have a clear idea of what the mix should sound like, it's like having clear lines on the road. It's not ambiguous, and you don’t wonder if you’re in your lane or not. You really know where you're at and you can really keep between the lines. This is a part that a lot of people struggle with, and it costs you nothing to fix. You have to listen to recorded music with the people that are running sound so everyone can be on the same page with the same language about what a great sounding mix sounds like for your people.

The other important element when it comes to leadership is having clear directions on who's in charge. You might have that one congregant that likes to voice their opinion louder than everybody else, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they’re right, just that they're louder. So to keep some sanity within the sound booth, you need to know who's in charge and who can give directions to the sound tech if there's something going wrong.

Fueling the Bus

Worship Team Preparation 

Next, we need to talk about the fuel, because a great-sounding band is going to sound pretty good when you just push up the faders. But if the band doesn't have it together, if they are losing their timing, if they're playing the wrong chords a lot, the sound tech can't really help with that. And sometimes people look to the sound tech and say, “Hey, fix our sound!” But the issue is that the band needs to get better at musicianship.

Now there are some things that we can do like using live vocal pitch correction, and I'm a big fan of it. I think it helps eliminate distractions and puts less of a burden on people to be perfect for the live stream. But you have to make sure that your band is performing at their best level so that even if you didn't have a sound system at all, everybody would be together, everybody would be playing the right chords and the right register, and the arrangement works. So the fuel matters before it gets into the bus.

Who Are Your Drivers and Mechanics?

Defining Technical Roles on Your Team

So from here, we have to think about adjusting things on the sound system in two different groups. We have our drivers who are the people actually operating the console at a rehearsal or a Sunday morning. This job can be taught to just about anybody that has basic hearing skills and isn't afraid to push faders up and down.

The other person that you need on your team or to be able to hire is a mechanic. Somebody that can come and make sure that everything's optimized and working its best. You don't have to have somebody that does all of that in order to get them to be a volunteer on your worship team. But the mechanic functions still have to happen. So if you're a worship leader and you're suddenly in charge of all these technical functions of the sound equipment, and you're overwhelmed, don't worry. I've been there and I can help you out.

Make Sure Your Fuel Lines Are Clear

Your Signal-to-Noise Ratio

So first of all, take a look at what happens in the driver's seat. The first thing that you have to have is clear fuel lines. This is the way that we mic instruments, plug them into DIs, and capture them to bring them to the soundboard in the first place. The thing about microphones is you want to pick up some sounds but not pick up all the other sounds. So it's really important that you have more like a fuel filter in place to know that you need to pick up some stuff and not pick up other stuff. In audio, we call this the signal-to-noise ratio or the amount of wanted sound that we want compared to the unwanted sound that we don't want. Great mic technique is just one of those little baby steps that help along the way in order to get a great sound from your church sound system.

Is Your Windshield Clear?

Casting a Unified Vision for Your Team

The next thing we need to think about is a clear windshield for our drivers. It's really important that they understand where the lines on the road are. But it can get messy when people tie up their identity in how well they perform, or they think that everything has to be perfect in order to have a successful worship service. Other times they minimize their importance and the enemy will tell them lies and say “Your job doesn't matter. You're not up on stage. Nobody cares about you. They only notice when you do something wrong.”  And while some of those things are true, they do matter and they are a part of the worship team. And they play a critical role in this little tiny bottleneck called the sound system that helps the people on stage lead the people in the congregation.

So it's important to cast vision for the importance of the church sound tech often. Because people tend to forget, and by the time you've repeated it so much that you're sick of repeating it, you've probably started saying it just enough. So take this as your reminder to shoot a text to one of your church sound techs and thank them for doing their job and for doing a great job, even if there's a lot of room for improvement.

Now, we already talked about clear lines on the road. They have to know what's in-bounds and what's out-of-bounds. Personal preference can creep in and it's not that personal preference is bad, it’s that we're serving the personal preference of our leadership team at church so that everybody's on the same page and we're moving in a cohesive direction. One person might like playing in clubs on Friday night, and they might have a more hard, heavy-metal type background. While another person might have a more acoustic, folk-music background, sitting around the campfire. Neither one of these is wrong, but the church needs to decide what direction we're going and how the different mix elements should fit together.

Are You Following the Speed Limit?

Be Mindful of Your Mix Volume

The other thing that I like to consider in this is the speed limit sign and our speedometer. How loud is too loud, and when do we need to dial it back? The SPL meter gives us a finite, repeatable metric that we can use to gauge how loud it is, because our ears vary in how much intensity we perceive, especially if we've been listening to loud sounds for a long time. The SPL meter gives a ballpark figure of how loud it is, although there are other factors that have more “feeling" to them as well.

Know Where You're Headed

Providing a Service Outline

Another thing that's critical for the person driving the bus is to have a GPS or to know where they're going in the service. If you don't have a printed-out order of service, at least pull one up on a computer or an iPad so that people know what's coming next and they're not surprised and missing cues. It can be easy to get bored at the soundboard, and if you know something is coming up and you need to pay attention for it, you're more likely to hit it than if you're just reacting.

Utilize Your Steering Wheel

Understanding the Tools You Have for a Mix

Finally, we get to the steering wheel. All the controls on the soundboard are like the steering wheel that we use to make adjustments, to keep the bus between the lines on the road. The course adjustments are our faders. This gets the level right between the different instruments and it locks in the arrangement in its presentation. Some instruments need to be out in front or louder than others. While some can be tucked back in the mix and quieter than others. This is where critical listening and defining the lines on the road help give language and understanding to where the fader positions should be.

Other tools include equalization and compression. Equalization lets you vary the tonal balance of certain inputs related to one another. So if you have a very bright piano, maybe you need a darker guitar to complement that. You can do that with EQ. Compression is a tool to help us manage the dynamic range, or it can turn stuff down automatically when it gets louder. This can be helpful for safety reasons so that if something suddenly gets much louder coming from on-stage, it doesn't mow everybody down in the first row. Additionally, it can help even out the dynamics of things like singing, which need to be dynamically performed, but in the mix and when loud, need to be less dynamic. This helps people not get hurt, but also hear the quieter parts of the phrases.

Make Use of Your Owner's Manual 

Create Step-By-Step Instructions for Your Sound Team

Finally, in the driver's seat, we need the owner's manual or our standard operating procedures. If you can write out all the steps that a sound tech has to do on a Sunday or a midweek rehearsal, it can go a lot easier for them because when they don't have to remember everything on their own, they’re less likely to miss steps. You've made it clearer and you've made the on-ramp shallower for new people to come on and join the sound team. They can be a lot less intimidated if they've got written directions and they've been shown how to do it.

The Engine of Your Bus

Creating a Base Scene on Your Console

Now, a good portion of you reading are probably doing a lot of the driving. You're actually the person running sound on a Sunday or a Wednesday, but others of you are actually responsible for how everything is set up, everything's hooked up and works together. So let's take a look at the role of the mechanic in this bus analogy and see what their job is to make sure that everything beyond what happens on the console's controls makes it to the audience the way that it should.

The engine on the bus is our console and the way that we set up our console can make it really easy for people to jump on, get acquainted with it, and run sound quite easily. This eliminates a lot of the extra work that we have to do over and over and over again. And one way that I recommend people set this up is by starting a base scene.

So if you've got a digital console, it's where everybody starts from the same starting place. It's got a lot of the main stuff set up already, like your preamp, basic EQ and compression functions, and all the monitor routing is ready to go. So with just a few button presses, you can get everything up and going so that the worship team can rehearse whether or not an expert is there behind the soundboard to troubleshoot everything. When you have a great starting place, it makes it a lot easier to get consistency from week to week. And aside from painting a clear picture of what the preferences of each person are compared to the preferences of what's going to serve the church well, having this base scene makes it just really simple so that everybody's starting from vanilla. Yes, they can save their own scene for that week, spice it up, adapt to this bass player or that singer or that guitar player, and make all the changes that they need and save them in the midweek rehearsal for Sunday morning. Absolutely do that still, but when they have that same starting place, they're not having to undo preferences that were for a single bass player that maybe had a higher output, or that one drummer that just beats the junk out of the cymbals, and we turn down the overheads all the way. We don't have to adapt to that each time. We just have to adapt to that on that week when that person's there. So the base scene creates a good starting place for everybody to win easily.

Are Your Transmission and Wheels Working Properly?

Optimizing Your Amps for Your Speakers

Now, in this analogy, the transmission and the wheels are like the amplifiers and the speakers. If the amplifiers aren't set right, it's almost like we're starting out in fifth gear. We just tap on the gas a little bit and we're off. Right? Assuming you have enough power. If you don't have it set loud enough, you're going to be revving your engine really high up to get barely enough movement or enough level. So we have to set our amplifiers in the right spot so that our console is easy to use, we can set things about nominal, and they sound pretty good or loud enough, and that just makes everything work well together. But they also have to work well with the wheels and the tires, or our speaker system.

Our speaker system is how the audience actually hears the audio. So if one of these wheels has a big bump or a flat spot, that's going to be bumpy for everybody on the bus. Everybody's going to feel that if we don't get it right. So what you want from your speaker system is to get even coverage from the front to the back, from side to side, so that everybody can understand and get a clear picture of what's coming from on stage.

If there's less variance in the tonality and level of the different parts of our auditorium, people are going to enjoy it a lot more. If you're into hunting or shooting sports, this analogy might work for you: if you have a more accurate rifle or if your rifle can repeat and hit in the same spot every single time, and then you have a bigger target, say on your deer and you go to shoot, you have to be less accurate with your shooting if the rifle is more accurate. Because anywhere that you aim within that target is going to get hit. But if your rifle is less accurate and you're not hitting the same spot every time, and your zone that you're hitting when you're aiming for the middle is very narrow, then you have to be much more accurate in your aim in order to make sure that your shot hits the target. The same thing happens with our sound system. If our speakers are reproducing an accurate representation of what's coming off the console, and it sounds the same in most of the spots in our auditorium, we've got a lot more leeway for how the mix can be without going off the lines on the road. I know I just mixed a bunch of metaphors, but hopefully, that makes sense to you. The better your speaker system, the easier time your sound tech is going to have running sound and doing a great job.

Understanding Signal Flow with a Bus Analogy

So now that you've got a big picture of what all the different pieces are, let's go through the signal flow all the way from our sound source or our fuel, all the way to the wheels on the road so that you can get an idea of where the different components go, and then have an easier time dialing things in (say if something breaks).

Our microphones and DI and mic cables are like the fuel lines. They're what carry the signal from the stage, from the sound source, back to the console. The console is like the engine. This is where we do all the processing with EQ balance, sending it to different places and getting all the levels just right.

The console is controlled by the sound tech or the bus driver. They've got their hands on the wheel and they're keeping their eyes on the road to make sure that they're hitting what's coming next, that they're within the boundaries of what's established as good and right for your church, and they're keeping their speed or level under control from the soundboard.

The signal goes out to the amplifiers. This is like the transmission. If they're set too high or too low, you're going to run into problems with your soundboard and getting enough level or too much level on the output. From our amplifiers, we go to our speakers or the wheels on the bus. They go round and round (that one's for free). This actually transfers the electrical energy back into acoustical energy so that everybody in every seat can listen, hear, and understand what's being spoken from the platform.

FREE GUIDE: How to Lead Your Church Sound Team

Now, if you want help defining what the lines on the road are and how to get the right people in the right places on your church sound team, I made a free guide for you called How to Lead Your Church Sound Team.

I hope this was helpful for you in understanding church sound. If it was, go ahead and share this article with a friend. I'm sure there are others out there that need just as much help as you do!

Remember: it's all about the low end, avoid the sound tech solo, and nobody leaves humming the kick drum.