Here’s the scene. You’ve been helping out at church for a few months. By now you’re comfortable setting up the stage, hooking up the monitors, making sure the mics are all working, and you’ve even had to troubleshoot some problems along the way. You’re getting comfortable behind the board, understanding the aux sends, assigning your inputs into the subgroups, and even figured out how to hook up the recording CD deck by the RCA plugs instead of 3 sets of adapters coming from some random aux send. Are you ready for the next step that 99% of church sound guys never take?

Monitors are one of the most common battle grounds where band and engineer face off and play tug of war week after week after week. Too commonly the band needs to hear more of themselves, and the engineer needs to hear less of the stage noise. To the musician who only plays Sunday mornings, the ideal monitor mix sounds much like the worship CD he or she listened to on the way to church. Professional musicians know, however, that a good monitor mix has a specific goal.

I want to talk about a commonly overused piece of gear- the compressor. The basic concept of a compressor is to turn the volume down when the signal gets too loud. A lot of inexperienced engineers think they can put a compressor on almost every channel and then sit back like they’re on auto-pilot. It’s not quite that simple, and using these too often goes against my entire approach of keeping it simple. Just because you read in a magazine that the bass was compressed, doesn’t mean you automatically need to compress yours. Too many compressors, and all of the sudden your mix has no life, no air, and no dynamics. To tell if your compressor is working well or not, there is 1 sure-fire way to find out.

You’re too old? You’re too close to the speakers? You’re too picky?? I see a lot of churches that have SPL limits for their services. In the touring world, we call this a speed limit. What is safe? What is too loud? What do the numbers mean? There are so many factors to consider before enforcing a speed limit at your church.

The most common complaint any audio engineer hears is, “It’s too loud.” When I hear that, I don’t reach for the master fader, I start asking questions. How close are you to the stage? Why is it too loud? It’s amazing that some people will try to meet a friend at a show, stand up close to the stage, then say it’s too loud because they can’t have a conversation while a rock band plays 20 feet in front of them.

In a church setting though, “It’s too loud” usually always means the exact same thing…

It seems there are a lot of churches exploring the idea of in-ear monitors these days. You know, the ones with the personal mixers so each person can have their own mix. I don’t really see this as a positive. However, I don’t think it’s bad either really. What happens, as we’ll discuss, is that when you solve one set of problems by switching to in-ears, you introduce an entirely new set of problems that must be addressed. There are great advantages to using in-ears, but just prepare yourself for a slow, bumpy ride before you’ll feel like you are experiencing any benefits.

As with any piece of gear, the first and foremost question that needs answered is, “What problem am I trying to solve?” In other words, why are you switching? If it’s because you see bands use them on tour or on TV, or perhaps because you want to not have to hear so-and-so sing so poorly, then you may have the wrong approach.