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?

Most volunteers on the sound crew get tunnel vision, focused on the technology of hooking up and operating gear. Have you ever known anyone with a  great camera though, but all of their photos or videos seems very dull or boring. It is true that you need to understand the tools you have and how they work, but what’s more important is the result those tools produce!

A good photographer sees the world in colors, shapes, highlights and shadows. You should start trying to hear your world (NOT just Sunday mornings) in frequencies- the ‘color’ of sound. You’ve probably adjusted the sound in your car- messing with the treble and bass until it sounded the best it could. Let’s build on that!

As you go about your day, you’ll hear thousands of sounds: the Harley that passed you on the highway, a tea kettle whistling, the office door shutting, the milk steaming as you wait for your latte… each of these sounds are made up of frequencies. Start trying to identify if it’s a high, mid or low instead of just treble or bass. The break it down even further: high, hi-mid, low-mid, low.

Lastly, start showing up early for sound check, or staying a little later afterwards. When no one else is in the room, start making a mic feedback in the monitors. Hopefully you have a 31-band EQ on that monitor mix. If you’ve been exercising your ears, try to quickly decide if it’s a hi, hi-mid, low-mid or low frequency you’re hearing, and turn that slider down on the EQ. If the feedback doesn’t go away, put the slider back where it was and try to figure out if the actual sound is higher or lower than the one you picked. Does this sound like price is right game to anyone else?

Don’t get discouraged if you thought that 400Hz sounded like a hi-mid. This is how you learn. Take what you learn and apply it to that Harley sound, tea kettle and door slamming. You can refine this skill without being behind the console. Before you know it, you’ll start hearing things you missed before- such as the Harley, which not only has the obvious low rumble, but also has a high-end element to is as well… Just like your kick drum has the low thump, but sounds way better when you add a little attack to the hi-mid too!