It’s a great thing that technology has become more and more affordable. A console 3-feet wide can now do more than all the gear you could cram in a 20′ x 10′ FOH area! Digital boards, smaller circuitry, computer-assisted all means many more sophisticated tools right at your fingertips, for the church audio guy to either masterfully shape your worship band mix… or destroy it by trying to use every tool available! This topic alone could be a book, but I’m going to focus in on one specific tool that I think gets waaaaay overused: Mute Groups, or Scenes (depending on your board).

Let’s first cover how they work, then we’ll talk about when to use them. The idea is that at the touch of 1 button, you can turn on or off a bunch of channels all at the same time. Probably the most common use of this feature is that all of your band microphones can be muted by engaging the mute group, rather than having to hunt and peck 20 different mute buttons on each channel, all while the band on stage is shuffling around, unplugging acoustics, etc.

Using these groups can be valuable, but please don’t rely on them too heavily. All too often, I’ll hear the band fading out that last note when all of the sudden the audio system goes ‘dark.’ The audio engineer muted everything when the singers started walking away before the band was actually done!

Another mishap that is too common is that a pastor or speaker will grab a singer’s mic to pray or make announcements, but the mic is off or gets cut off in the middle of their talking because that mic was muted when the mute group muted after the band was done.

Have you ever had the keyboard softly playing under someone praying after the band is done playing their last song? If you just mute that whole group after the last song, that keyboard is going to get cut off! These mistakes are NOT critical, but they are the little things that make your audio seem either amateur or professional!

My recommendation is to focus on good console layout rather than mute groups. If all of your inputs are in a logical order, it’s easy to mute channels as needed without having to kill the entire group at once.