To start, I’m writing this blog for Steve W., who posted a question on the Facebook page for A Sound Church. If you have questions, ideas, suggestions or just want to stay in touch, I invite you to that page, and also my Twitter. Being relevant to what you want to know is my #1 goal, so bring on the interactiveness.

A channel EQ will typically be either a 3-band (Highs, Mids, and Lows) or a 4-band (Highs, Hi-Mids, Lo-Mids, and Lows) EQ. The confusion starts when your board has 4 bands, yet there are 6, 8, 12+ knobs. Look at the photo in this post. This is a 4-band EQ. There are 2 knobs each for the highs and lows (red and black knobs respectively). There are also 3 knobs each for the high- and low- mids (green and blue knobs respectively).

My guess is, if you’re reading this, that you are the type that always readjusts the treble and bass in your car, trying to find that ideal setting. If you understand treble and bass and how it affects the sound, you can start to build on that and adjust the mids, or high and low mids as well.

Have you ever seen one of these charts, showing you where different instruments live in the audible frequency range? I include this graph in my workshop workbook, but it’s included so we can talk about the bigger picture. After my last post on frequencies, I wanted to mention and elaborate on these commonly-seen, and deceptive graphs.

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?

No. No. No. I didn’t run sound for the iconic rock band who may or may not be knights in satan’s service. Oh no- I’m already off topic.

This blog post is going to be about one of my rules for running sound: KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. Me. I’m the stupid one. Not you. OK? Don’t get offended.

The other night I got to use the Yamaha M7 digital console, which has tons of available plug-in, EQs, compressors, gates, FX, blah, blah and really cool blah… Instead of a standard FOH package with 8 comps, I could, if I wanted, put a compressor on every channel!

A lot of church sound engineers do not have the luxury of mixing 5+ shows a week, and most church musicians do not have the time to do a full soundcheck before each rehearsal. What this means, is that the average church sound engineer does not get to a chance to experiment with gear, learn EQ, understand gates, or tweak good compression. So, I present UNFINISHED sounding (on purpose) sound check audio files for you to use in your sound system and get more alone time with your gear.