Full Compass = Full Service

When we were first doing sound stuff at our church we were really the small time. Our first sound system, back in the late 80's was $1500 - for everything! Now, I think the quality was decent but over the years I've come to learn that you get what you pay for. Just to give you an idea of where we've come from: One of my great sound mentors - Pastor Jonathan, who is now leading Gracepoint Davis and taught me a lot - loved shopping at Radio Shack! Now, Radio Shack certainly has some useful and interesting gear for sure. But I think the flagship sound products is like Realistic - not to diss Pastor Jonathan too hard =).

Well, we've grown a lot since those first days and so have our needs. Our vendor of choice over the years has been Full Compass and our main sales contact is Kurt Krueger. Let me tell you that Kurt has been awesome for us over the years. He's given us great and competitive pricing and Full Compass has a huge selection of gear. Also, anytime we've had problems with our gear upon receipt Kurt has always been generous to swap it out right away for us. He'll send a new piece of gear before we even return ours. And their selection of gear is enormous - along with some great B-stock deals and other specials. And I can't tell you how many times Kurt has helped us out with shipping - when we needed something in a pinch or just to help with us with some of the costs. Recently, we needed a new Kramer switcher for our overflow needs and I also knew we needed one for our RISE event so I ordered one thinking it was in stock 1 week before RISE. But it turns out they didn't get it until a few days before RISE and the regular shipping wouldn't get it to me in time so Kurt upgraded me for free so I could get it on Friday - the day before RISE. I don't need to wonder why Kurt is part of the Million Dollar Sales Club. Thanks Kurt!

Of course, I think I could scour the internet and find better pricing on individual pieces of gear and such but most of those places are in NY - you know what i mean? =). And I realized that you don't just pay for gear but the service that backs it up. Sure I could save a few bucks here and there but I do believe you get what you pay for. And sometimes we get even more with Full Compass.

Is this a shameless plug? Well, Kurt didn't ask me to do this but I often get questions about where you get your gear from and I just like to let others know where we go. I don't think my post will give them a whole lot of business but I did want to give them a shout out!. But I wanted to let our church members that we try to go for quality. Especially as a church on wheels we need the roughest and toughest gear. On a tangent, I'm sure we can break any piece of gear. B/c we've broken about everything we've bought before. =)

My First Sunday with Pastor Ed Kang

Nope, this is not about my first time meeting Pastor Ed Kang. It's about my first time doing sound at the board with Pastor Ed. Now, I've been doing sound/tech stuff for church for about 10+ years and I've learned a lot but when I first started as I was as green as grass. I was running the board after only 1-2 months of training b/c the previous sound guy was going to LA for grad school and I had to fill his shoes.

And that first Sunday I was running the board we had some major feedback problems and mics not properly set. In particular, Pastor Ed's mic was not set with the right gain and so it gave out a loud and sharp feedback loop through the system causing everyone to wince...I remember Pastor Ed Kang saying with a smile, "Man, I miss Jeff..." and many roared into laughter. So my first Sunday running the board was with Pastor Ed and as much as I made that big mistake his funny comment helped relieve some of the pressure and stress. It's like another time when some of my peers and I were doing a special verse recitation and Pastor Ed....well, maybe I won't go there with this one.

But did you know that Pastor Ed was actually the original Sound/Tech guy for our church? He was the first to use Pagemaker and make the Sunday bulletins and he and Kelly bought the first PostScript printer for our church b/c they were only ones making money when we were first starting. They helped fund an audio translation system b/c we used to be a more bilingual speaking church. He was the one running the cables, electrical, etc... He's the original Tim Fitz!

Just wanted to give a shout out to Pastor Ed! I think that's why he's always supporting all of our tech/sound endeavors. He's always for us!

ProPresenter Dual Head

So....we're always trying to be efficient where we can. While browsing the ProPresenter site I found out that we could take advantage of our Matrox Dual-Head adaptor and have one laptop output 2 different images with ProPresenter. What does that mean? It means that one person can control the main slides that everyone sees (words with nice background graphics) and then output a different slide just for our singers. It's hard for the singers to see the words if there is a lot of graphics - esp since our screen is so far away from the singers.

We did have to pay for an extra module in ProPresenter but the huge benefit is that we need one less person for ProPresenter then.

Kudos to Emily and Jackson for working on this and getting this done!

RISE-ing to the Occasion

Sometimes we face circumstances in our lives that are beyond our control and sometimes you feel like you're in way over your head. Even though preparing for the RISE event was something that I was familiar with having done NSWN setups and Pauley Ballroom setups. But something about this night just felt so different. I just never felt confident. I mean it was the same thing we had done before. But I just felt so unprepared and in the end I think we were. But I'm thankful for the people around me who really stepped it up as we faced some adverse situations. They really ROSE to the occasion. I'll try to tell a few stories below.

Most of the problems were actually triggered by a single event that couldn't have been foreseen really but ended up impacting almost every part of the tech setup. Tim was working on a busted light and as soon as he opened up the can, the DMX line short-circuited and sent an electrical charge back up to the main distro that seemed to jump over to all the other circuits. For some reason, this mainly affected all of our video transmission from our Kramer PT110s. The electrical spike went from the transmitters and fried the receivers, which didn't have any fuse unfortunately. So in that one spike, we lost three of our video receivers - Kramer PT120s. One for the wide screen and the 2 side screens. Man, that was painful. We dropped one receiver that we were going to use for Sean McDowell and replaced his with a regular RGB cable. How did we find those??? We gave that receiver to the wide screen projector. Then we proceeded to scramble for more RGB as we had to abandon the Kramers. We daisy chained the side screen projectors with RGB cables that we found more of!

Also Rich was having a heck of a time trying to line up the 2 projectors to make the wide screen. 2 Panasonic PDT5600s. At 5:40pm he looked discouraged and ready to give up. I pressed him onward and played Eye of the Tiger by Survivor to cheer him on. Here he is below trying to adjust the projectors.

Richard from lighting was distracted and asked us to shut it off so he could program the lights. He was in a time crunch too. He thought we were starting at 6:30! haha.

Our main ProPresenter laptop also went on the fritz and starting crashing and unable to start it up properly. Once we got it booted it started to be flaky. Now it's a highly questionable laptop. I tested it for the Sunday Service the next day and the headphone jack was not working.

Jackson swapped out the laptop with Mike's.

But b/c we swapped this laptop out and Mike's didn't have a Final Cut HD codec we couldn't play the video Conrad had made of the mentors. While Mike scrambled to get the codec I took out my laptop and loaded the video so we could play off of that.

Once we got all the projectors live we could see that the chroma key was working excellent. However the slides from Sean McDowell's laptop was super grainy and blurry b/c it was taking so many hops. So we ended up using 3 different scalers to make it all clean...whew. Part of it was b/c we had this center projector that wasn't a wide b/c it would handle just 1024x768 res images (like Sean's slides). The only draw back is that these other scalers didn't have a preview. Only the Corio has a preview.

But we were concerned the whole night b/c all the gear was starting to feel really hot. Then we heard that the video team was getting shocked touching their gear so we thought there was a short circuit somewhere for sure. This was an adventure and a half.

There were more issues like how we would record all the video footage and make sure the audio/video were in sync. For you super techies, we were running BNC across all of our cameras into the switcher and ran 2 XLRs from the sound board to the video switcher but it only takes in RCAs. So we had to use feed the sound board audio into a mixer to give an RCA out to go into the switcher. Next time - get a compressor b/c it overloaded the audio a couple of times.

What an adventure. It was a great learning experience. It was Esther's last hurrah with us and a transitional moment for Evelyn who will be taking her spot. I hope we all learned from this and can use this in our future endeavors.

We pulled out all the stops and everyone gave 110%. We had some serious Times of Crisis. Thanks to all who threw their lot in with us!

RISE Setup Details

As soon as we got to Pauley we had to make some game time decisions. The layout of the room was different and so we had to adjust somewhat. We knew we were going to go with a 90degree layout change from NSWN. But we lacked the space in the back we wanted for games. We ended up moving our sound and video to the very back of the room. It seemed like the best place to be and most out of the way. Only issue was we didn't know if we had enough ethernet for some of our video streams to the projectors.

Next, the stage layout had to be adjusted. This was minor but still delayed us a bit and took some more work.

We decided to leave a lot of space in the front of the stage b/c we wanted to have the mentors and the students in the middle jumping up and down!

One advantage we had over NSWN was we actually had more man power. I guesstimated that we had over 100 ppl helping with setup. That's just an awesome number to think about. We had 100 ppl helping unload stage pieces, truss, lights, sound gear, cables, road cases, etc...

Pretty much we were doing NSWN setup so I think most of us knew what was going on. We decided to make the side screens 3' off of the main stage so they would close and almost tight and then it would seem like the stage and screens were like a wall.

We used the FBTs as fill-ins on the stage for people in the front instead of on the sides as we traditionally do. This was only for the praise time.

We had to do a lot of eq and volume adjustments for the actors. They did a great job but we had to really push them up and down with the faders chasing them.

I have another post with troubleshooting. Check out my iphone recording of the Intro...crazy!

Interhigh - RISE

This past week our tech team has been preparing for Interhigh's RISE event. It's a special kick-off event for Gracepoint's regional youth ministry - Interhigh. We're going all out again for this event just like we did for NSWN. But we're doing things a little different this time.

1. We're rotating our stage and setup 90 degrees - thus we're going for a tighter look.

2. We're going to use word overlaying live video. We're going to do IMAG for the praise and overlay the song's words on top. We'll have a camera upfront near the stage with a wide angle doing the "jam cam".

Our video switcher has some pretty cool functionality. We'll be using 3 inputs for our Canon HD Cameras, and Sony PD-150 and another s-video input with the song's words coming from ProPresenter. Using a chroma key function we'll be able to merge the s-video signal (words) over the live feed of the singers/instrumentalists. Nice! It's a big change for us and a first. I'm looking forward to this monstrously cool effect. With the lights, haze (we got 2 more haze machines) I can't wait! It's no U2 concert but hey, I'm still digging it.

SWS Mixing Feedback

The all important part of learning is receiving feedback. So i'm going to open up this page to everyone. Please let us know what you thought of today's mix. Please give pertinent information such as your seating location (Center Section, 5th row back, 10th seat over) or as close as possible and if you were in the main auditorium or overflow and anything else that might be helpful. We welcome your constructive and informative feedback. Thanks!

Our gear - microphones

A new series of posts that I wanted to start on is the kind of gear that we use. People often ask what kind of gear we use for our various applications. Over the year we tried many different models of equipment and gear. Of course, we're still a small church and our installs and mobile locations vary in size and form.

Now, just to start this post, I wanted to talk about the variety of microphones we use for our speakers.

WIRED - we have about 2 handheld models we use: both from Shure - SM58 and SM58Beta. These are basically the industry standard of microphones. I've seen these used everywhere. The standard SM58 tends to have a stronger bass response than I like for most voices but the Beta is quite a bit more expensive.

WIRELESS - we use a variety here of different mic heads.

* Countryman E6 and E6i and B6 - the E series is the one that wraps around your ear and the B series is a lapel mic.

* DPA 4065 - this is a wireless head that wraps around both ears. We've become most fond of this mic head b/c of the response and the ease of placement of the mic head.

Koinonia Welcome Night

Last week we changed venues a little bit. For the Koinonia Welcome Night we did a much less intense setup compared to our NSWN. Our campus Bible studies have much less gear due to more constraints - setup time, man power, other overhead...

But we did still have our switcher/scaler. Very nice.

So we go leaner - smaller mixer, no eqs, compressors, no subwoofer, drum pad instead of real drums, fewer singers, only one electric and one acoustic....just to name a few.

The setup is much simpler than our normal setup. The one challenge that we have this time around is the stage. Classrooms don't make the best venues for a band and a skit but we gotta make do with what we've got.

We decided to put the 4x4x2 Joyland stage pieces behind the lab bench at VLSB b/c it seemed to look better - to have the skit farther back and closer to the wall. We put 6 pieces together to make the stage that we wanted. We placed the band on the floor and had about a 2x2 space for Pastor Ed to speak from. It worked out for him since we had the lab bench to his right so he could use it for his tablet and drawings.

Documenting NSWN

So here's the part of NSWN that is probably everyone's least favorite but also probably the most important - Documentation. Well, I know it's important for next year, so I'm using this post as an addl historical archive.

Projector and Scaler Setup

Sound/Band Layout

Stage Pieces Layout