Small Church Big Sound

One of the things that I do when assessing a Church sound system is to ask the question: is what we've got working for or against us?

In the case the church I work at, when I got there we had a small sound system that really was not working for us.


Here's a rundown of the gear that had been used prior to my arrival on the scene, and I'll detail my solution. Since the church is a very small, rural Canadian church in a mining town that had gone bust (but is now coming back to life thankfully), our budget for fixing the sound system was next to nothing.

For the sound board, we had this bad boy

Now I'm well aware of the whole debate about Behringer products being either the spawn of Satan or the savior for low budget audio applications. I've had great luck with several Behringer products. This mixer however, was not one of them. In our case, it was old, it buzzed like crazy, one of the inputs didn't work, and if the gain was pushed it made everything sound mushy. 

Power Amps

For the monitors

Aside from being insanely loud (the fan sounds like a jet), this cheap little amp is the amp that would not quit.  I even over drove it one day for minutes when a kick drum mic was set with the gain too hot by a volunteer sound person at the church. We shut it off for 5 minutes, turned it back on and it's been going strong ever since. ha!

For the mains, we were using this:

That is, until it blew some sort of fuse and then refused to work again. The fuse was impossible to find a replacement for (we are still looking ...).

Mics

Our microphone system is all wireless. Made by Vocopro. I must admit, when I first saw it I wanted to barf a little. UHF is way out the window .. but it's cheap, and now that I've spent some time with them, aside from the occasional squelch issue, they aren't bad microphones to work with. They are nice and crisp for vocal applications of all kinds and I find I can get a good vocal mix very quickly with them. The fact that they free up stage inputs is a bonus. I would definitely not do any serious recording with them, but aside from that I actually like them. 

Mains

When I got to the church, there were four mains. Two of these at the front of the sanctuary:

And two of these half way toward the back of the sanctuary

Monitors 

We have two JBL wedge monitors

And we have two crazy Roland monitors that sit on mic stands. They are so old I can't even find pictures of them on the internet, which is pretty crazy. This is as close as I could find. It's got the idea, but the monitors are a little larger and need to be powered by a power amp.

OK. So, the dilemma was this: We had a Left and right channel going out from the Samson power amp to the nice JBL speakers, which at the time sounded terrible because they were then daisy chained to the much crappier Behringer loudspeakers. I will never understand why this was done. 

As soon as I disconnected the Behringer speakers, all the life came back into the JBLs. It also made my mixing job a ton easier because I didn't' have to compensate for the muddiness of the Behringer speakers.

Those little JBL loudspeakers have a very nice extended bass response and a lot of usable mid and high range to work with. I run our Bass amp through them, and it gives just enough low end that it washes the whole room. Very nice! I also run the kick through them, just for some definition.

Next, we had to switch out the Behringer mixer. It was God-awful! The Samson power amp was dead and the Main outs of the Behringer made the loudest buzzing noise I've ever heard. It was as if twelve 60 cycle hums got together for a party and were all yelling at full volume. 

Just terrible!

Lucky for us, a bunch of gear was donated to the church. One day, in came a little 12 channel powered Samson mixer. Surprisingly, it sounded crip, clean and had some thump when pushed. With a little re-jigging of the inputs, I was able to set this up handily. 

We powered the JBL mains with the powered outputs of the Samson mixer, and the monitors get the two channels of the Behringer power amp.

I used the graphic EQ built into the Samson mixer to adjust for mud in the room (it's a long room, so there's a lot of build up).

Next, I started using a Fender acoustic guitar amp as a stage monitor for our acoustic guitar player. Because I can't EQ the monitor mixes, this became helpful. I could put the guitar through the monitors to the drums but keep it out of the front monitors. Plus, I could EQ it at the Amp to remove stage mud etc. I did the same for the electric guitars. 

The amps face the musicians and point toward the back of the stage. I have them run loud enough through the mains that you can't really hear the fact that the amps are on. 

I run the amps direct (they both have XLR outputs) to the mixer and I mix them in. It sounds ... awesome! I do the same thing with the Bass amp. 

In effect, each of those instruments have their own custom monitors for their own instruments that they have tweaked to exactly what they want to hear. I can control the finer points of where they sit in the FOH mix and in the other monitors. When you blend it all together, you have to listen on stage, go back and adjust, then listen on stage again until it sounds about right from both on stage and at the Front of House.

I've been using this system for about a month now and am getting positively great feedback from the musicians and congregation, who can't believe I was able to save the sound system.

So that's how I made the worst sound system ever into something useable. If there was a price tag on it, i'd say it might have cost $500 for the mixer. If we can sell some of the older gear, who knows - it might work out to net zero cost! In our case, the mains were good enough quality that it replacing them would have been silly. If anything, we can add a sub to the system now to round it off nicely.

The only struggle is finding enough inputs, which we will have to take care of one day. Another struggle is that the stage inputs were created in the early eighties. They are all falling apart. This also needs to be taken care of.

But the moral of the story is that the mixer and main speakers matter a TON. If either the mixer or the mains in the room aren't properly set up, your sound is going to be way off right from the get-go.