7 Principles to Improve Your Church Sound

Many churches suffer from poor sound in their sanctuaries. It doesn’t have to be that way. Today we cover seven principles that you can apply immediately to improve the sound in your church’s sanctuary, whether you’re in a big church or a small church. Enjoy the practical advice in this episode, and may it help you get clearer, cleaner, better sound for the glory of God!

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Quotables:

A good sounding system in a bad sounding room will still sound bad. -Tweet That!

When arranging your song, spread your band’s parts across the frequency spectrum to improve your sound. -Tweet That!

No amount of EQ is going to fix crappy cymbals. -Tweet That!

The sound tech is the most important person in the room (besides the Holy Spirit). -Tweet That!

 

Resources:


Acoustics:

Roxul Acoustic Foam
Bass Traps
Gilford of Maine Acoustically Transparent Fabric
CCI Solutions

Stage Volume:

Clearsonics Drum Shield
Clearsonics Drum Shield with Roof
Hot Rods
Electric Drums
Allen & Heath ME-1
Roland M-48
Behringer PowerPlay P-16M
Behringer PowerPlay P1
Shure SE215
Art Headphone Amp
Tech21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI
Episode 14 – ‘The Ultimate Guide to In Ear Monitors for Churches’

Arrangement:

Episode 6 – ‘Playing In Parts – How to Sound Like a Professional Band’

Sources:

SM58
Beta 87A
Audix D6

Digital Board:

Behringer X32 Digital Board
Behringer Digital Snake (optional)

Resources for Sound Techs:

Lynda.com (Training Videos)
Church Tech Arts Blog
Worship Sound Guy Blog
Great Church Sound Blog
Church Production Blog
Quiztones App
‘Audio Essentials’ E-Book

Room Tune:

CCI Solutions

Worship Leader Training Free Trial



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Transcript

Alex Enfiedjian 00:11 Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the worship leader training podcast. This is Alex Enfiedjian. Your host, your friend, you’re someone that you don’t know, but I like you. Not like that. Today is Episode 27 of the worship leader training podcast. And we are talking about seven principles to improve your church’s sound seven principles to improve your church’s sound. So these are principles meaning they can be applied to big churches and small churches, they can be applied to big budgets and small budgets. So whoever you are, and wherever you are, in whatever context you’re in, this episode will help you get better sound. But first, before we get into the content, I’d like to thank our sponsor of the month core sound pads. So if you’ve been listening to modern worship music at all lately, you’ve noticed this rich ethereal sound that’s happening in the background during quiet parts of songs during soft bridges during intros and outros, and transitions. And that’s called a pad a pad sound. And it’s usually created with the keyboard or a synthesizer. Problem is, not all of us have keyboard players who know how to create patches that sound good. And let alone play them at the right times with the right chord voicings and stuff like that. So it’s hard to create this atmosphere. Thankfully, there are people out there who are creating these sounds for us. So we can reap the benefits without all the hard work. And that’s exactly what core sound pads has done. They’ve created eight great sounding sets of pads. So each set sounds different from the next set. And each set comes with every single key. So you find the sound you like, you drop the key into your song, and you’re on your way you can drop it into Ableton Live, if that’s what you use. Or if you don’t have anything fancy setup, you literally can just put the songs in a playlist on your iPhone, and have your keyboard player press next, next, next next until your set finishes. And so you get this great ethereal sound with very little effort. And it makes a huge difference. And I would encourage you to check out the video demo that’s linked in the show notes. If you really want to hear how these things sound with a band in front of them, it’s great. our listeners get an exclusive $20 off the deluxe bundle by typing WL t podcast at checkout. And if you’re not sure if you want to buy them, you can try them for free and everything is linked in the show notes. Go check it out. Alright, that’s it from our sponsor, core sound pads, let’s get into the content for today seven principles for improving your church’s sound boom.

Alex Enfiedjian 02:54 I’ve had the chance now to help two churches that I’ve worked for go from 15 to 20 year old sound systems to brand new, updated sound systems. My last church and my current church are about the same size 550 to 600 people on a Sunday. So not tiny church, but not huge mega church either. And yet, the budgets between the two are very different. So at my last church, we spent about $250,000, to do a full audio video renovation in our sanctuary. And my current Church has a much, much, much smaller budget. But at both churches, regardless of the budget and the gear that we bought, the principles of improving the sound in both spaces are identical. So I’m taking the exact same approach in my current church, which has a much smaller budget that I did in my last church, which had a huge budget. So whether you’re in a huge church, or a tiny church, whether your church has a huge budget, or a tiny budget, you can make your room sound better by applying these principles. So what I’m going to do as I go through the seven principles of improving sound, is I’m going to try to provide options for both of you, those of you with large budgets, and those of you with small budgets. Before we get into the principles themselves. I just want to answer the question, why is it important to have good sound at your church. So here are a couple of reasons. Bad sound at your church will make your good band sound bad, bad sound will make a good band sound bad and you don’t want to sound bad, you want to sound great. Bad sound is a distraction. Bad sound is a distraction, whether it’s feedback issues or echo issues or whatever. Also bad sound makes it hard to hear and understand speech. And that’s important. If we’re preaching the Word of God every week, we want it to be clear and crisp and understandable. And even if somebody is not an audio file, they’re not obsessed with sound, even your average person. If sound is bad, it’s subconsciously hard for them to concentrate. They have to kind of lean in and squint and try to focus on what the pastor is saying we want to remove all of those barriers and good sound, a good sounding system and a good sounding room will help with all of those things. So that’s why it’s important and I’m sure there’s a billion other reasons, but let’s move on to the seven principles to improve the sound at your church. Principle number one, start with the acoustics. Start with the acoustics, a definition of acoustics would be the way that sound waves bounce around your specific space, your particular room, how does the sound move around that room, and some of you are lucky or blessed, and you have rooms designed for loud live sound. But others of you are meeting in renovated grocery stores with tile floors, and long hallways worth of bare drywall and your acoustics are a nightmare. And it’s easy to want to go and spend money on new gear because new gear is fun. And you think, Oh, this will improve our sound. But I want to encourage you to please please, please first, fix your room improve the sound of your room first before you buy any new gear. Because a good sounding sound system in a bad sounding room will still sound bad. So go take a look at your room. And I want you to look and see if you have any of these problem areas. typical problem areas regarding acoustics are parallel walls untreated parallel walls. So anywhere that you have parallel walls, you’ve got sound trapped between those two walls bouncing back and forth, creating a flutter echo or a long long long reverb it keeps those frequencies around for a long time. Another problem area in your room might be hard flat surfaces, anywhere that there’s a hard flat surface like a bare drywall wall, that sound is just bouncing and going somewhere else it’s not getting absorbed or dying. Another problem area that you might have in your room are untreated walls that are directly opposite of the speakers. So in other words, your back wall, or any little walls that stick out from the side that are directly pointed at your speakers. Because the speaker is shooting sound right at those walls, they’re bouncing back at the back of people’s heads and creating weird frequency issues. Another problem area that you might find are corners, bass frequencies tend to build up in the corners of rooms. So parallel walls, hard flat surfaces, walls directly opposite of speakers and corners all need to be treated. How do you treat these things? Well, you want to absorb the extra frequencies by hanging acoustic panels on your walls. Acoustic panels are just foam of certain density that absorbs the frequencies and keeps them from bouncing around the room. There are two ways for you to do this. You can buy them from a professional company, or make them yourself. So the making them yourself way would be for the church with a small budget. And you can get away with this. If you do it in bulk, you can make a panel for about $30 each. So here’s how to make your own panels. You buy this high density foam called rock soul, our OXU L. It’s a rock wool high density foam that absorbs sound and is used for kind of construction type purposes. So you buy this rock soul You can buy, I think it’s six, two by four sheets of rock. So for $70 and then you buy some wood to make a little frame around it. They’re already pre cut in two by four rectangles. And then you can buy some Gilford and main acoustically transparent fabric. Now that part is really important. You can’t just cover your panels with any type of fabric, it’s got to be acoustically transparent, which means it allows frequencies to pass through the fabric. If you just cover it with like a thick Canvas, it’s going to actually reflect a lot of the high end frequencies back into the room. So it’s got to be acoustically transparent fabric that you cover it with. So you just build your own panels using those three things and you hang them up on the walls, in the corners and anywhere that you have sound bouncing off of hard surfaces. Now a little tip that you might not have known is that when you’re hanging the panels, if you actually put a gap, a two inch gap between the panel and the wall and just leave some air behind the panel. by mounting it off the wall with some little I don’t know blocks of wood, you’ll actually absorb twice as many frequencies because the frequencies will go through the panel, bounce off the wall and get reabsorbed. Whatever didn’t get absorbed for the first time we’ll be reabsorbed as it bounces back through so there’s a little tip. Now that’s the cheap way to do panels. If you’d rather you can hire a company to come out and do Room analysis and design your acoustics specifically for your room. One such company would be CCI Solutions out of Olympia, Washington. And they can actually do it digitally based on your buildings blueprints. So you just send them your blueprints, you say, this is how many seats This is the kind of fabric on the seats. And they will design your room and a computer and tell you how many panels you need and where you need to hang them. Now, that’s cool and everything, especially if you just want to get this done. But I would highly recommend, if possible that you bring the company out to you, and have them actually put their ears in the room because they can do a better job at treating the problem areas. One other tip about improving your acoustics, you don’t want to take away all the reflections of the room, because then it’ll just sound weird to be in a totally dead space, there’s got to be some natural live sound to the room. So don’t cover every single wall completely in panels, because that’ll just sound weird, and you won’t be able to hear the people sing. And that’s what we want. So that’s it. Principle number one, fixing your acoustics should be your first step, and it will immediately improve the sound of your current sound system. Principle number two is to reduce stage volume. Now, this principle is going to be the longest principle to explain because I’m going to give you the three main culprits of stage volume and a bunch of solutions on how you can tackle the issue of stage volume. So why should we reduce stage volume First of all, stage volume actually muddies up your house mix, because you’ve got all this sound coming off the stage bouncing around the stage and down into the congregation, you’ve got sound that is arriving at a different time to your congregations ears than the main house speakers arrive. And so it’s messing up the timing, it’s messing up frequencies, it’s just creating a muddy mess. And so you want to do whatever you can to reduce your stage volume. Now the three biggest culprits of stage volume are drums. I bet you could guess all three if you tried drums, wedges, and amps. So I’m going to give you some ideas on how to reduce the stage volume for all three of those things. Let’s start with the drums. Number one, get a plexiglass drum shield. Okay, and make sure that it covers the entire drum kit. When I first came to my church, they had a shield up but it was only in the front of the kit that doesn’t actually contain the sound because all of the sound just spills out the sides. So get a full eight panel, plexiglass drum shield to go all the way around the drum kit. And the best company for this is probably clear Sonics. They’ve been doing this for a long time. And so besides the Plexiglas, it’s very, very helpful to have absorptive material behind the drums so that the sound bounces off the Plexiglas comes backwards and gets absorbed by the absorptive material behind you. And you can buy the absorptive material from clear Sonics as well. And I’ll link all of this in the show notes I’m going to I’m going to give you guys a lot of products. And I’ll just put all the links in the show notes for these products.

Alex Enfiedjian 13:22 You can also use that rock soul material and cover it in fabric and put it behind the drums. But the idea is, don’t just put up a shield put up something to absorb the sound that bounces off the shield. And if you’re in a room with a low roof, a low ceiling in your church, you might need to put a roof of absorptive material on the top of your Plexiglas drum shell. And if your drums are still too loud, then the next option is to move to Hot Rod drum sticks. Instead of using real sticks, you can use these bundles of sticks put together called hot rods that dramatically lower the volume of the drum hits, they do change the sound of your drumming a little bit, it makes it slightly trickier sounding because the sticks stick together. But you can try that. Now if you still need to reduce drum volume or if you’re in a tiny room, you might want to consider moving to electric drums. So the plus side of electric drums is that they literally remove all stage noise from the drums. The downside of electric drums is that they don’t have that same feel or dynamic or energy have a real kit. The other downside of electric drums is they’re actually really really expensive like a good drum kit where you have full control over all of the eight channels of drums is like $4,000 there are some with a stereo output, only just a headphone output that cost around 14 $100. And if you’re like if you don’t care about having full control over your drums, you can just buy one of the cheaper sets and run the stereo out To your board, and just you won’t have control over each Trump. So that’s how you reduce the volume of your drums on your stage. The second culprit, besides drums, our stage wedges, your monitors. And you really, really want to reduce your wedge volume. Because if you’ve ever been on stage with musicians where they’re like, can I have more of this, and then can I have more of that, and it becomes this volume war. And pretty soon, they can’t hear their voice because they turn their guitar up. So they need their voice louder. That’s a stage volume nightmare. So the best solution to solve wedge stage volume is in ear monitors, there’s a reason why tons and tons of churches are moving to ears, because it gets rid of almost all the stage volume. And there are some really great solutions out there. For any ear monitors. If you want something more high end, Allen and Heath makes a great product called the me ones. Roland also has a really nice high end product. But those are about $800 each. If you’re on a budget, the beringer power play p 16. M’s are great for the price point, they’re like 200 something bucks. But if you’re on a super tight budget, and I know a lot of churches are and you really want to move to atheist, because you want to get your stage volume down, the cheapest way to do it, is to take a line off of the back of your soundboard. So take out one of your ox outs for your wedge and plug in an XLR to quarter inch stereo cable. And you just literally run it out the back of your board to your stage, and you plug it into a cheap headphone amp. So you know art makes a four channel headphone amp, so you just plug it into there. And then your sound guy mixes just like he would mix a wedge he mixes to the headphone amp, and you plug your ears into that headphone amp. And that’s like a super cheap way of doing it, you could do four of those types of setups for probably under $500. And it really does reduce the stage volume. And it’s a really cheap way to do it. The one problem with that is that it’s a mono mix. So you don’t have the stereo separation of left, right. But it works. And we’re actually doing that at my current church until we get next year’s budget. And then we’re going to buy some real ears. Now, if any ears are not an option for your church, and you still want to reduce your wedge volume, some ways that you can do that are only putting into the wedge what the performer needs to play. So instead of giving the singers, bass and drums in their wedge, you just put their voices, the piano and the lead vocalist, and that’s all they get. And that’ll keep extra sound out of that wedge. For the bass player. You just put the acoustic and the leader in his wedge, just keep it to the bare minimum and that will help keep your stage volume down if you can’t move to any ears. So the last culprit of stage volume is amps, guitar amps, bass amps, keyboard amps, here’s the way that you reduce stage volume. You keep the amps off the stage, okay, you don’t need to keep your amps on the stage, you’re gonna blow your congregation’s hair off. So put them backstage, put them off stage, put them on the side of the stage pointed at the wall into an acoustically absorptive panel. But don’t put them on the stage. For example, at our church, we had a handicap lift that has never been used. So there was a space underneath that lift. And I put the AMP down there, I ran an extension cable over there. I filled it with foam that rock solid material that I told you about earlier, filled with foam. I ran a 25 foot instrument cable from where I stand on the stage to the amp. And then I mic the amp and I run the XLR cable back to my floor pocket. So the amp is offstage in a sound proof box. And it’s Mike with a great mic. It sounds awesome. It runs through the house. And our sound guy has full control. And it’s not making our stage volume. 10 Db louder. So get your amps off the stage. If you have a bass amp and you want to get rid of that you can go direct and still get a great sound by purchasing something like tech 21 sansamp Bass direct box. It’s a little box it has amp sounding tone, it sounds awesome. But it’s it goes direct into your floor pocket or or into your snake and goes straight through the house and sounds great. So those are the ways to get rid of those three culprits get your stage volume down, because that’s what principle two is all about. Get your stage volume down, and your mains will sound clearer. All right. I told you that was going to be the longest one. The next principle for improving sound at your church is band arrangement, band arrangement. And this actually has nothing to do with sound gear. But a good band arrangement actually has a huge impact on the quality Have the sound coming out of your speakers. And the main principle behind this is that spreading out your instruments across the full spectrum of the frequency range will clear things up a lot. Let me repeat that in a different way, you want each player’s part to cover a different role across the frequency range spectrum. Okay. So for example, if everybody is playing in the same frequency range, like your drummers hammering away on the floor, Tom, your bass player is playing nonstop on the low B string, because of course, he has a five string bass, right? I mean, don’t all church bass players have a five string bass. So your drummers on the low Tom’s your bass players on the low B and your piano players pounding down on the lower left hand on the low strings, that’s tons of low end energy building up and overlapping, all on top of itself. And there’s no way that that’s going to come out of your speakers clean. So what you want to do is spread out that frequency and say, okay, piano player, the bass and the toms are covering the low end, you do not need to play your left hand, you put your right hand up high, and you pluck out some nice, pretty melody, and you cover the top end frequencies. Because they’re handling the low frequencies, the better your band can spread its instruments and parts across the frequency spectrum, the better it’s going to sound. Here are a couple of practical examples of how that might look. So if you have two guitars and acoustic and electric, don’t make your electric player strum the G chord just like your acoustic player, why double up over the same frequency range. Instead, put your electric player up high, and keep your acoustic player down on the one position. If you have two acoustic players, give one of them a kebo and have him strum a pie, you need to spread that frequency range out. So that’s kind of the basic principle and you can hear more about it. In episode six of the podcast we talked about playing in parts. So arrange your parts based on the frequency spectrum. That’s principle three, principle four. Principle four is about getting better sources, better source sounds, and better miking of those sounds. So here’s the deal, you want to improve the source sound, because and what do I mean by source sound, I mean, the tone of the drums or the tone of the piano, if your piano doesn’t sound good, just as it is, naturally, it’s not going to sound good with a mic. Okay, you want to improve your source sound. If you’ve got loud cleany symbols, your sound guy can’t fix that if you’ve got cheap symbols, your sound guy can’t make them sound good, you need to improve the source of the sound, you need to go buy better symbols, you need to tune your drums. Or if you have $100 guitar that’s buzzing or an AMP that’s buzzing, that’s not good, you can’t improve the sound if your sources suck. So you got to get better sources. Now, as you improve each source, that’s going to be an incremental improvement to the whole of your sound quality. And the better source you can give your sound guy, the less he’s going to have to work to make it sound good. Now, the source is just one half of the equation, the other half is miking. Because you can have a great sounding source. But if you don’t use the right mic, or if you don’t make it correctly, it won’t sound good either. So not a lot of people know this. I’m sure the sound guys out there listening know this, but every single microphone that’s in your arsenal has a specific set of characteristics. It has a different frequency response than the other brands microphones. What that means is like an SM 58 will boost and cut certain frequencies. Whereas an 87 A will boost and cut other frequencies they sound different. And so if you’re miking everything on your stage with an SM 58, you’re going to have the same frequencies building up across your mix. So here’s the solution for you. Try different microphones for different sources. Don’t use the same mic for all three singers because you’re just going to build up those frequencies that that mic naturally carries. Here’s something that I did at my last church that was really cool and helped a lot.

Alex Enfiedjian 24:35 Not every mic is going to sound good with every singer. So how do you figure that out? Well try this. Have all of your singers come a half an hour before rehearsal and get out three different types of microphones, and then have each singer make sure that microphones have no EQ on them. have each singer sing with all three microphones and see which microphone naturally sounds good with that person’s So if Jenny comes and she sings with a 87, a sm 58 and some other one Sennheiser something, and she sounds great with the Sennheiser, then say, okay, Jenny, you are always going to use that mic, because it naturally sounds right for her voice. And so you do that with all your singers and you assign them the microphone type that they will use each week, that’ll make your sound guys job easier. That’ll make your singer sound better. That’ll make everything sound better. And it’s not just with singers, you want to try different microphones on different sources. So go to your piano and try two or three different microphones and see which one sounds the best without any EQ. And whichever one sounds the best. That’s the one that you should use on your piano. Because why would you pick a mic that doesn’t sound good naturally, and try to force it with EQ and compression, just find the right mic and experiment until you’ve got good mics on good sources. Because the right mics on good sounding sources will make great mixes. That’s principle four, look at your source sounds and look at your mics. Alright, couple more. The next principle that has been really revolutionary for me is moving to a digital board. If possible, you should move to a digital soundboard. Digital boards offer so many more capabilities than the analog counterparts. For example, if you have a digital board, you can remotely mix from anywhere in the room via an iPad. So you get an iPad, you get an app, and you can mix from anywhere, you can go to the corner of the room, you can go to the front of the room, and you can change things based on what you’re hearing, which is great, because for some reason, a lot of churches put their sound boards in the balcony. I mean, come on, how is your sound guy supposed to mix from the balcony that’s like a totally different acoustical space than where the people actually sit. So if you get a digital board and an iPad, you can actually go downstairs and mix where the people are actually going to hear it. What a concept. It’s amazing. So that’s one capability that you have that you maybe don’t have with an analog board. The other one is that they give you all sorts of built in effects like compression and reverb and delay, they give you a graphical representation of EQ for each channel. So your sound guy doesn’t have to just twist knobs and guess what he’s doing, he can actually see, oh, I’m boosting 500 hertz. And this is what the sound is doing based on what I’m doing. Oh, I have to cut 200 hertz. And he can actually see with his eyes, what he’s boosting and what he’s cutting and how it’s affecting the sound. It’s a great, great tool to have another really cool tool of digital boards. They give you the ability to save settings for different musicians. So when Johnny comes in plays electric guitar, you can easily pull up his EQ that has been saved for his guitar, you don’t have to dial it in fresh each week, when Alex comes to play electric guitar, you just pull up his EQ for his electric guitar. And so you can save settings for you know, different musicians. Same thing is true for the whole board, you can save the entire board. So if you have rehearsal on Thursday, and you mix it in, it sounds amazing. But there’s a women’s retreat on Saturday and they come and change everything. Well, you can just pull up the settings that you saved on Thursday, and recall them Sunday morning before service and you don’t have to start from scratch. I’d say probably the best feature of digital boards is that you can do a digital soundcheck. And what that means is that it actually records every single channel of the band while they’re playing. And then when they go home, you can play those channels back through the board and through your sound system. And you can keep mixing when they’re gone. And what that does is it allows your sound guy to start tweaking things and practicing things and getting the sound dialed in exactly as he wants it, even when no musicians are around. It’s a really, really powerful training tool for your sound tech. And so you can see why I think moving to a digital board is such a vital principle to improving your church’s sound. There’s a great digital board out there for a very, very small price. Some of these boards can go up to 6070 120 grand, but the beringer x 32 does lots of things very, very well and cost 20 $300 and I know that might sound like an insane amount of money for you if your church is not used to spending money on sound gear but for what it does 20 $300 it does so much and you’re going to get so much out of your investment. So go digital, if you can. Principle number six we’ve got to left is to invest in your sound tech. Principle number six is to invest in Your sound tech. So I would argue that the sound tech is actually the most important person in the room besides the Holy Spirit. Because a good sound tech can make a bad band sound good. And a bad sound tech can make a good band sound bad, and a bad sound techs gonna mess up the pastor’s EQ or make it hard to listen to or miss a cue and be a distraction. So having a great sound tech is vital, but but you have to invest in the sound tech that you currently have. So here are some examples of how you can do that. Send them to conferences, send them to a class, you know, some of the local colleges have have mixing classes, send them to a mixing class, send them to online resources. For example, lynda.com is a great is a great resource that has training videos on hundreds and hundreds of topics related to sound, send them blog articles, or ask them to subscribe to some blogs, here are a couple of my favorites, church tech arts, worship, sound guy, great church sound, and church production.com. I’ll put the links for all these things in the show notes for you. So just start investing in your sound guy. Here’s a really, really cool way to invest in your sound guy and get immediate better sound at your church. hire a professional sound guy to come in and mix at your church once a month, or once every six weeks or once every eight weeks. However often you can afford to do that, bring in a professional and have him mixed your service and let your sound guy watch him and learn and ask questions from him. And the cool thing about doing that is one, you’re going to have a great sounding service that week. But two, if you have a digital board, you can actually save that professional sound guys settings, and use those settings each week. So let him come dial in your drums, save those settings and use that each week as a baseline for your mix. So those are some of the ways that you can invest in your sound guy, principle six, invest in your sound guy, he or she is worth it. last principle for you guys, and then I’ll let you go. The last principle to improving your church’s sound is to tune your room tune your room. What does that mean? Well, that means you hire a professional company to come in and look at your speaker placement, and adjust the EQ and delays that are on your speakers. Because if you have multiple speakers in your sanctuary, for example, a subwoofer or two subwoofers, a left and right main and some side fill speakers, those are all going to be out of alignment or out of phase with each other. And they might be over emphasizing certain frequencies or under emphasizing certain frequencies. Or if the time delay is wrong between your speakers, your bass frequencies will cross at certain points in the room and they will cancel each other out. Or they will double up at certain points in your room.

Alex Enfiedjian 33:16 And you don’t know how to fix this, I don’t know how to fix this, I’m not a crazy freak of nature sound guy like these guys are. So what you have to do is hire a professional company, bring them out and ask them to tune your room. They’ll make sure all of your speakers are aligned, they’ll make sure they’re pointed correctly, they’ll make sure the timing is right. And they will use some analyzation tools to measure the frequencies of your room and get rid of the ones that are over emphasized. And bring in the ones that are under emphasized in order to have a great sound in your room. And I would just say this about this last principle, this is the thing you want to do last after you’ve done the other six principles, do this after you’ve done the other six principles. So that’s it. That’s the seven principles to improve your church’s sound. I will say please don’t be overwhelmed by this list. Most of us can’t afford to do all of these things at once. So I recommend coming up with an upgrade pathway and upgrade pathway. And what I mean is right up on one or two pages, all of the things that you need to improve your church’s sound. And here’s what you put on that list you you put the thing that you need, you put an explanation of why it will make things better, and you put how much it costs. And you put each of those things in order of importance and in order of priority. And you come to your pastors and you say

Alex Enfiedjian 34:41 please,

Alex Enfiedjian 34:42 this is what we need to do. Can we please consider providing a budget to do this phase by phase over the coming years because this will help us have a better, less distracting sounding room. So that’s it again, there were a ton of products I mentioned and a ton of room. sources, I will put links to all of those things in the show notes for you. And I will say this, I’m going to be providing Amazon links to a lot of those products. And if you buy something using those Amazon links, it won’t cost you anything extra. But it will help support the podcast. So if you decide to buy something, please, by all means use the links I’m providing, because it helps me to pay for the cost of producing this podcast and keeping the website online and all the hosting and all that stuff. So that’d be awesome. Also, I really want to start to get to know you, my listeners. So go to worship leader training calm and use the contact page and shoot me an email. Just tell me who you are, where you’re at and what you’re doing. And I’ll try to say hi back to everybody. Maybe none of you will actually do that. But worship leader training, calm contact me. I would love to start getting to know you guys who listen each month. Thanks so much for listening. If this episode was helpful to you, please pass it on to your sound tech and your pastors and anyone else you think it might help. And yeah, God bless you. We love you and we’re rooting for you. We want to support you in all that you’re doing to advance the kingdom through your ministry. God bless you guys. I’ll see you next month with another helpful episode.