Improving Sound Quality in Small to Mid Sized Churches w/ Attaway Audio

Alex |

Welcome to the Worship Ministry Training Podcast, a monthly podcast for worship leaders who are serious about growing in their craft and calling. My name is Alex, fellow worship leader, super stoked you’re here. And if you’re a new listener, I’m going to encourage you to hit that subscribe button, because every single month I’m going to give you helpful practical guidance that you can immediately implement into your ministry. Hit that subscribe button, and then go back through the past nine years of episodes and binge listen your way to a healthier ministry.

 

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And if you’re someone who is really.

 

Alex |

Serious about growing as a worship leader, I’m going to point you to the Worship Ministry Training Academy. What is the Academy? It’s an online training platform that will give you everything you need to build a thriving worship ministry. You’ll get ten indepth courses on topics like set building, team building, musical excellence, vocal technique, and more. You’ll get live monthly training workshops on topics that are relevant to you. You’ll get exclusive expert interviews with some of the best worship leaders in the world. You’ll get done for you ministry adjustment systems and audition process, onboarding documents, team training materials, and even team discipleship materials.

 

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Alex |

Just $1 by going to worshipministrytraining.com. Sign up today for your $1 trial, and I hope to see you inside of the academy. All right, let’s get into today’s episode.

 

Alex |

Today I have the privilege of talking to my new friend James Attaway, who’s out in Kansas City, and we’re talking about how to improve our sound and our sound systems in a small church context. But the things that we’re going to be talking about also apply to larger churches as well. So let’s welcome James to the screen. Hello, James. How are you doing, bro?

 

James Attaway |

Hey, good to be here.

 

Alex |

Thanks for having me, dude, I’m excited to have you. You and I connected via email a couple of times, and we finally made it happen. So you’re kind of doing for audio text what I’ve been doing for worship leaders. And so great to have a like minded person and an excellent teacher. You’re an excellent teacher. So just for our worship leaders listening who may not know who you are, just give them the one two minute summary of who is James Attaway and why should we listen to you. Just kidding.

 

James Attaway |

Yeah. So I have been a sound tech since I was 19 years old, but before that, I was on worship teams, playing bass, playing guitar, leading worship, and then I figured out that singing above middle C was a little too challenging for me and a little too necessary for worship leading. So I fell in love with running sound and being able to see the big picture of the worship session. To be able to put all the instruments and the vocals in their place and highlight different things at different times in the arrangement was so fun for me because as a worship leader I was always making chord charts. And charting out the arrangement and saying the bass player comes in here and the drum come in quiet here making sure that the big picture really felt really good. And I could do that more through the soundboard, not just giving people charts and telling them what to play when. So in learning audio I jumped in with both feet and took to it like a fish takes to water. It’s been awesome learning that craft of the science and the art and how they come together and then how many worship services can be improved and people can enjoy singing more if it sounds better.

 

James Attaway |

So after college I joined staff at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City and joined their full time mission staff. So they have 24/7 prayer and worship. There are worship teams that go around the clock and they’re full worship teams bass, drums, guitars, keyboards, six singers at a time. It’s amazing, but it’s a lot of juggle for a soundtech. And so for five years I sewed into the soundtechs there through their music academy. I started a sound training program there and then ran the recording studio for five years. And that was kind of the completion of my time as a missionary at Ifkc. All the while serving in the prayer room, helping the soundtext there and getting to go deep in the word, to sing the word with the worship teams. It was a fantastic ten years of my life.

 

Alex |

So that’s crazy, man. Like for again, for all the listeners who didn’t catch that, he mixed in a setting where there’s 24/7 worship, there’s never a musician not on stage for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it’s I’m sure the variety of musicians is all over the place, the ability of the musicians is all over the place. The tone of their instruments. So you really cut your teeth, you know, and I would you know, we won’t go into it now because I want to get into how to improve audio in small to mid sized churches. But I would love to have you back just to talk about the logistics of like how do you run a ministry that’s twenty four seven and how do you fix a broken microphone? You know what I mean? All that stuff is interesting to me but we won’t go there. Maybe the listeners or viewers are also interested, but I would love to really hone in to really aim this at worship leaders because worship leaders in most churches do not have a full time sound person on staff. They maybe have a part time, or maybe have a part time tech director who kind of oversees all of it and even that person is probably not very trained right where they’re doing it.

 

James Attaway |

On the side, they’re having computers.

 

Alex |

Exactly. And so most worship leaders are the ones setting up the stage, plugging in the cables, trying to figure out why is this thing feeding back? And I want to give our listeners the benefit of the doubt and say they probably have figured out most of this stuff because those are the kind of people who are awesome and listen to this podcast. But what I want you to do is just help the average everyday worship leader make their church sound better. And so my first question, James, is like, when you’re coming into a building for the very first time, what are the very first things that you’re going to assess? Like, let’s say I call you in, hey, I’m bringing you in as a consultant to look at my church and make it sound better. You walk into my building, what are the first areas you’re looking at?

 

James Attaway |

So the weakest link in any sound system, whether that’s a touring system with giant acts that are filling arenas or going to an amphitheater all the way down to the coffee shop sound system, the weakest link in all of those is the speaker system. So if you can dial in the speaker system and get it to sound its best, it’s like the lens that you see everything else through with your whole worship team, right? Every member of your worship team, unless they got the tambourine on the front row, they’re going through the sound system. And that has to impact every single person in every single seat that’s coming. So when you get that, the speaker system itself optimized where it sounds similar from the front to the back, on the sides, there’s no dead spots, things like that. When you really dial that in, that’s when you see the most improvement for your sound system because you fixed the weakest link. We could argue about this soundboard versus that soundboard or this microphone versus that microphone, but the biggest weak link in your sound system is the speakers.

 

Alex |

And how do you go about fixing the speakers? I know there’s DSP, digital signal processing and all that fancy jargon and stuff, but what should they do? Other than maybe the answer is they should bring in an outside consultant to come fix it for them. But what would you do?

 

James Attaway |

Right? Well, the first thing that you have to understand, especially if you’re going to bring your church leadership team along with it, is how it sounds different in different spots or where your weak spots are and how that’s causing problems. You might have that one person that keeps coming up at your church that complains about the sound every single week, or they have a problem with how loud it is, or different things that are going on that aren’t right. And they might be hearing something that’s related to the speaker system not related to the way that the person is mixing or the way that they’re mixing for how that sounds right at the soundboard, right. So the differences in the variations between where it sounds in one spot to another can really highlight for you, okay, what are the weak links right now? What pain is this weak link causing? So when you can dial that in and put it into a way that everybody can understand it. So your lead pastor that might not have a musical bone in their body, if you can say, hey, stand here and listen to this and then stand over here and listen to this, these are very different.

 

James Attaway |

So those are causing us problems and that’s creating a distraction because now our sound tech has to mix in a very narrow window of what’s acceptable for it to sound good for anybody. Because if you make it say too bright over here, then it’s too dark over here. And you can’t fix that globally with moving faders around on your board. So understanding where the speaker system is weakest and the problems that you have with it, that’s the first step so that you can bring everybody on board and say, okay, we need to then bring in a pro to see if we can just move the speakers. Maybe they just need to be tilted a different way or maybe they’re placed in the wrong spot. We’ve got to move them forward or we’ve got to maybe just get a little front fill right? A speaker that’s not very expensive or very big just to fill in on those front rows where people are saying, hey, I really can’t understand what the worship leader is singing or I see the words but I can’t really understand them. Finding those little things that you can do, it might be a small problem to fix, but it makes a big difference for the way that everybody can encounter what you’re presenting on a Sunday morning.

 

James Attaway |

So a professional can give you those clues of like, hey, we can do this, that’s low cost. Eventually maybe it might just be that your speaker system does not fit your space very well and you need to shift that. So it’s kind of like if you’ve got to change the tire on your car and you’ve got that little donut rim on there that’s really not supposed to last very long. And if you had four of those on a car, you’re not going to take a road trip with that, right. You’ve got to get the right speakers that really fit your space well. And so sometimes it’s worth just saying, hey, this is a long term expenditure and we’re not going to upgrade a lot of other stuff with our sound system because we’re going to save up for this capital expenditure that’s going to make a big difference. We’ve just got to wait a little while for the budget to roll around on it.

 

Alex |

Okay, so speakers are the very first thing you’re looking at. Is there anything else major that you’re assessing when you first walk into help a church?

 

James Attaway |

Well, it also matters where the sound booth is and sometimes people are locked in behind the sound booth and they never move, right? So if their sound booth is in like a room, which is terrible for listening and making judgments about what people hear elsewhere, if you can at least get some sort of remote mixing set up where you’ve got an iPad, where somebody can walk out into where other people are listening, that’s going to make a big difference. For making sure that you’re just perceiving the same thing as the people that are coming to church. So even just a wireless router and an iPad for your digital console goes a long way in making it so that you can have an easy time mixing. Right, because we want to make it easy for volunteers to walk in and do their job well. We don’t want to have them like run up here, listen to something, run back, make a change, run up here, listen, run back here, make a change. That’s exhausting and they’re going to quit because they’re like, why should I bother with this? Making it so that it’s easy for them to say, oh, I need to change this and this on the iPad when they’re listening right there, that makes a huge difference.

 

Alex |

Right. And an iPad is a couple of an M 32 x 32 digital sound console is like maybe 2000, maybe on sale for 1900 around Black Friday or something. So it’s not crazy crazy. Maybe you can ask a rich congregant to donate. But even for those who have a regular sound console, analog, even like James’point of just getting out of the booth and walking around the room is really important. So what about acoustic settings? I would assume that that’s pretty important because if you have great speakers in a big echo chamber, it’s not going to sound great. So are you looking at that as well?

 

James Attaway |

Yeah, that’s another one of those long term projects. But if we’re talking about the speaker system is like the wheels on the car, the acoustic space is kind of like the road that you’re driving on, right. So if it’s really, really echoey and boomy, that’s going to create a lot of problems that no sound system itself is going to fix. Because if those frequencies get excited in that place where it sounds muffled and they hang on for a long time, you can’t fix that with EQ because that’s something that’s happening in the time domain. You just can’t go back and eliminate that. You’re going to be fighting uphill basically the entire time. So again, one of those capital expenditures that’s a bigger project but lasts a long time is acoustic treatment and getting that placed in the right place and making it so that it makes intelligibility go up. That’s kind of the goal with acoustic treatment is we’re not necessarily trying to make it totally dead, like a recording studio that’s got no reverb or a voiceover booth. We want there to be some reflections and some excitement from when people even just start chatting with one another to when the speakers are on for worship or the spoken word people delivering a message.

 

James Attaway |

The fewer reflections you have that are distracting, the easier it is just to pay attention. That’s one of those capital expenditures that lasts through many, many iterations of sound gear. So although that’s expensive and not really flashy and it’s not like, yeah, we got acoustic treatment, we’re going to have so much fun. It’s not a toy you can play with, but it’s going to last as long as the roof on your building. You have to think of it as like we’re investing in the structure itself to be a better place to meet. No matter what sound gear we put on, even if the entire sound system dies and we have to just go put two speakers on sticks in the front to make it happen, that acoustic treatment is still going to be beneficial for any gathering that’s happening in that space.

 

Alex |

I think that’s really key. And thanks for bringing that out because like you said, it doesn’t matter what kind of microphones you buy or what kind of speakers you have, if it sounds horrible in the room, like, you can’t fix it with gear. And for the listeners, again, this is like aimed at maybe smaller and mid sized churches. And you’re like, well, I can’t afford $30,000 worth of sound panels, but you can make your own. I have right behind me, these are my own homemade. Like, you buy Rocksole, it’s ROXUL rock wool and you build a little frame out of two x fours and you get some acoustically transparent fabric and you can make a few and put them in the most reflective places in your church. And so it’s better to have something than nothing, unless you disagree with that.

 

James Attaway |

James no, I’m actually a huge fan of homemade panels. And you might even have people on your church that are construction types or fabric types, even like stapling the fabric around the frame on home built acoustic panels is kind of a pain. But there might be somebody in your church that loves it and it might be the project that brings them in and they’re like, hey, I did this. They get to take ownership of it. And then you’re not trying to be a guitar player with a hammer and scratching your head and you’re beating your thumb into submission. And then you can’t play piano, right, because you can’t hit that octave because you smashed your thumb with a hammer. Make sure that you you’re bringing in people whose expertise are that and that want to serve, you know, like somebody might love churning out, you know, 26 two by four frames made out of one by fours and filling them with rock wool. They might love doing that and be super pumped that the church asked them to do that. So don’t feel like you have to do everything yourself, even though a lot of times that is the case.

 

James Attaway |

Being a worship leader that’s taking care of sound, taking care of pro presenter, taking care of setting up the stage, all the stuff you’re making, the copies, try to delegate at least some of those jobs when it comes to doing that, and you’ll have fun doing it. It’ll be a project where you can really connect with other people in your church. Yeah, I I love, love that.

 

Alex |

That okay. So we talked about speakers are hugely important. Let’s talk about some key important gear purchases besides speakers. What are maybe two or three things that worship leaders who are wanting to improve their sound should purchase for their churches?

 

James Attaway |

Yeah, I think one of the ones that to me, makes the biggest difference for worship leaders is having a way to do virtual sound check. And depending on your soundboard, you might not have to spend any money to do it. You might have to buy a computer or use an older computer because it doesn’t take a lot of processing power to do it. It’s just a matter of going through the steps to set it up. And what virtual sound check is, is it’s a way to record all the channels coming from the stage onto a computer or SD card if it’s in your console itself. And then after the band is gone or the band comes out into the congregation and into the audience, you can play back those channels and each one shows up on a different fader on the console as if they’re on stage playing. And what this allows you to do is not only check the mix and actually hear what it sounds like out in the congregation as if you’re on stage. Because I don’t know, this has probably happened to you too, Alex. You’re on stage and you can tell something’s off with the sound, but you can’t exactly articulate it because you’re behind the speakers and all you hear is a muddy mess.

 

James Attaway |

But you know something’s not quite right. And you can’t really give clear directions on what to change for your sound tech unless you’re actually out there. But when you’re out there, you’re not on stage playing. So it makes it so that it’s kind of like you’ve got game footage for a football game where you can actually see the play. You can hear what each player is sending the front of house. You can hear if your bass player’s timing is terrible. You can tell what your guitar players tone is like. There’s all these things that you can look at from a third party perspective of this is what’s really happening with our sound system and our worship team. So it’s great for the players for them to really hear, oh, wow, my timing is a little sloppier than I thought, or wow, my tone really sounds like that. And for the sound tech to be able to practice on their own without the pressure of doing that with the band there, or messing something up or worrying about monitor mixes, all that stuff. If you can get virtual sound checks set up, that’s the very first thing that I would recommend that people do.

 

James Attaway |

If your console at all can set it up, it’s a game changer for both your worship team and your soundtechs.

 

Alex |

Yeah, that sounds amazing. And everybody Google virtual sound check and type in your console name, title, whatever it’s called. Are there any other pieces of gear you recommend getting to improve the sound?

 

James Attaway |

I think the next thing that I kind of address is stage noise. And so if you’ve got monitor wedges, maybe it’s time to move to in your monitors. And so that’s a clear one for a lot of churches where especially if you’re in a small room, if you’ve got a really loud stage, you turn off the main speakers and you still hear a bunch of mud coming from on stage from all the monitor wedges that are there so that everybody can hear themselves. If you can eliminate that, it’s going to make it a lot easier to mix out front and you’re not going to get as much difference of people in the front getting a lot of mud from the monitors, whereas people in the back, it sounds thin and kind of maybe even harsh in the back. Reducing your stage noise goes a long way. And if you’re going to do that and go to in ear monitors, I will not send a team to in ear monitors without doing crowd mics, if at all possible. So this could be a pair of vocal mics that are on the front of the stage, like on one on one side, one on the other, and they’re just facing out.

 

James Attaway |

That’s $200 right there for crowd mics. And that allows you to stay connected to the congregation in a way where you can hear them and you don’t feel like you’re in a tin can and you’re seeing all these people, but you’re not hearing any interaction from them or you see mouths moving, but you can’t really tell how loud they’re singing. If you rely on those crowd mics for in ear monitors and really turn them up quite a bit, that can really help you feel more connected like you’re with the congregation. So if anybody’s struggling with that transition, you’ve gone to any of your monitors recently or not recently, and you’re still struggling with it, rely on those crowd mics. Thin them out with the EQ a little bit, but that’s going to make a huge difference for making it feel comfortable, feel like you’re worshiping with the congregation, not just isolated from them.

 

Alex |

Yeah, I think that’s a really important little tip. You just dropped about thinning out your crowd bikes, basically rolling off the low end. So it’s mostly like upper, mids and highs. So you kind of feel the sibilance and the chatter, but you don’t have all the tonal qualities like muddying up your mix, right? Yeah, that’s great. So I didn’t add this question, I didn’t send it to you in advance, but all this stuff costs money and do you have any tips for pitching these ideas to your leadership, your senior pastor, how do you help them realize like, hey, we should upgrade? Do you have any thoughts about that?

 

James Attaway |

Absolutely. So it starts with making sure that you’re highlighting both the pain point of what is this costing us to not fix this, and making sure that it’s connected to your church’s mission and vision. Because leaders can smell from 100 miles away when somebody is saying, I just want new toys to play with. So if you can show how it’s serving your congregation and your church’s mission, that’s going to make it a lot easier for them to get on board and start to consider this. Because again, you’re competing with a lot of different ministry areas of where you can put money if there’s a surplus, like do you hire another children’s pastor or do you upgrade the speakers? Those are tough decisions to make, but if you give them the right information and see how it ties into the church’s mission, that’s a great way to start the conversation. Even bringing on somebody that says, hey, this person is suggesting this. And here are some two or three different options that we can do in the pros and cons of those that’s going to help lead pastors and executive pastors feel like they’re in control and feel like they’re not just spending money unnecessarily as well, because that can stink when you buy something and then you’re like, oh, we could have just done this for a third of the price if we did this.

 

James Attaway |

Making sure that all the options are explored, not just saying, this is what we need, this is what we need, this is what we need that helps to build trust through the process. So you’re really trying to say this is how we’re going to serve our congregation. Well, I want to be trustworthy and come up with all the options, do my research, make sure that I know why these other cheaper alternatives won’t work, or making sure that we’re spending money and being good stewards with it. We don’t want to waste our money and we don’t want to use our money in a way that’s not serving our vision, but we also don’t want to hold on to our money and not do something that will serve our vision. So finding that balance and really talking vision and strategy and pain points with your leadership team is going to help them get a little bit less hesitant to maybe look into that capital expenditure, maybe look into that infrastructure upgrade or tidying up things just to make it easier for volunteers. All these things are different facets that you have to look at for how do we spend our resources well so that people can volunteer?

 

James Attaway |

Well, they can have an easy time jumping in. If we create a system that’s easy to do, we’re going to have a lot easier time recruiting people to run it. And if we have people to run it, then the two people that are committed aren’t going to run ragged and I’m not going to be scrambling stressed out about trying to find volunteers every week. We’ve built a system that makes it easy for them to jump in. That makes your job easier as well. So even pitching that as, hey, I want to be spending my time discipling my team and I want to be spending time in prayer for what direction we go with our worship songs and our song selection. When I’m dealing with X, Y and Z problem all the time, I’m not able to do those other things that are important but not as urgent.

 

Alex |

Yeah, pure gold right there, everybody. So basically speak your leaders language, their love language and then I love your point about being good stewards with what we have because a lot of things you don’t need to upgrade. You might have decent mics, you just need to try different mic placement. Or even yesterday, actually, one of our the music director at our church was wanting to upgrade, get tracks for the youth band. And they were like, we want to get a Dante card. And I’m like, why don’t you just plug an iPad into just a little eight inch cable to a TRS and plug it in like tracks on one side and click and speaking lady on the other side? It’s youth band. Why are we going to spend $2,000 when we have the iPad and we have the cable? You know what I mean? So it’s like getting creative with what you already have and can it accomplish the I love everything you said. Basically everybody go back and rewind and relisten to what James just shared. I want to talk a little bit of James about actual audio technique because you’re a guru and we need to learn from you.

 

Alex |

So when it comes to the actual mixing board, what mistakes do you see? I mean, this is a broad question. It’s laid out wrong. It could be they’re not doing gain structure properly. But what are the mistakes that you most commonly see made at churches?

 

James Attaway |

I think the biggest one that rubs me the worst is random changes or processors or EQS that don’t have a purpose. Right. So making sure that every change that you make on the board every time you’re reaching. For an EQ or you’re trying to lower the threshold on the compressor, make sure you could justify to somebody that was looking over your shoulder, why am I doing this? What am I trying to accomplish with this? And then evaluate, did this work or did this not work? And if it didn’t work, put it back. Because so many times I will see something, somebody filled with an EQ and it’s like you push up the fader and you’re like, man, that sounds weird. And you look at the EQ and it’s chopped all up and pushed over here. It was like, maybe that might have worked at some point for some input coming through that channel, but it’s not right now. So let’s clear it out. Let’s put on our high pest filter for safety and let’s work our way through this systematically in a way that makes sense. Not just doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff.

 

James Attaway |

So being able to identify I did this EQ because it was sounding like this, and I bypassed it to check to see if it was actually doing what I thought it was doing. That is kind of the biggest thing. If people can understand that the soundboard is very simple and it needs to stay as simple as possible and let each thing do its one job. That’s the kind of the biggest thing that I see, that people are just turning knobs to turn knobs. They don’t understand what they do. They don’t check to see if it did what they wanted it to accomplish and then they just leave it. So it’s kind of like your kids that pull out a toy and get a board game set up and then walk away from it. It’s like, what is this doing here? And there’s a little picture of my life of children around the house and cleaning up, but that’s the same idea. Make sure that everything that’s being done on that board has a purpose and that you’ve checked to see if it’s working.

 

Alex |

Yeah. And if you’re not sure why it’s there, get rid of it and see if it drastically makes the sound worse. I’m going to use a bigger word, but I couldn’t think of it well.

 

James Attaway |

And sometimes you can turn off something and it gets better. You’re like, oh, why were we doing that? So always safely, without making too much level jump or making something get really loud all of a sudden safely, test that to see if it’s working and to see what it’s doing. And if you like it or not, it’s okay not to like what you did before and abandon that and switch over. So that’s kind of the number one thing that I see. The number two thing that I see is, I mean, you mentioned board organization and that to me is a big thing because you need to make sure that stuff makes sense for somebody that doesn’t know what they’re doing, right? You might have this grand design of like, I want this here and this here and this here, and I’ve got it all arranged. But to somebody walking up for them to reverse engineer your train of thought to why this is there. And then if you just have a standard, like drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals, speaking mics, if you put everything in a logical order, that really helps people jump in and understand easily.

 

James Attaway |

And then game structure is something that a lot of people just really struggle with or they don’t know where to turn it up and turn it down to get things balanced. Right. So the fader on your board, I don’t know, you just can’t see my faders very well. But they work best, right, when they’re right around that little U or a zero, right. You’ve got the best fine tuning control there. They don’t work great when they’re pulled all the way down, you know, like one inch from the bottom of the travel. Right. So when you can set it up so that your board, you know, like if something is at the right volume closer to that middle section, that’s going to be helpful. The other trick is though, the preamp on the board. So the very first place where you turn it up and turn it down, that affects everything else down the line. That also will affect your monitor send that’s probably coming off your front of house console, unless you’ve got a second console. But a lot of times we’re using the same preamp for monitors and for front of house. So we have to figure out a way how do we get enough juice to say the drummer.

 

James Attaway |

Drummers typically need a lot more level coming to their linear monitors than we need level coming out to front of house. Finding solutions for how we make sure that all of those different things are served well, both for the front of house tech, for the drummer that needs to hear themselves, and everybody else in the band that needs to be able to mix their monitors, making sure that those things are done systematically, and again, doing it so that it makes sense. We’ve got a purpose for why we have each thing set this way so that we’re setting everybody else up for success.

 

Alex |

Yeah, I think I have a few thoughts in my head that I want to get out there. One is basically what you’re saying is pure audio is better audio, meaning let’s not not process it unless we have to. Which means we need to get it sounding good at the source. And I always say the best way to improve your sound, the fastest way to improve your sound is to make sure the source sounds good so that the drum is tuned, that the mic placement that you’ve tested out a few different spots until it sounds good just as it is. And then you got to make sure that the gain structure is right. And for that I want to point everybody to your YouTube channel which is a super great resource attawayaudio so go to YouTube comatawayaudio. I think it’s A-T-T-A-W-A-Y-W-A-Y? Did I say right? Yeah. Anyway, spells how it sounds. So everybody checked that out for Gain structure, any Q tips and a lot of other things. The other thing I’m thinking about is the worship leader who’s listening to this and the academy members. I’m watching you guys live and I’m like, they’re probably like, dude, there’s so much to do and I feel like worship leaders can feel overwhelmed.

 

Alex |

So my encouragement to the listeners or the viewers is, guys, just one thing per week. Just spend a two hour block every Tuesday afternoon in your sanctuary looking at your audience mic placement or looking at the acoustic echo of your room and trying to figure out, okay, where will I put placements? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It’s like just go in there 2 hours a week and by the end of the year your church will be in a completely different audio set up. Don’t be overwhelmed, just do the work a little bit at a time. So that would be just an encouragement I have.

 

James Attaway |

Yeah. And even we’re talking about stuff that we can do without spending any money. And one of the things that will really help both your team, your audio team and you and kind of dialing in your speaker system as well is if you just listen to music together in your space, that’s going to do a couple of different things for you. First, it’s going to help you identify what the speakers themselves are doing and what you’re kind of fighting against. So it’s helpful for that avenue and making sure that your speakers are serving you well. But also when your team understands what it should sound like, all the rest of the steps of audio and gain structure and balance, then get a lot easier. Because it’s like if you’re trying to paint a picture of a pumpkin, but you’ve never seen a pumpkin before, or you’ve only got an idea of what a pumpkin might look like, you’re going to struggle to paint that very accurately. Right. But if you’ve spent a lot of time just looking at a pumpkin, if it’s sitting there, you’re like, that’s what a pumpkin looks like. I know how it should look like.

 

James Attaway |

It’s orange, it’s got lines around the side going up and down and it’s got a green stem. When you clearly understand what that looks like, you can draw it quite easily. And it’s the same thing with music. A lot of our sound volunteers, if they’re coming from a technical background, they haven’t listened to music critically like people that are coming from a musical background. So the stuff that’s obvious to you of the balance between the different drums and the symbols, or the balance between this guitar and that guitar and how that should change in the guitar solo. That stuff that’s intuitive to you might not be intuitive to your whole sound team. So listening to music together and talking about it is one free way to upgrade your sound just by giving them a clearer picture of these are the parameters and how we’re trying to balance music and we’re playing a similar arrangement so we can try to put our instruments and get them to balance well that way.

 

Alex |

Yeah, that’s great. I have so many more questions I want to ask, but I want to be sensitive to your time. I was going to ask you about live stream, but for the Academy members, I’m actually going to be having another guest in the future. Talk about live stream. Mix in March. So mark that on your calendars. It’s actually in the academy. You can RSVP right there. But James, I have other questions that I want to ask you, and I definitely want to talk about where people can connect with you. But worship leaders, like I said, are often thrown into the audio directors as well. You actually have a book, a handbook that you created. First of all, tell us about that, but then recommend other resources. They can be your resources or other people’s podcasts or other people’s, whatever. What would you tell a worship leader? You need to read this and you need to listen to this. And I’m going to say the first thing they need to read is your handbook. But tell them about the handbook. Tell them about some other resources that you would recommend them to take. And then I have a couple last questions for you before we get into the Academy.

 

James Attaway |

Q and A. Yeah, for sure. So the book is the Live Mixing Field Guide, and basically it’s a bunch of cheat sheets, basically, for how to get started with certain EQ points on different instruments and different compression settings that you can try to start training your ear on how EQ works and then see if that helps your sound or not. So it’s not presets, it’s not do this exactly how I have it drawn on the picture. It’s kind of a guided tour on if you want to learn how to hear EQ and know, like, well, what knob should I turn to try to make this instrument sound better? Here are my go to steps for all the instruments that I’ve mixed over the, you know, ten years at IHOP KC with tons of different singers and tons of different drummers and guitar players and keyboard players, what tended to work really quickly, and where are my go to frequencies for things that I want to listen for and then evaluate? Is this helping or not? That book has been really helpful for a lot of people to get over the hump and the fear of using EQ and compression and effects on your soundboard.

 

James Attaway |

So it’s a bunch of starting places. It’s in a wire bound book that you can leave at your soundboard. So you can just leave it there and somebody can open up to a page and say, all right, I’m going to work on vocally queue today. And it walks you through the steps of what I do, step by step for a vocal, what to listen for. And then again you’re evaluating whether or not those changes that you make work on that vocalist on that day so you can find it@livemixingfieldguide.com. And there’s an ebook version too if you’re international and international shipping is extraordinarily expensive. But there’s an ebook version as well and it comes with a free mini course on getting started with EQ and compression. So that tool has been super helpful for people learning, like just getting started, getting over that initial hump of what is this actually doing and how do I use this in a professional way has been super helpful for a lot of churches.

 

Alex |

That’s great. And I will put a link to that field guide in the show notes or underneath the YouTube video. So definitely check that out guys. So you mentioned this is my last kind of big question that I think is really worth exploring with you and then tell people where to find you. But you had mentioned setting up systems for volunteers and I would love it because worship leaders, they’re on stage and they have to raise up a volunteer to be in the back and how can they trust that person and is that person doing a good job? So just how would you go about training volunteers or setting up systems for volunteers to be able to run sound excellently. And you can go in any direction that you want there.

 

James Attaway |

Yeah, for this, virtual sound check is an invaluable resource because you can be back there with the sound tech and you can be listening together to the different things. You can even learn how to do it better yourself through virtual sound check. And then you can bring people along on what you’ve already learned. Right. It’s going to be harder to teach people if you’re kind of unsure about it. So you taking those time to get the reps to balancing a mix, to going through vocally queue for a few things that’s going to help and then showing them what to do when a time when you don’t have to be on stage or you’re not leading the rehearsal. Having that ability to show them what it should be like and then having a written set of directions on what to do when you have a clear system of when we arrive, we boot up the console and we load our base scene that everybody starts from. That’s got good gain structure and a good starting place for most of our EQS. So that things are good to go at the onset. So then we worry about turning on our speakers and we go through checking wireless batteries, all the different things.

 

James Attaway |

If you can distill it into a checklist, that makes it easier for people. They don’t have to feel like they have to remember everything. They don’t have to worry that they’re forgetting something, and then they’re going to have that stress sweat or five minutes before service and they forgot to do this task, but it takes six minutes. Whenever you can do all of those things and then write it down, make it really simple, that’s when it’s going to be a lot easier and a lot less intimidating for people to come on and join your sound team. So if they can practice with virtual sound check offline, no pressure, no band staring at them, no monitor mixes, they’ve got to fix. And then if they’ve got a checklist of, this is what I do step by step, those few hours that you take to do that is going to replicate so many more sound texts, because the time you invest in training can multiply, right? So if you invest in somebody and they really take it, they really learn it and they really jump in, they’re all in on learning sound, then that person can then train somebody else, right?

 

James Attaway |

So the time you spend training, if it’s done wisely and if it’s done with systems, it will end up being a multiplication of your time, not a drain on your time. So making sure that you’re doing that in a purposeful way to make it easy for people to jump on, that’s what I would do for training. New soundtechs, if you’re a worship leader, virtual sound check and make sure that it’s a simple process for them to jump in, yeah, that’s so good.

 

Alex |

And it could just be, guys, a clipboard with a bunch of the same printed piece of paper that they actually check off each time they serve and then they throw it away. Or if you have an iPad in the booth already, like, just put a Sauna as a NA and it’s an app and you can create a list that actually recurs. So you check off the task and it creates a new one for next Sunday. Right? And so I love that systematizing. It and I think the Academy members will know that I’m all about leadership. And leadership is about providing clarity. And what you’re describing in all of this is clarity. Like, I’m going to stand at the back sound booth and talk through what I want the mix to sound like. That’s clarity. I’m going to give them a checklist. That’s clarity. We’re going to listen to music together in the room and get a vibe for what we’re going for. That’s clarity. So everything you’re saying, James, really boils down to great leadership. And I think that’s why you’ve been successful is because you’re a good leader. And so I would love for our people to connect with you because you have so much to offer.

 

Alex |

Where can they find you online? What’s the best place to point them? Anything else you want to share there? And then we’ll get into our academy.

 

James Attaway |

Q and A. Yeah, so I’ve got a pretty big library on YouTube of free videos that are there at attaway Audio and then my website attawayaudio.com has a free guide for how to lead your church sound team, how to kind of clarify the different values that you have for your congregation. That’s a great place to start. And then we have online courses and other resources if you want to go deeper and take your team to the next level. Things like coaching and in person training, I’ve done a lot of that and it’s been really rewarding for the churches that have brought me out, and I love getting to see people face to face, so that’s a lot of fun. So Adawayaudio.com is the best place to go for that.

 

Alex |

Awesome. James, thank you for all your wisdom. And to the podcast listeners and YouTube viewers, god bless you. Will see you for the next episode. For the Academy members, hold tight.

 

Alex |

Thanks for tuning in today. I hope this episode encouraged you, helped you and pushed you forward in your ministry. If it helped you, can you take a second and help us by sending it to just one person that you think needs to hear this? And if you’re feeling extra nice, leave us a nice shiny five star review on Apple podcast or like this video if you’re watching it on YouTube. If you want to discuss this episode or ask questions, we do have a free section in our academy where you can post comments and questions and chat with other worship leaders just like you and also sample some of our courses. And you can go to Worshipministrytraining.com Free to join us inside the free portion of the academy. If you’re looking for more, check out the full access academy. You can get 15 days for just $1 to start and try things out again. You can try all of it for 15 days for just $1 by going to Worship Ministrytraining.com. Hope to see you inside the Academy, or else I’ll see you next month for another helpful episode.