When it comes time for an existing church to establish an additional new location or when a completely new church is established, the question of location looms large. Some churches have the budget to construct a brand-new facility, but a substantial number of them will either purchase an existing location or rent space and time in such a place. Typical locations for such arrangements are school gymnasiums, movie theaters or other performance spaces of that kind. If the space is used for non-church purposes when services are not happening, it is usually necessary for the portable church to provide its own technology – audio, video, and lighting. They must literally bring all their own gear each week, set it up before the service and strike it at the end of the service. We’re going to take a look at portable church processes and operations, the good, the bad and the ugly. As per usual, we won’t concern ourselves with the visual aspects of the presentation – we’ll focus on the segment we know and love – sound.
Challenges Aplenty
There are many portable churches around the world, and they all face challenges that don’t exist for churches with permanent locations. During the late 20-aughts, the church that I and my family attended was portable and faced such hurdles. I was the lead audio engineer and, by extension, a guy who contributed to the weekly unloading and reloading of the trailer in which our equipment was stored. It was hard work – we were just starting to make the move from analog to digital technology, and the gear was heavy and unwieldy. And some days, when the volunteer crew was short of help, it could get a bit grueling. I dreamed of the day when we’d eventually move into a permanent location – I would fly the speakers from the roof and roll that dreaded 1-inch diameter snake out one last time, never to be coiled up again. That day did finally arrive, and it was glorious. Perhaps I’m sounding a bit curmudgeonly here – telling the tales of my bidirectional uphill trek to school through mountains of snow – get offa my lawn!
Technology to the Rescue
Fortunately, things have changed substantially in just the past decade or two. There are still plenty of portable churches, and plenty of crews loading gear in and out on Sunday mornings, but technology advances have lightened the load a bit – figuratively and literally. One domain in which substantial strides have been made is that of mixing consoles. Typically, the channel count required by portable churches is considerably less than that of permanently-housed churches, but even portable churches sometimes need quite a few channels, and in the old analog days, this meant a large, heavy and unwieldy mixer. At the current time, however, we have the blessing of digital mixers, which grant us substantial advantages over the analog desks of yesteryear. First off, they can be physically smaller. Motorized faders let us see and adjust whichever channels we want – frequently in banks of 16. And the channel count is only limited by the on-stage I/O… we can have a stage box with quite a few inputs and outputs feeding our desk. So the mixer can be smaller, and smaller almost always means lighter, and in this case, lighter is always better. And the smaller physical footprint means that we don’t need as much storage space – yet another positive.
Another nice advantage afforded to today’s portable ministries is mixers with built-in processing. It’s nice to have lots of dynamics processing, high-quality equalization and great-sounding effects, but in the old days, that meant toting around a rack (or three) filled of heavy physical processors. Now we have all that built right into the mixer. Not only do modern digital mixers feature gates, compressors and multiband parametric EQ per channel, but even excellent reverbs, delays and other modulation effects. In some cases, they even offer excellent software emulations of the rack processors that we have always loved. Some even go so far as to build in a nice two-track recorder. The equivalent weight and storage space this processing represents would be immense, and would make for some back-breaking Sunday mornings. If indeed we choose to use a digital FOH mixer over analog, there’s yet another welcome advantage – digital snakes. Analog snakes are heavy and unwieldy, but a tidy run of Cat-6 is much nicer, and easier to run in a way that reduces trip hazard considerably.
Portable churches tend to be small churches, and small churches tend to have small volunteer bases. A common attribute of small volunteer ministries is the lack of trained and/or experienced audio folks. The process of mixing services must be kept dead simple for them, and building a mix from scratch on a large-ish analog desk every Sunday morning is not at all simple for the untrained and inexperienced. Digital mixers give us the ability to build a baseline FOH mix that can be recalled to give our volunteers a giant head start on the process. In fact, we can even do just like the old days, routing instruments into groups to enable simplified mixing with just a small handful of faders – drums, guitars, keyboards, backing tracks, vocals, and so on. Predetermined mute groups allow volunteers to easily silence all but the pastor’s mic during the sermon, and unleash the musicians when it’s their time to be heard. The snapshot also gives us consistency week after week, no matter which volunteer steps up to handle the mix. Another advantage we get is the increasingly common ability for musicians and vocalists to dial up their own in-ear monitor mixes with smart device apps. This obviates the necessity for a separate monitor mixer, further reducing the weight we have to carry and space we have to take up.
Speakers!
Beyond the gear we need at the FOH mix position, we also need speakers through which our congregation will hear the music and message. This is yet another domain in which recent advancements have reduced the weight and space requirements. Modern portable speakers are more compact and efficient than their ancestors. Historically, we not only had racks full of signal processors at FOH, but also racks full of very heavy amps to cart around. Now, our amps are almost universally built into our speakers. They provide us with plenty of power and SPLs, despite being smaller and less unwieldy than our old systems. Modern speaker-on-a-stick solutions can even give us the ability to distribute SPL a bit like a line array, with more SPL for the rear of the room and less up front. Another welcome development pertaining to loudspeakers is the increasing adoption of IEMs. It’s plausible now for a portable church to abandon stage monitors altogether, shaving off even more weight and storage space.
We still need some traditional hardware – particularly things like mic stands, speaker stands, and flight cases. Of course we also still need a bunch of mics and cables, but there’s simply no avoiding that. We increasingly rely on smart tablets mounted on lightweight stands to replace metal music stands, and we’re even greener now, saving a lot of trees by using these devices in lieu of printed music. We can also achieve a much cleaner look on stage by mounting these pads on our musicians’ mic stands. Beyond hardware considerations, we also now have access to software that can help us do some pretty marvelous stuff. The use of computer apps like Ableton Live has been revolutionary – not only providing high quality backing tracks to enhance and augment the music, but also facilitating MIDI automation of lighting and lyric slide projection. This can also reduce our need for volunteers while increasing the production value of our services. The computer that synchronously runs the lights and the lyric slides will never get a flat tire on the way to church Sunday morning, and almost always does its job perfectly.
The operation of a portable church used to be a much more daunting prospect, replete with a lot of heavy labor and complexity. We’ve since been blessed with a lot of technological advancement to make it simpler, lighter, easier, and better. If your church is portable and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, it’s well worth your efforts to consider the adoption of some of this new technology to make life much easier.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
