As church sound practitioners, we ply our trade week in and week out all year round, and most of the time, it’s business as usual. Last week’s service looked pretty much like this week’s service, which looks pretty much like next week’s service… most of the time. We do a great job of audio, visuals, lighting, and streaming, and the services look and sound great. We all slap each other on the back, congratulating ourselves on a job well done, and then the cycle starts over and we do it all again the next week. But every now and again, we have special services that might resemble our usual week-to-week services in some ways, but are much larger in scope. And having been lulled into a cruise-control sense of lather-rinse-repeat week after week, we may find ourselves panicking to discover that we’re being asked to shift out of our comfort zone and plan and execute a much bigger production — more sound, more visuals, more lights, and oh, by the way, we’re holding the service on a large field outside, and yes, we still need to provide a live stream. So we run screaming out of the building, terrified at the prospect of being held responsible for planning and executing such a promethean production.
Be Prepared!
Hopefully, if all goes well, we don’t have tasks like this dumped into our laps at the 11th hour. If we’re smart, we plan for such events way out in advance — weeks at minimum, preferably months, and maybe we should even be talking about this stuff a year out, even if only discussing the big picture that far in advance. That gives us the opportunity to make the planning more and more granular over a period of time. To put that sentiment in a more colloquial way, you eat an elephant one bite at a time — so a year in advance, we decide that we’re going to want to eat an elephant this time next year, then during the next months, we can plan on how to cut the elephant up, followed by the acquisition of the necessary resources — or at least giant-sized skillets! And over the final months leading up to the deadline, we actually carve the thing up and eat it — we’ll have it consumed by that date that was planned so long ago. Luckily, most of us have learned the lesson that the scope of our grand designs shrinks vastly along with the lead time available. The bigger the production, the more lead time we’ll need.
Okay, so we’ve established that planning well in advance is paramount. But what about the actual process once the plans are laid? We have several things to consider. Let’s say that most of our seats are full for Sunday services, but we expect that attendance will expand by 50% for holiday services like Christmas or Easter. And let’s say that the conclusion is drawn to hold services outdoors — the weather gets a lot nicer around Easter, so let’s all go out into the large field north of the parking lot! For smaller churches, it may be plausible to pull the main P.A. out of the sanctuary and take it outside.
For larger churches, that may not be possible. We’re certainly not going to pull down the line arrays we’ve flown in the main sanctuary for a multitude of reasons — not the least of which is that we probably don’t have anything (nor could we acquire anything) from which to fly them outdoors. The solution is to purchase or rent the P.A. for the outside service. For small churches, that purchase/rental may entail adding more amps and cabinets to the existing system that’s been hauled out of the sanctuary, while larger churches are more likely renting or purchasing a completely separate system for the outdoor service because they simply can’t move their main P.A.
Buy or Rent? — That is the Question
And renting versus purchasing becomes the next big question. In my experience, smaller churches are more likely to rent (or even borrow) P.A. gear, since they are less likely to have the budget for a straight-up purchase. But for larger churches, a purchase may be plausible — they’re more likely to be able to buy an “outdoor system” and have the resources to store it when it’s not being used. But even then, rental is probably the more likely option, because let’s face it, owning a complete outdoor P.A. rig that only gets used a couple of times a year is a luxury, and may not be the most efficient use of resources.
I would also recommend that some careful planning go into the process of determining the P.A. requirements. Again, presuming that our larger-than-usual special event will be outdoors because the main sanctuary can’t accommodate the expected crowd, we need to be aware of the fact that delivering sufficient SPL to the entire congregation outdoors is a different beast from doing so indoors. We’re almost certainly going to need more cabinets and more amplification. We may even need delay towers if the space is particularly large. And on the topic of sufficient SPL, we need to be mindful of local ordinances. If our location is in a residential zone, we might get ourselves into a bit of trouble (and potentially earn a visit from the local police) while delivering 100+ dB SPLs during an Easter sunrise service.
Don’t Forget the Little Details
There are yet other considerations. Inside our usual sanctuary, we have AC power run all over the place, and there are plenty of outlets to serve up the power we need for all our gear. Outside, we probably won’t find AC sockets in the lawn, so we’ll need to import AC power from somewhere. It might be plausible to just run extensions from the building, but if our power needs are more substantial, we may need to deploy generators. And that probably entails rental, as high-current gas-powered generators almost certainly fall under that “luxury item — not efficient use of resources” category we brought up earlier. Whichever way we do it, we’ll need AC power for an outdoor service.
There are other things that we take for granted in our usual indoor production world. The semi-permanently installed gear we use from week to week in our houses of worship doesn’t need to be set up or struck at the end of the service. We walk in, we turn it on, it usually works exactly the way we expect it to, so we’re able to come rolling in only an hour or two before our services start for the day. Outdoor services (particularly those that are being done outside because there’s not enough space inside) will require substantial advance setup. And once the gear is in place and all connected, we’ll want to test drive it to make sure it’s going to behave in the expected fashion come Sunday morning. One potential challenge in this domain is RF. Chances are we’ve carefully scanned the available bandwidth and sorted out all our transmitters and receivers inside our sanctuary, but we’ll need to do so again outside, especially if we’re using rented gear that has not been configured for our location.
Another issue is live streaming. Adding cameras, switching and a discrete audio stream to the mix increases the complexity and calls for even more advance planning and setup. And we also need to think about staffing. A large-scale setup requires a large-scale crew, and we may have to enlist additional volunteers or even hire in some help. We may even need to hire security to protect technology assets overnight for a couple of nights if we have to set up a couple of days in advance so we have enough time to get it right. And striking the gear is something else we must consider. By way of avoiding asset protection issues after the services, we need to get stuff put away as soon as possible. It’s easy to see that additional labor is a key consideration in our process.
There’s a lot to think about if we are going to do large events for special occasions. Certainly the benefits outweigh the costs and challenges, so we shouldn’t balk at the prospect of such events. We can minimize the costs and challenges with careful planning, making this type of event more appealing.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
