Around 120 years ago, some folks thought it might make sense to start leveraging both steam-powered and internal combustion engines to provide the power necessary to move carriages down the road, to the delight of horses everywhere. In the early days of automobile manufacturing, the process of building cars was identical to the process of building carriages and other horse-drawn conveyances. Each individual auto was hand-built from the ground up by craftsmen. A visionary named Henry Ford came along and introduced the notion of the assembly line, in which autos under construction would move in a linear fashion through a factory, and at stations along the way, additional parts would be attached or installed, and by the time the automobile reached the exit, it would be complete and ready to roll off to the showroom.
A number of years later, after struggling with the deficiencies and inconsistencies of human laborers, some visionaries started to propose the idea of having machines take over parts of the car manufacturing business. They pointed out that car-building robots would be faster, stronger and more precise than humans. Moreover, they would not ask for lunch breaks, days off, larger paychecks or vacation time. Once properly calibrated, they would do their job perfectly every single time, hundreds or even thousands of times each day. The idea of automating tasks formerly accomplished exclusively by humans had arrived in the process of car manufacturing.
The Audio Side
So what does all this have to do with church audio, you ask? Well, think about it for a moment — auto manufacturers chose to have machines do work because the machines were more reliable than humans. In the world of church sound, we have human reliability issues of our own. We love our volunteers, and usually they do a fine job for us, but life happens: people get sick, tires go flat, alarm clocks fail, and there seems to be no end to the number of troubles that keep volunteers from successfully getting to church and getting their job done. And even if they successfully get themselves to church, they don’t always perform consistently. They’re human and they can get distracted by chatter on the comms or the nice lady who wishes to register her concern that the worship music is just too darn loud. These distractions cause humans to miss cues or press the wrong button or fail to unmute the pastor’s mic… things just go wrong. What if we could follow the example of the auto manufacturers and find a way to have “robots” do some of the things that volunteers have traditionally done?
For quite a few years now, we have had the capacity to advance lyric slides in ProPresenter by nudging it with a MIDI note from the worship team’s sequencing software. We can even get fancy and permanently build such DMX-triggering data into our Ableton session so it not only works perfectly this Sunday, but will work perfectly on that Sunday in six weeks when the worship director decides we should once again play that one song that really got the congregation to its feet. This capacity gives us repeatability, which is valuable to us. Even if the Spirit compels us to repeat the song’s bridge four times, that MIDI note data will keep projecting the correct lyric slide every single time. In fact, we can use that same kind of data to cause the lighting to keep doing what we want it to do — perfectly every single time. This gets us thinking, “hmmm — if we can control the slides and the lights perfectly, is there some way we can control some or all of the sound too?” The answer is yes, and it is a good thing.
Tricks and Treats
To be sure, there are arguments against putting audio under the control of machines. There are terrifying tales from the early days of live sound consoles outfitted with moving faders… tales of computers going haywire and moving every fader to its maximum gain and causing feedback loops that are still floating around in the earth’s upper atmosphere to this day. But our technology has improved, and we have mostly sorted out how to avoid such disasters. And if you’re still not sold, fine. It’s not quite as scary to let a digital audio workstation app take control of muting and unmuting various elements of our mix. We know when certain slides need to appear and we know when the lighting should shift from one mode to another — and we also know when the pastor is going to stroll onto the platform and start giving us a message. Why not have the DAW keep the pastor’s mic muted until that moment arrives? And we could also have that same DAW mute all the drums, guitars, keyboards and vocal mics to minimize the likelihood of feedback during the pastor’s message. And when the music director steps back onto the platform to start that gentle synth pad, he or she can start a sequence that includes a little piece of data that tells the FOH console to unmute the keyboard subgroup and let that sound out of the speakers.
Now check out this crazy idea… that same sequence could be programmed to very slowly turn up the gain of the keyboard subgroup so that the heavenly synth pad sneaks in behind the words of the pastor, and as the rest of the musicians take their positions, their subgroups can be unmuted and turned up as well, and the music sneaks in and undergirds the pastor’s passionate message. And all the while, it doesn’t matter that the FOH mixer’s wife has beckoned him away from his station with a phone call announcing that the upstairs bathroom has a massive leak and there’s a waterfall running down the staircase. He’s out in the lobby trying to calm his wife, but it’s okay — a computer is taking care of business on his behalf. And that same computer also rhythmically and repeatedly panned a sequenced synthesizer part from left to right and back again during the opening song of the worship set. In fact, it also turned up the electric guitarist’s channels a touch during the 8-bar instrumental section of that song so her solo would be clearly heard by the congregation. And it did a dozen other such little things throughout the worship set. Machines really can do stuff that humans have done historically. And they can do it more consistently.
Note that in our scenario, there still is a front of house engineer, and that is probably a good idea. We’d like to think that machines work perfectly every single time, but alas they do not, and even if we haven’t formally appointed a specific person to sit and babysit an automated mix, it’s probably prudent to have some halfway tech-savvy person close by to punch a mute button if dreaded feedback rears its ugly head as a result of a computer malfunction. Another appealing scenario has a computer handling lots of tweaky, repetitive, “background” type tasks in the mix so that a seasoned FOH mixer can focus strongly on getting a perfect balance of five or six vocal mics, or other, more “artistic” kinds of mixing tasks.
Get in Sync!
There are numerous ways in which automation can be leveraged to improve the quality of our services. Of course we must accomplish some synchronization in order to make this happen, but as sync becomes increasingly easier with modern technology, it’s worthy of consideration. One might conclude that all this automation can only be leveraged by big, well-funded churches, but that conclusion would be wrong. In fact, as technology gets less expensive, it becomes ever more plausible for small churches to do this stuff. And it only takes a moment of thought to realize that small churches with few qualified volunteers would benefit the most from such automation. If you haven’t already done so, it may be high time for you to look into it.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
