It’s no secret that we all have a lot more parishioners show up for the holidays. Whether it’s winter or spring, more people will join us during the holidays, and we celebrate our holidays with big, sophisticated services. Sometimes this means that the production will simply be “larger,” with more in attendance, and probably necessitating additional SPL (and hence additional P.A.). And in some cases, it means that the production is just more detailed and sophisticated — not necessarily with more congregants in attendance. In my experience, it’s usually a little of both. Christmas, in particular, tends to require the incorporation of additional elements (dramatic segments and choirs, for instance). But even Easter can get a little sophisticated, and over my career, has almost always required additional P.A. (as a result of an increased likelihood of an outdoor service). In either case, managing these productions requires more planning, resources, and effort than usual, and it is incumbent upon us to ensure that we’ve got it all squared away so it goes well. In my estimation, we need to think about three distinct aspects of production: technology, people and planning.
The Big Question
The big question pertaining to technology is this: will our existing audio gear be sufficient for the bigger-than-usual production we’re planning? If the production is to remain indoors, the answer is likely yes. But an outdoor production may require additional P.A. The main reason for this is not limited to the necessity for more SPL because we’re outside, but also because it would be really nice to not have to physically move P.A. from the inside to the outside. In many cases, that would be virtually impossible to begin with — there’s a reason why we refer to many of our installs as “permanent.” It’s hard to imagine why we might need additional P.A. if we’re remaining in our usual space — hopefully we’ve engineered it to be sufficient all along — but we gotta do what we gotta do. In the case of churches that will choose to move the indoor P.A. to the outdoors, there are some considerations. That temporary move requires us to strike the indoor gear, pack it up, move it outdoors, set it up, get it configured, tune the P.A., do the production, strike it again, pack it up again, move it back indoors, set it up again, configure it again, tune it again and be prepared to do the next service. We would also need to confirm that we have sufficient AC power for an outdoor service — generators could be required.
For smaller, less sophisticated P.A.s, moving from indoors to outdoors isn’t a huge struggle. But larger, more complex P.A.s could require a substantial amount of work, which could require a lot of labor. And time figures in too. Let’s say Christmas falls on a Saturday, and we decide to do the service outdoors (full disclosure, I’m in Arizona where the likelihood for outdoor Christmas services is substantially higher than elsewhere in the U.S.). It would probably be a good idea to plan on a day or two to move gear out and get it ready for our Friday Christmas Eve service. But are we really going to require people to strike late on Christmas Eve or sometime Christmas day to be prepared for the Sunday service? That sounds crazy to me. Even if Christmas falls on Friday, this would be a tight schedule that would require some kind of unreasonable demands on our people. If things work out this way, it seems to me that renting gear for our outdoor service would be preferable (and hopefully within our budget). And we will probably also hope that it’s plausible to accommodate additional parishioners indoors (possibly with multiple services), which would resolve the whole issue outright.
And the Rest…
Thus far, the conversation has been focused on P.A. What about other tech? If the services are musically more sophisticated than what we usually do, or if they include dramatic elements or a choir that we don’t usually have, we may need more mics and possibly more wireless. We may need to consider additional monitor speakers for a choir (IEMs for each member of a large choir would be a pretty tall order). Heaven forbid, but we might even need to come up with ways to move more signals than usual from the platform to FOH — possibly analog snakes, possibly additional digital snakes, and possibly expansion of what we normally do via Dante or other networked audio solutions. And on the topic of moving signals to mixers, we may need to consider the deployment of a monitor desk, complete with an engineer who’s not afraid of a little abuse.
In my experience, larger holiday productions sometimes require us to bring pro musicians in from the secular world, some of whom may not have weekly experience with mixing their own monitors like our regular folks do. I would say that this is most likely in the case of actors and vocalists who may actually have zero experience mixing their own IEMs. And in relation to IEMs, if we’re wireless and we choose to go outdoors, we’ll need to ensure line-of-sight between transmitters and receivers, and we’ll also need to re-scan and do frequency coordination — it will definitely look and be different from what we had going on indoors. If we have substantially more channels of audio than usual, we might need to consider renting a larger FOH desk or consider submixing certain elements. One other thought: if we don’t normally live stream, but we’re asked to do so for a holiday service, we need to consider an additional mixer to create the audio mix, whether video is deployed or not.
We tech-heads tend to think of equipment and software as our most important assets, but we’d be wrong in that thinking. Human beings are our most important asset, and we need to consider the human element of doing more sophisticated-than-usual productions. Additional complexity and additional technology almost always require additional people. If we do need more people, the question is whether we should bring in additional volunteers, or go with hired-gun professionals, or a combination of both. Green volunteers will require some training, so time and resources must be allocated for that, but in some cases, professionals can be as challenging as volunteers because we have to provide them with training on the unique idiosyncrasies of our systems and our processes. Sometimes hired-gun pros perceive their education and experience as a license to ignore our direction and do things their own way – which sometimes causes problems. Luckily, most pros are happy to step into the situation and do the job as they’re directed. But they will cost us money, and that’s yet another consideration. As with creatives, we may end up with audio pros from the secular world, and church production could be a challenging foreign notion to them — another thing to think about.
Planning — The “P” Word
The third and final aspect of holiday sound production we’ll examine is planning. In my experience, the timeframe for planning complex holiday productions is, at a minimum, on the order of weeks. But honestly, the thought of that gives me heart palpitations. I would sleep a lot better at night if the planning were done months in advance. And if the production is going to be really sophisticated, we may want to start the planning process a couple of quarters in advance — maybe even a full year. And even if we don’t fully plan out all the details for our Christmas pageant during the previous January, we can at least sit down and make a list of the things that went particularly well with our most recent Christmas production, along with a list of things that did not go quite so well.
We can build on our successes and avoid previous pitfalls. Of course, this is truer if our annual Christmas production doesn’t change substantially from year to year, but even if it’s a completely new and totally different production every year, we can still learn from previous mistakes in the domain of audio production, and plan on repeating the parts of the process that went particularly well. The planning process should, in my opinion, take into consideration the aspects we have examined here, and also any special considerations that apply in your unique paradigm. If we do plan well in advance, and if we plan sufficiently, we’ll almost certainly succeed in excellent holiday production.
John McJunkin is an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University
