Why Marcus. A blog now?
Yes. The website precisionaudio.org won’t stay up past May. It was a pursuit in building my personal studio business which isn’t exactly what I am focused on right now. My full-time job at church is where I want to focus my effort and time – with a dash of blogging and training material on the side to hopefully guide, teach and just enlighten the people who care enough to read up on what I may have to formulate.
The past week, I have been joyfully involved in what was my 5th Colour Conference. For those unfamiliar, it’s a Christian Conference for women with the goal to empower, build and gather the women of our society. It never fails to astound me the life changing encounters that come about from Jesus in these conferences. More on that another day.
Team FOH. That was where I was serving at this year. Production has been a home for me the past 5 years here with Hillsong, yet team FOH at Colour was a new thing to me. There was so much to learn, to observe. I could write about the 250 things I’ve picked up just observing, asking questions and deductive reasoning. However, I’ll just share the one thought that stood out most to me.
FOH has one console. Two operators (for the most part of every service anyways). This isn’t a norm for our weekend services, but a norm for our Conferences and large events with a higher level of scrutiny and what more, number of transitions and elements on platform.
Two operators. One console. This raised a couple of questions to me.
Why?
How?
Why ; does it not make sense to just have the one engineer on? Surely at a conference like this, we will utilise the people that have the skill to pull off a great mix by themselves. The answer probably doesn’t lie in the ability of said engineer(s) to pull off a mix then.
On the left is Andrew Crawford. To his right – Omar Sierra. Both incredible engineers in their own right. Multiple tours with the Hillsong crew, our core engineers in church if anything. I wouldn’t expect either of them to need to share a console to pull together a tight mix. They share anyway.
Andrew was mixing the band, with Omar doing the vocals and MC mics. This separation of tasks was an easy one to decipher. Indeed, they probably have the full skillset and mental capacity to mix the entire band and vocals. With the separation of tasks, I saw that their decisions on channel processing were precise, considered and intentional. With full trust in the other engineer to complete their end of the mix, it allowed both of them to concentrate on the additional elements on platform as well as the numerous transitions (which don’t always go according to the runsheet).
How ; it was a marvellous sight – two engineers with different styles of mixing and two separate elements of the complete mix having a shared working platform at the exact same time. Timing becomes much more key (as if it wasn’t already) and pushing and pulling faders become a dance. Being in sync with each other seemed like a dangerous thing to do, as the possibility of screwing up now multiplies by 2. I figured later in the week that they weren’t syncing to each other. They were both in tune with the service and where it was going. If they were both following (yet leading) those moments, it wouldn’t matter if the other engineer was not paying attention to your finger movement or the reverb tail from your snare.
There were so many things I’ve learnt and/or reconsidered during these two weeks of conference in reference to mixing. Input channel processing, buss processing. Workflow. Routing. Tuning a PA and the general idea of long throws etc.
What I found most useful on a personal level was the how and why.
As an audio engineer – keep striving to learn all that you can.
That’s advice anyone can give you. The trick is to remind yourself daily that there is much to learn. Not just about techniques and tricks.
Sometimes you just need to learn how and more importantly why you are doing something.
These are very hazy thoughts from a mind that wants to share and I hope it meant something. There is so much more, a spiritual encounter, a strong reminder and all that to come.
I endeavour to have at least one blog post a week so be sure to check back in. Much love, and thanks for reading.
sound thoughts 