Headphones - every mixer needs a pair.
Before I knew what a fader was, I watched the sound guys at church put on their headphones at the beginning of the service and keep them on until the end, never or rarely listening to what the rest of us were hearing. They'd watch the meters, and the congregation had to live with something that might have sounded good to the sound crew, but didn't necessarily sound good in the sanctuary. That made absolutely no sense to me, so until a few years later, I wouldn't have been caught dead with a pair of headphones because no one ever taught me the value of using headphones correctly.
As a live sound mixer, you need a pair of headphones. There's no negotiating that point, but make sure that you use them the right way. Your primary job is to make sure that the system sounds good in the room, not to make sure that the board mix sounds good for the recording.
In the standard live sound set-up where you can hear the speakers directly, here are a handful of reasons to add a pair to your setup, if you don't own a pair already.
With a good pair of headphones, you can use the PFL (pre-fader listen) or Solo button on your console to listen to any one channel or group of channels.
Why might you choose to do that?
Have you ever needed to cue a CD, DVD, or taped accompaniment without everyone in the room hearing what you're doing? PFL means that you can listen to a channel in the headphones with the fader shut off. As a rookie sound mixer, I used to cue accompaniment tapes using only the meters on the cassette deck, and sometimes I cued things up to the wrong point. Not smart.
In the similar manner, headphones allows you to isolate a channel in order to find a hum, buzz, or noisy guitar amp. Make sure to mute the noisy guitar amplifiers during the sermon and/or use a noise gate.
With a pair of headphones, you can figure out who's singing off-key and keep them back a little in the mix, and you can tell if whether someone is really playing their instrument or singing. From 50-70' away, it's often hard to tell exactly what's going on. Sometimes, the keyboard player isn't really playing or a vocalist isn't singing.
When the guitar player wants more guitar in the monitors, you can quickly listen to his or her monitor mix to see whether more is needed or if you can achieve the same thing by reducing the level of something else that's covering up the guitar. It's a fact of life; guitar players always want more guitar. If you continually give everyone more of themselves, you'll soon have monitors that are too loud, which causes other problems.
A really good pair of headphones might set you back $150 or so, and there are plenty of good alternatives, even as low as $50. Whatever you do, if you don't have a pair of headphones and if your console has a headphone jack and PFL/Solo buttons, make sure that you get a pair. You'll wonder how you ever lived without them.
Take a look here for some great headphone options.
Earthworks PM40 Piano Mic System
Effortless Grand Piano Sound - well, almost
Sometimes, it’s hard to get great sound. Sometimes, it’s not. Actually, getting fabulous sound can be pretty easy and almost effortless, but that ease comes at a price, and many folks think that they can’t afford it.
Most days, I can be found scouring the world of audio and video equipment for products that I think will fit the unique needs and budgets of the typical church. Today, it hit me. What does a “typical” church look like?
The challenge that I present to myself every day is to find products for you that are the right fit for your needs. Sometimes, the right fit might be the most expensive products we sell – products that you think that you can’t afford until you start counting the costs and benefits of performance, reliability, ease of use, and long-term effectiveness.
Contrary to what I believed at one time time, the “lowest cost” doesn’t stop when you buy something. Anyone can sell for less. That’s easy. Providing the lowest cost of long-term ownership takes effort, planning, and making sure that you get the right product. That way, you have tools on which you can depend – week in and week out, so that you can focus on your purpose.
I’d like to introduce you to a product – one that you might never have seen before, and a product that might not be for you. But then again, when you count ease of use, exceptional quality, long-term service, and other factors, you might just find that it's the perfect fit.
It used to drive me crazy that my dad would go to the same stores and pay “too much” for a pair of khaki pants when he could shop and shop and shop like I did and get a better deal. His response to my questioning went something like this, “Dave, I know that these pants are more expensive, but I know that I can drive to the store, pick them off the shelf – in any color – and that they’ll fit, wear well, and I’ll like them. It’s just not worth the time and hassle to try to save $50.”
Granted, we’re not talking about $50 savings, but the principles still apply. In order to get a great piano sound every week, what would the right solution be worth?
SurgeX SU1000Li - finally, a back-up system for pro AV!
Protect your AV equipment with the new 1000VA UPS surge eliminator.
You're in the middle of your weekend service and the lights go out. Not only do you flinch, but the audio and video systems go off then on, and then off again with a flicker, a bang, and a flicker and bang again. We've all been there, but what can you do?
The first things that we were all taught about audio systems is to make sure that your low-level electronics (mixer, equalizers, processors, recorders - everything except the amplifiers) are to be turned on first (before the power amplifiers) and off last. In a blackout, everything goes off at once and comes back on together and you'll often experience a loud bang, sometimes followed by puffs of blue smoke from your speakers. And no one has ever figured out how to put the smoke back inside once it escapes.
Okay, you got me. That's a little bit dramatic, but spikes from turning some low-level devices on and off are strong and very audible if amplified. Those spikes can damage your speakers as a result of blackouts or other power failure. Those power failures can also cause you to lose unsaved settings on computers and other devices in use during your services.
Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) have been commonplace in the computing world for years. The advantages are obvious. No lost work, longer lasting equipment - no more surges, spikes, blackouts and brownouts, more stable voltage and more.
Why now? People have been asking for it. If it makes sense for the computer world, it makes sense for the AV world, too. I'm not sure why this has taken so long.
I can hear your brain humming. Can I put my entire sound system on one? In a word, no. The goal of using a UPS in the worship setting isn't to keep the systems operational, but to give you time to get your wits about you and to shut things down in an orderly fashion. I can envision one of our clients, in particular, running toward his amp racks now.
The SU1000Li will give you about four minutes to either shut things down in an orderly manner, or to wait for the power to come back on. Since your low-level electronics will remain on, what the SU1000Li will allow you to do is to make sure that your amplifiers are switched off and/or that you're ready in case the power comes back on in a hurry.
When the power goes out, as long as all of your low-level electronics are plugged into the SurgeX SU1000Li, your system will go silent after the load on the amplifiers bleeds off what's left. Without the SU1000Li in a power failure, there's a good chance that one of your processors will send a big spike down the line to the amplifiers and that spike will bleed off what's left in the amplifier with a big bang, and maybe a little bit of blue smoke. If you happen to avoid the blue smoke (which you probably will), and the power happens to come right back on, you'll probably get another big bang.
Those bangs, over time, damage your system and especially your speakers.
The SurgeX SU1000Li offers advanced Series Mode surge elimination, Impedance Tolerant EMI/RFI Filtering, Over/Under Voltage protection, 1000VA battery backup, voltage regulation, power management and diagnostic software, and a 10-year warranty. It's not only a battery backup, but it's part of the SurgeX family - with some of the most advanced power protection circuitry available today.
The SurgeX SU1000Li is $1189.00 and it's available today. Please find the SU1000Li in our webstore for specifications and more information.
SU-1000Li, SU 1000Li
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What others say
Dave...I like your emails...it feels like you are just sitting and chatting with me! Terrific..in this electronically charged age...we still NEED that personal touch!
Kudos to you, Peggy Bartz
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