The Intergalactic Cowboy

Today I was given the challenge of running sound for the Palm Sunday service of the church. This service was to take place in the fellowship hall of the church, due to my usual work area, the sanctuary, being renovated at the moment. I have run sound in the fellowship hall twice before. The only planned changes to the usual service were that a couple of extra microphones would be needed for the children of the church to sing through. As the 9 am service ended, the soundman of that service left the area to rehearse with the choir. The teenagers of the church began removing microphones and mic stands from the stage as they normally would be expected to. After the mics were quickly removed, I found the youth minister and informed her that I would need a couple of mics for the children. She then directed the teenagers to put a couple of mic stands back on stage. I then started sound-checking the mics for the podium and the piano. No sound came from either one of them. The teenagers were standing around the stage, making it difficult for me to trace down the mic cables into the snake. ( A snake is a junction box for mic cables.) It turned out that the piano mic was plugged into the channel that I had equalized for the podium and the podium mic was plugged into the channel for the piano. On top of that no signal from either channel was getting into the sound board. We tried different channels of the board with no sound being broadcast by either the piano mic or the podium mic. The drummer of the praise band that performed at 9am noticed that channel 14 of the snake was not plugged into channel 14 of the board and corrected the situation. Someone else got the signal from the podium mic into channel 15 and we finally had muddy sound coming from the podium and piano. In the meantime we had been asked not to make so much noise because our sound check was disturbing a sunday school class nearby. So, I now had to adjust the volume for each microphone through the monitor speakers by tapping on the mics and listening. Our guest oboeist walked up and told me that neither she nor the pianist next to her could hear the choir, which they needed to do in order to perform in time with the choir. The microphone closest to the choir was the muddy sounding podium mic that was ten feet in front of the choir and ten inches away from the mouths of the people who spoke from the podium. The best that I could do was point a monitor from the front of the stage in the direction of the oboe and piano and then turn the microphone that was closest to the choir as loud as I could through the monitors without causing feedback. So, the compromise that I had to make was to make the people speaking through the podium a little too loud through the monitors and the choir not quite loud enough through the monitors. So after an hour’s work, I was able to get the sound quality to rise to the nirvana like level of total crap ! My apologies to all who had to suffer through this…
I still don’t know exactly who switched the cables from the snake to the wrong channels of the p.a. I suspect that one of the church teenagers did it, not understanding the implications of their actions.
Unintentional actions result in unintentional repercussions. (or something like that)
I.C.