I wanted to chuck down my observations on running the sound board for my gf J-’s church last weekend. I think the last time I touched a sound board was in the heady days of being a (the?) roadie for the Squeegees. Ope, realized I was wrong about that.
Anyways, as a person in the technical/creative crowd, being asked to run sound is this big deal because it’s easier to do wrong than right. When people need a tech/creative person, the process is straightforward: find someone who will show up and is willing and has a brother that’s done something similar before.
I was going to go into the gory details of this particular instance, but I’ll go ahead and bypass the part about showing before everyone except the pastor and wife who knew nothing of me or my task and the part about the guy (there’s always one) who never, in a total of 20 minutes of announcements figured out how to properly utilize a microphone. Please, if you ever find yourself speaking in front of an audience with a microphone, place it close to your mouth and keep it there. Unless of course the sound guy tells you otherwise. So the pastor just stares at me while I try to invent sign language that says “Dear Pastor Bob, I regret to inform you that Elder Bob, who is currently making announcements related to the possible building site among other announcements, quite possibly doesn’t have the wireless mic on. Even if he does it is placed at such a distance from his mouth that it wouldn’t help. Quite sorry, good chap.” I tried though.
The experience got me thinking about a few things. I’ll start with the freshly coined “geek tweaks” and move to “retrograde knowledge” and finish strong with “data summarization.” Now, to figure out a system (this applies to many things, but we’ll stick to sound boards for now) I find it necessary to play around with some educated guesses to understand the setup. Once the main settings are in place, it’s time to tweak the little stuff to really make it high quality. This is the ‘geek tweak’- basically little things that probably won’t be noticed or missed by anyone else except in overall perception but which the geek does simply because they are proud of their ability to do so. I do this often with software development (makes it sound high level that way- don’t be fooled). I’ll throw in some error checking or some atomic explosion sound when a button is pressed just to impress me. When I demonstrate the tool to someone else, they just push a few buttons and say, “But why doesn’t it do this?”
Before I forget, the rule is that everyone knows how to do technical things. For example, many people comment freely to sound technicians about how they should do their job. To use an example from my job: At a meeting where I was assigned the task of creating a tool that generates a 100+ page monthly report, my various bosses all concurred that it should be a pretty trivial task for me. Nice, guys.
Data summarization: I asked my bro the sound pro (nice ring to that, eh?) for some real quick tips on running sound for the church. His sharp intake of breath before the pregnant pause before he started searching for a starting point spoke volumes. This is funny to me because I do the same all the time. For example, people ask me if buying a computer part (RAM, for example) will fix their computer problem. Then, while I try to discover what the actual problem is, they’ll say, “What does the RAM do, anyways?” So I stop, take a deep breath and try to summarize at the appropriate level of detail required to explain the complex interaction of millions of digital data particulates. My bro did good, though. Everybody was happy enough with the sound the next day.
Finally: retrograde knowledge. I brought up a couple sound concepts I’m pretty sure I learned from or around my brother years ago. When I brought them up, he took a deep intake of air, paused and politely indicated that those methods were not good ideas. He’s been learning all this time and I’m still using old knowledge, essentially.
It’s the same with S- and computers. I developed a pattern of computer usage in high school that I no longer subscribe to; S- still uses, to some degree, those methods. It’s not bad really, it’s just that there are probably better ways.
Anyways, maybe next time some you hear feedback in a church you won’t turn around with everyone else and just stare at the sound booth until it stops. Or turn and stare at the door that just slammed when someone re-entered.
And when someone presents you with a piece of software they created, maybe you’ll find a couple of compliments about it and indulge their desire to brag about some feature you’ll probably never use before asking them “But why doesn’t it do this?”