FRONT OF HOUSE
CALM IN THE CHAOS | Kent Morris
Photo by Sting Alleman on Unsplash
The universality of chaos during live events dates back to the Bronze Age in Europe when, during the largest festival of the year in what is today the Bordeaux section of France, the lute section mics failed because someone turned off the phantom power supply, the spotlight for the pheasant eating contest went out just as the competition began, and the PTZ camera mounted on the main pole to capture the acrobatic team in the main tent lost its NDI output leaving only a blank screen in its stead. We experience the same issues today. Since chaos is inevitable and even the best prepared teams face it during events, let’ s look at ways to keep calm and carry on, as the British say.
Once an event gets underway, it becomes a real-time express train to the final destination with no stops in between. As such, whatever happens negatively has a cascading downward effect on the next moment. Once a problem arises, it must be handled immediately in either triage mode or discard mode because whatever is next will not wait. A key element to calm success is to develop the ability to discern between a true emergency demanding immediate attention and something that can wait until after service to address. Getting this wrong can lead to serious frustration. To understand the difference, consider the consequence of not fixing it now. For instance, no output on the worship leader’ s mic is an emergency because the service is now crashing while no signal on a BGV is significant, but not an emergency since the service will go on. In the case of the worship leader, the solution is to preplan for the nearest BGV to swap their mic with the worship leader. This action solves the problem without a tech rushing onto the stage and creating a scene.
Speaking of preplanning, having an agreed upon action for specific situations is critical. If the pastor’ s head worn mic goes out, everyone on the team needs to know the worship leader will bring their mic to the pastor. For video playback glitches, the solution is for everyone to know the plan is to fade to black when the video crashes and to go immediately back to the I-Mag shot. No explanation to the congregation is necessary since they all know what happened. Do not aggrandize an error.
Lighting mistakes are difficult to work around because they are obvious to everyone. The point is to minimize the disruption. When a vocalist enters their designated position and the spot doesn’ t shine, there isn’ t much at hand to resolve the problem. The only thing the vocalist can do is quickly but discreetly move to a lighted area nearby. If the spot later comes up, the vocalist can gingerly move back to the original location.
For churches using a predetermined order of service, the tech planning is relatively straightforward with known moments for muting and unmuting mics and instruments. However, for churches with a freer flowing style, the primary responsibility of the audio engineer is to wrangle the mutes and keep mics open when in use and off when not in use. Of course, this exercise is easier discussed than accomplished, but the key is to have eyes on the platform at all times while using memory and feel to engage controls as needed. One inevitable downside of this method is the mix may not be as finely polished as it could be, but the tradeoff is worth it since a muted mic is more noticeable than some missing reverb on a snare drum.
Church services are not Broadway plays, they are communal offering of praise and spoken edification of believers, but they should be executed at a high level technically in order to honor God and to keep distractions at bay. Building a plan to determine what events are emergencies and how they will be handled is essential to keeping chaos to a minimum.
Kent Morris Kent Morris is a 45-year veteran of the AVL arena driven by passion for excellence tempered by the knowledge all technology is in a temporal state.
114 November 2025 Subscribe for Free...