We all have the desire to see our services run seamless and distraction free. And while few are able to hire engineers and technicians, most of us rely on faithful volunteers with varying skill levels in A/V Production. In our efforts to mitigate “problems” we can inadvertently be holding our volunteers back from progress. Today we’re going to highlight some of the ways we help our volunteers continually progress in their tech knowledge journey.
1. Create a Safe Environment
Over the years of developing my audio skills I’ve made quite a few mistakes; approaches to microphone placement, stage monitor placement, EQ choices, mix choices, effects choices, you get the idea. I didn’t always fall flat on my face, but there certainly were some fails along the way! The important thing is that I was allowed to make those mistakes and learn from them. I was fortunate enough to have folks by my side that learned along with me and together we developed and sharpened our skills. Creating a safe environment where your volunteers are free to learn, explore, make mistakes, cause feedback and develop their skills is very important. I’ve trained many that had a desire to learn but were far too nervous of making mistakes or “wrecking” things. Now, I know we would never intentionally cause our volunteers to worry this way, and there are certainly times that are more appropriate than others to experiment, but we need to make sure we are affording our volunteers these times. Rehearsal nights don’t always have to be about the band, use these times to allow the technicians to hone their skills. Let your band know that things may sound odd here and there, but this is important for the technicians to progress.
2. Foster Trust within Your Team
One of the other ways we can stifle progress is by physically limiting what our technicians are “allowed” to change. In my travels I have witnessed a variety of ways, good-hearted leaders have attempted to save “professional” settings that may have worked years ago remain the same. One of my favorites is the tape over the EQ section that says, “DO NO TOUCH”. I have even seen one console that had a metal plate that limited how much the faders could be adjusted. Priceless.
I’ve been asked to come in and work with teams, run sound checks and lockout the settings in an effort to maintain the quality. The obvious problems with this approach is that so many elements change; musicians play differently, singers sing differently, you’ll always need to change something. If we don’t allow our volunteers to access the entire realm of settings, they’ll never learn and progress. I am a proponent of utilizing baseline defaults for system EQ’s, channel presets, etc, as these help technicians rest at ease making changes and “playing” with settings, while knowing they can go back to a reliable setting if they get too far off kilter.
3. Communicate Clear Expectations
Expectations are an interesting thing, some folks rise to them while others are stand intimidated. If we set expectations too low, we don’t move forward – too high and we can scare people off. I’ve been involved in coaching technicians that had high expectations placed up them, and while I believe we should encourage our teams to rise to the occasion, we need to be realistic and set our technicians up for success. In this scenario, I’m not referring to the skill set of the engineers, but the other side of the coin, which is the quality of the equipment, the quality of musicianship and dynamics of the space you meeting in. While it’s not the most popular thing to say and point out, there have been times that my coaching ended up focusing more on the musicians and the sound coming from the stage than the skills of the engineer. In those cases, the tech was doing just about everything right and other things needed to be addressed. We need to make sure that we’re not expecting our technicians to magically transform the inputs from the stage into something they could never be.
4. Invest into Proper Tools
Tools are a wonderful thing. I don’t profess to be an all-star handyman, but over the years I have definitely come to learn the value of the proper tools for a job. Now, I know that there’s an old adage that “necessity is the mother of all inventions,” and I’ve seen many creative inventions in venues short on budget, however, there are basic tools that we should make sure our technicians have access to. If we’re looking for certain results, we need to take a look at what it really takes to get those sounds or lighting effects. I realize fully that budgets are what they are and by no means am I suggesting that the solution to good sound relies in having the latest and greatest gear (although it is fun to play with!). But there are certain pieces we should pay attention to. If we’re working with a choir often, we should make sure we have proper microphones for this application. For instruments we should invest in good quality DI boxes to properly capture the sound of the instruments on stage – all of these things play into how much our technicians can deliver the product we’re all looking for.
5. Cultivate a Culture of Continued Training
One of the most common pieces overlooked, sometimes for lack of resources, is proper training. Now having been a trainer for quite sometime now, and currently being involved in an available resource, this may sound like a sales pitch. It is in fact not so, and I would say the most important part of the puzzle is training, whether peer mentoring from more experienced folks on your team, or finding reliable local hands on training, or one of the many online resources, implementing some sort of training is very important for your technicians to grow. While this may seem obvious, I’ve worked with volunteers who have been slugging it out on their own for years before any sort of professional training was offered.
6. Be Consistent
Finally, a common scenario I see is not necessarily that a church’s tech team isn’t skilled in what they do, but that there’s a lack of consistency to the audio levels from week to week. What is commonly overlooked is that no guidelines have been set from the leadership on down as to what the “sound” of the church is to be. The assumption is that each technician should be mixing the same, and this is never going to be the case. We all hear things a little bit differently, in fact, producers and engineers typically get hired for the sounds they produce with a band, so expecting tech volunteers to maintain similar audio mixes without any sort of guideline is setting folks up for failure. While I understand that most leadership teams may not be able to speak to specifics to do with audio, the general guidelines can speak to overall volume levels, intensity and will likely be supported by the band configuration and songs chosen from week to week. The last church I worked through this process with, we asked the leadership to take note over a month long period of how the mixes were from week to week and choose highlights from that period as to what they wanted the sound of the church to be.
We all want to see our volunteers succeed and want the best possible results for our events. Investing in our teams by way of training, making sure they have the required tools, allowing them times to experiment and make mistakes to be learned from as well as access to all the working parameters for our systems and providing a vision to follow and having realistic expectations of our teams are in my opinion, the top 6 ways we can allow our technicians to grow and to succeed.
