Thanks to the continual improvements in live and installed audio technology, as general audience expectations rise, those in houses of worship do so in parallel. Rock-Tech's training helps to ensure that users not only get the best from their mixing console, but the entire signal chain from performer to loudspeaker.
"Our course aims to give church sound technicians a solid grounding in how sound works and how to solve common problems. Feedback, unexplained buzzes, hums and other such annoyances can be really disruptive," says Rock-Tech's Cat Adlam. "We look in detail at advanced microphone techniques and use of DI boxes, which can go a long way to helping inexperienced users understand what's going wrong.
"Once the basics have been covered, we move on to how to best mix sound, including hands-on tuition in techniques for digital mixing desks. Feedback from previous training programmes showed that participants wanted more 'hands-on' time with mixing consoles, so we have teamed up with Yamaha to deliver that."
Yamaha's QL and TF series digital mixing consoles are popular choices for houses of worship. The flexibility of Yamaha mixers means they can be precisely tailored to their environment. Straightforward to use, even by relatively inexperienced operators, the hands-on training helps users to deliver the best results as quickly as possible.
"One of the most popular parts of our console training is that users with a basic knowledge of sound engineering discover many of the advanced features, meaning they can benefit from them immediately. This is where our partnership with Yamaha is proving extremely valuable - by showing users the more advanced facilities of the QL and TF mixers they can take advantage of them, even if their knowledge of mixing was previously fairly basic," says Cat.
The company's 2016 seminar series began in a chilly Dunfermline, where 70 participants from up to 100 miles away braved the horizontal snow typical of a Scottish winter to attend. Backing up Cat's comments were responses from attendees which included:
"Of special interest was the sector covering the audio frequency spectrum and how to set up a mixer to get better results using the spectrum analysis" and "The following day we experimented with our new knowledge and found additional faders on our desk that we had not previously known what they were for."
Rock-Tech followed the Dunfermline session by more at St Michael's church in Stoke Gifford, near Bristol and London's KICC Crystal Palace. Further free sessions take place at Leeds Hope City Church (23 April), Wolverhampton All Nations Church (14 May) and Lincoln Alive Church (11 June).
(Jim Evans)
