FOH at Willow Creek

Thanks to my friend Todd Elliot (a KCC alum, now the PM at Willow), one of the highlights of my conference experience was hanging out Wednesday afternoon and evening with Scott Ragsdale and Nathan Miller, weekend FOH & monitor engineers at Willow Creek who were also mixing the conference. I sat shotgun for the New Community rehearsal and service and it was a great experience seeing how someone else approaches a similar style of service to what I do each week, using similar tools.

I picked up a few cool ideas that I’m going to try with our system over the next few weeks to see how they work. I’ll write about more of these later, but here’s one that’s food for thought…

Scott has the gate engaged on every open mic or DI. This seemed odd to me at first, when you think of it in traditional analog terms of a gate only being full open or full closed. However, the result of his technique really worked in keeping system noise down and cleaning up the mix. This goes in the category of things that I really wish I had thought of!

There’s two things that make this work. The beauty of digital is that you can set a gate to a 0 ms attack time and it actually snaps open when its supposed to. The other trick that’s equally important is that with the PM1D (and I’m sure other digital consoles as well) you can define how “closed” a gate is – whether it is -50 dB reduction or only -7 dB. The trick on open mics is to set the range so that it drops enough off the signal to reduce the noise floor and extraneous stuff without going all the way to zero where it sounds weird. Normally, all that’s needed is a -7 to -10 dB drop with an extremely low attack time and 1 second release.

Mixing with Priority!

Robert Scovill gave some excellent insight in his audio breakout at Willow of something I already do that has always set my mixes apart. Think about this: no one ever went home humming the bass drum. Seriously. There are several trademarks of my mixes, one of which is a strong, gutsy (some say ballsy) foundation with a nice solid, thick, in your face low end. But I’ve always been a vocals guy. I’ve been blessed to mix for some amazing Christian and secular vocal groups and it’s always been my thing. Robert masterfully detailed the need, especially in the church world, for the central focus of mixes to be the vocal. I’ve listened to many mixes over the years where the vocal was unintelligible, distant, or just didn’t fit, all the while the engineer is spending effort on a killer kick/snare tone or mesmerizing verbs. Vocal first, then build everything else around it.

How do you initially judge the tuning of your PA? How do you build your mixes? Most start with the kick drum or the drum set as a whole. Robert suggests this is completely backwards, and I have done this for a long time. Start with the vocal – make the vocal sound great…present, detailed, intelligible, etc. Once the vocal sounds great, build the rest of your mix around it. Since the message of the vocal is the most important element, it has to be priority number one. Working the other way often leads to awesome band mixes, but it takes a VERY experienced engineer to be able to build a mix in the band and still leave the right amount of room for the vocal. Robert even suggests building monitor mixes in this way if you can…get everyone the right amount of lead vocal, then build the rest of their stuff around it.

There’s one caveat for me, and maybe for others too, based on our rehearsal process. On the weekends, I start out with a 2 hour band rehearsal where we get mixes working for everybody and then they work through all of our material for the service ahead of the vocalists arriving for full element rehearsals and the service run-through. Because of this, I don’t have the luxury of starting with the vocal – it’s 2 hours before I have a vocal – but you can still make it work.

Here’s my process, in steps, for a weekend full production song:

• I get the band mix happening the way I want in that rehearsal.
• Once the vocal is in, I drop out the band with the DCA’s and start the mix with the vocal, then add guitars/keys and make all of that work together.
• Once that’s done, I then drop it all out, again with the DCA’s, and check the kit and bass relationship to make sure it still works.
• Last, blend the two big chunks together – the meat and my foundation.

My Summer Projects…

Summer time means more projects to complete so I’m ready to hit the Fall running…

1. Build a 16 channel snake with stage box for more stage inputs. I currently have one 24 channel snake with box and it just isn’t enough.

2. Build a new snake for the piano. 4 channels for piano mics, 2 for a Motiff or Triton above the piano, and 2 returns for wired ears at the piano.

3. Strip and redo the connections on our existing 4 channel piano snake so it can be used elsewhere

4. Build amp stands so guitar amps can stay low to the ground but be easily tipped back at the ears of the player. I’ll post the design once its done because it will be home made and simple to build.

5. Build a portable wireless transmitters “rack” for the mics we’re using in a service. They need a home and an organized storage system. I have a great idea I picked up from Willow that will be simple to implement.

6. Come up with four nice looking table stands for amp heads so they don’t have to go on the ground or on black boxes. Our black boxes are too big and beat up to be the right thing for this task. At Willow, they have these cool little triangle truss pieces with a table top on one end and a base at the other. I want three for amp heads or keys modules and one for the drummer mixer so we can eliminate that black box as well. The result will look much more streamlined and professional.