You may not know this if you don’t know me in meatspace, but part of my “Office Manager” position at the church where I work is running the audio/visual during the services and doing all the planning and preparing that is involved in that. It’s a holdover from my part-timer days as “Audio/Visual Technician” and probably constitutes about 20% of my time working at the church now.
(As an aside, I don’t know for certain why they hired a Computer Science major with poor hearing and no formal education in the matter to run the technical side of their programs. This goes both for ECC and for Union University, who paid me for a while to help run their Instructional Technology and Campus Media office. I suspect the answer in both cases as to do with gullibility, but on whose part, I couldn’t say.)
So as someone who is not at all qualified to be doing what I do, I’m now going to gripe about people who aren’t qualified to do what they do. If you’re reading this and you’re one of those people, just know that I do love you, I appreciate what you do for the church, and I wouldn’t kick any of you off the stage because I know that you’ve got a willingness to do your best and, despite my gripes, you do a great job.
This issue you run into any time you do anything which requires skill, talent, or professional ability from folks at a church is that, requiring volunteer effort, you usually get to deal with folks whose cups do not run over with every one of those qualities. They try really hard, their heart is in the right place, and they do pull off some pretty great stuff, but the ones that do it for a living would rather not do it on the weekends, and those that don’t rely on their talent for a paycheck probably don’t have the experience to know when they’re doing the right thing and when they’re causing problems.
One problem that folks who sing in a group often have is microphone discipline. What I need them to do is hold the microphone really close to their lips while aiming it into their mouths and project their voice outward. I’ve tried several things to get some folks to effectively do, you know, what they’re up there to do, with little success:
Sing to the Clock
The advice that always worked for me as a choir member is: “Pick a point on the back wall and sing as if that’s the microphone, or the ear of the person you’re singing for. Make sure you can be understood all the way back there.” Again, I’m not a professional, but it seems to me that if you do this, biology kicks in, and your posture and breathing problems go away or are at least mitigated. People don’t do it, or if they do, they don’t make it a habit, and I have to keep pointing to the clock above my head, which makes me look silly and makes them look like they’ve been caught slacking off. A look of surprise on the faces of worship team leaders makes the audience try to figure out what happened, and my objective is always to be unobtrusively helpful in my amplification during services.
Glug, Glug
I’ve thought up a handy rule of thumb: “Hold the microphone as if you are drinking a glass of water that is about half full. That puts the microphone at the correct angle and distance from your lips.” People get what I’m saying, but we once again see that knowing the right thing to do and doing the right thing are often far separated. Besides, at least with the clock thing I have a handy visual signal I can give a floundering worship team, but the best visual aid I can give for this can easily be incorrectly interpreted as “I need a drink,” and some church folks are just too uptight about that sort of thing.
Hypochondriacs, Rejoice
I’ve tried telling them that “If you aren’t worried about picking up harmful bacteria from the microphone, your lips aren’t close enough to it. I clean these mics every week.” This is a lie. I never clean the mics. Maybe they can tell? People are way too afraid of a few germs these days, in any case.
No, Really: I Won’t Let You Ruin Everything
Sometimes people will intentionally hold the microphone far away because they are afraid they’ll sound bad. I’ve tried to reassure them that I will not leave them turned up if they’re distractingly bad, but to no avail. I actually had a student who helped lead chapel worship at Union tell me that some days she didn’t feel that she was singing well enough for the Holy Spirit to work through her on some songs, so she alternated between holding the microphone far away and lip syncing while not actually singing anything. I told her that the Holy Spirit was working just fine for me through the marginally-developed intellect that the good Lord put in my noggin, so she could feel free to do her cheery best and let me objectively decide for her, but if she really thought she was too useless for even God to use, that perhaps she should stay off the stage and let them get someone with less talent who would at least do it wholeheartedly. She never came back, and that’s a shame, because when she tried she was the best voice we had.
The point here is that consistency is more important than talent, and I still struggle with getting folks to believe that at the church. The folks I would call the top vocalists on the team aren’t necessarily the people with the greatest voices, just the people who give it their best shot every single time. Some of my most frustrating brethren I’ve heard sing like superstars, but they’re too gosh-dern concerned about how folks will perceive them if they mess up, so they just choose to rarely contribute at all instead.
I Finally Did It!
I finally figured out how to get people to maintain microphone discipline. Most folks know that I can listen to each channel individually through my headphones, even if they don’t understand that I can also see who is slacking by the column of lights on their channel. I discovered that if I put one headphone up to an ear and look around as if I’m confused about why things don’t sound right, they quickly stop lip syncing and start producing sound again. Bingo! This has the added bonus of not requiring them to look surprised or to acknowledge the correction in any way, and likely allows most of them to think that they got away with it and that I didn’t notice.
But I did notice, because I am always watching. Watching and listening and judging.
I love ‘em, anyway. Maybe I’ll even start cleaning the microphones once in a while.
