Church Production Magazine: Anyone that has been involved in sound reinforcement for any amount of time would agree that having some piece of equipment fail during a service is more of a ‘when' question than it is an ‘if' question. If you work in church audio long enough, sooner or later something will go wrong and you will find yourself in a room full of people turning around to look at you while you desperately wish you had been given the gift of invisibility.
2 comments:
I feel like anyone who has every engineered a live performance has their own horror story from when their system failed. When you're executing a design, in any discipline for that matter, it is critical to have your backup strategies and alternatives. For example, this summer during a production the playback computer for music completely crashed during a performance of "Flashdance" The music director happened to have a keyboard for some other parts of the show, and had to sightread "Maniac". Needless to say, it would have been nice to have a backup computer. I know for me I would always run a backup of the lighting rig on my laptop running ETC Nomad just in case. In a production of "Beauty and the Beast" We put 2 transmitters on Belle for obvious reasons. Knowing which line items are show critical and less critical, as the author points out, can be a helpful starting point when designing a system with a backup in mind. Additionally, since experience is the best teacher, listening to other instances of system failure from other technicians can go a long way in ensuring it won't happen to you.
In this day and age, it is not avoidable that things can let you down during any production (be it a church, concert or play production). Like the author stated in the beginning of this article, it should be expected. The important aspect about the failure is the response that happens after the failure. The cloak of invisibility is unfortunately not something that is available for use or real. I appreciate the practical advice that is being given and how they can be implemented in how we go about in preparing for situations such as this. It is also important that we know how the members of our team would respond and also prepare them in case it does happen. This does not mean that we should work like something is always going to fail but we should always have a back up plan and prepare for the worst. Also learn from our experiences and those of others.
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