# Worst Concert tech I've seen in a long time



## gafftaper (Jul 11, 2010)

First off let me say I hate to bad mouth anyone who is a volunteer. Even worse I hate to bad mouth a church volunteer. I started running church sound when I was in 4th grade. I have nothing but respect for guys who sacrifice huge amounts of personal time to make sure the choir looks and sound good on Sunday. All for no pay and little thanks. That said when you are playing with big boy toys, charging good money for tickets, and working in a mega church with a massive budget. You need to at least have some basic knowledge of how to do stuff. My wife and I went to a concert at a mega church tonight. You old timers (or those handy with search) may remember I'm exactly the biggest fan of mega churches. This church in particular has two buildings separated by 30 or 40 miles of bad traffic. I hear, the pastor preaches at one building while his wife preaches at the other one, then they trade buildings by helicopter between the first and second service every Sunday morning. 

The church itself is a huge flat floored rectangular room. Reminiscent of a Vegas convention hall. It probably seats 3-4 thousand people. 30'-ish ceilings. Along one wall a stage apron sticks out. There may or may not have been anything behind what we will call the "proscenium". The stage is probably 45' wide, 25' deep and 4' off the main floor. MASSIVE FOH catwalks run the entire width of the room... must be 300'+ across for the back one. The catwalks are obscured by acoustical tile in places. The room itself sounded really nice. Someone did a great job with the placement of those acoustic tiles. There were a LOT of Source fours with Seachangers acting as the stage general wash. They had a Congo in the back. On either side of the stage there were three video screens in the 15'-20' range. Video was done on a 3 camera system one wide shot in the back at center, a big boom crane sweeping across the back, and a hand carried camera roving down front. Sound was using three large very nice concert arrays... I think Meyer. I couldn't see subs although their presence was felt. I think the speaker arrays were flown temporarily for the concert and there was actually an additional hidden house system in the catwalks. I think they put a couple of extra subs up there for the concert out of sight. 

The concert was probably the biggest name in Christian music doing a very simple concert. No big touring rig, just a couple of musicians, and a mix of house and locally rented gear. I'm also pretty sure they were using the regular house technicians. 

Audio:
Just barely visible on Stage Left was the monitor mix board. This was apparent as there were multiple times the lead guitarist was waving hand signals at him. The system was nice enough that the FOH sound was really nice and clean. But there were multiple times that mics were not un-muted and the artist spoke into a dead mic. There mix also seemed to vary too much. Again I hate to bad mouth a brother who is just volunteering, but it sounded like they were back there re-mixing every song as they went along. In situations like this where you don't know the band or the show and don't have a lot of time to rehearse, the most likely problem that will happen is operator error... so operate as little as possible. You do a sound check, you set levels and then you LEAVE THEM ALONE. You only do minor level tweaks when there is a solo or when the artist asks for them ahead of time. If you have time to play through the whole show and set levels for every song in sound check GREAT! You take careful notes and adjust each song TO YOUR NOTES. But, if you don't have a lot of time and you don't know the show, don't mess with it. My wife... the non-technician... was complaining the whole time about how instruments seemed to come and go from the mix for no apparent reason. As you may have read in the other forum, she has some hearing issues and she was worried the problem was her bad ears. Nope. It was the mix. 

Video:
As I said before, they had three monstrous screens. One directly upstage in front of the cyc about 12' off the ground, the other two on either side of the stage. The two side screens had a great mix of camera shots. They were really well done. The main center stage screen... well... for some reason they decided it would look great with this amorphous group of squiggly lines swirling around and changing colors the whole show. I couldn't decide if it looked more like a Windows 3.1 screen saver or a multi-dimensional being from classic Star Trek. It never went away... even during BLACK OUTS! It was always there, watching, threatening to take us all into another dimension unless Scotty gets the mater/anti-mater chamber fixed in time. It would have been so much more logical to say have the wide shot on the center screen at all times while the two side screens alternated between other camera shots. Or give the same feed to all three screens. Or press the button and make the screen retract into the ceiling. But no, we looked at a slow moving color changing squiggle all night long. 

Lighting:
Did you catch that line above about where the center screen was? About 6" in front of the cyc. The stage was roughly 45' wide. They had a Black traveler pulled in about 10' on each side leaving about 25' of cyc visible. In the center of this cyc there was a giant view screen with a swirly monster on it. From time to time... when the stage wasn't far too dark... we would get a glimpse of beautiful color from the Seachangers hitting the cyc. But it was hard to tell because 75% of the cyc was hidden by black curtains and a video screen.  

On each side of the cyc there was about 10' of black traveler curtain. The first 5' or so of this at the extreme edges of the stage was unlit. The second 5' or so of this black curtain was illuminated with an LED strip light pointed upward. There were no cyc lights on the little bit of cyc that was visible. YEP, they were using LED's to light a BLACK curtain. Red looked okay. But the rest of the time it just looked muddy. Meanwhile, only inches behind this black curtain was a beautiful cyc begging to perform for those LED's. If you don't have an amazing backdrop, either close the curtains and play in front of a black background OR open them up wide and light your cyc with color. Lighting a black curtain just doesn't work. If you've got dozens of Seachangers washing the stage in color, you don't even have to try, the cyc will look okay from the spill. If you've got some LED's you can use to up light it as well, it'll look spectacular. 

They had 6 moving head wash lights and 8 moving head spot's. Judging from the weird mounting of the on stage fixtures I'm guessing they were rentals just for this show. I think the wash lights were VL 500's I couldn't see the spots. Above the stage there were two or three catwalks. Located at a nice convenient working height of 30" or so above the deck of the catwalk was a batten that the Wash lights were mounted on. This was clearly convenient and easy to hang, but it means that much of the fixture's path of movement is obscured by catwalk. They need to hang down below the catwalk so that when they move, they don't suddenly disappear! A truss hanging down a few feet would be perfect. Throughout the show when they would get the fixtures moving they would be illuminating each other and the rest of the catwalks! If you are going to use movers, hang them in a place that they can actually make use of the fact that they move! 

Speaking of moving... they moved fairly often in the concert... unfortunately the programmer apparently only figured out how to program two moves. Sometimes they simply moved back and forth left to right without changing tilt at all. Other times they performed a sort of out of control figure eight pattern that quickly got annoying when the pattern was repeating over and over. That was it. Every time a fast song started we either saw the figure eight or the side to side pan. Over and OVER and OVER... Kids. If you are going to rent moving lights, take the time to program them. It quickly moves from cool to annoying and distracting. My wife (not a technician) said afterward all she could think when a new song started was which pattern will the lights move to this time. If you don't have the time, rent a bunch of colored pars and do some classic flash and trash on the fly. Save your money, the audience will be far less annoyed at you. 

Speaking of classic Rock and Roll lighting. The basic principle is lots of colored light from above, sides and behind. Then hit the artist with a follow spot from the front. Nothing fancy but it's worked for as long as rock and roll has existed. If however you keep all your down and side lighting turned way down and you don't turn on a follow spot, you have a dark stage. This happened a lot. There were at least two complete songs with no follow spot. There were times that the only front light was coming from gobos in the movers... which were a darker color. This only counts as an effect if you do it once or twice for just a moment. If you do it all the time, it's just dark. If the stage is really dark... you've got radio. New designers out there, I don't care how cool your look is, we need to be able to see the talent's face. It's scientifically proven that our ability to understand what someone is saying relies heavily on being able to see their lips move. If you are making the whole show up as you go along record a LOT of different looks and be sure they all have proper light to see faces. Then you won't have a problem. 

Ignoring the clashing color combination choices I'll skip ahead to one more annoyance... gobos. They used the same star shaped gobo for the first 75% of the concert. Then for about 10 minutes we kept seeing what appeared to be a could animation wheel slowly swirling. Finally we saw a different gobo... accompanied by a previously unseen movement pattern right at the end of the show. We never saw a gobo rotate, never saw two gobos in use at the same time in the same fixture, and the gobos were always in sharp focus. People if you are going to use gobos, learn to use them well. In the wrong hands they can be repetitive and annoying (Why are there always stars on the stage? This show is really patriotic). It's rare that a gobo is used in perfect focus (unless being used to establish a realistic element). You often want to pair them up and make even make them spin so you get changing looks. Movement is interesting! The same thing over and over... not so interesting. 

My wife, the non-technician, found the show so poorly executed it was distracting her from enjoying the music. Me I wanted to go in the back and take over. I'm still frustrated hours later. They had so much nice gear and obviously a huge budget. But their fundamentals are so poor. 

Which brings me to the educational point of this post. Even the best gear can't overcome bad fundamentals. There are a lot of people out there in really lame low budget high school, churches, and community theater facilities. Yeah it's frustrating trying to do theater on no budget. But the key is fundamentals. So what if you only have 12 lights. Can the audience see the actors? Make the most of what you have. It's easy to get distracted and wallow in self pity because your theater can't afford GrandMA and a dozen MAC 2k's. The good designer learns to make the most of what he/she has in stock. A bad designer has thousands of dollars of toys at his/her disposal and can't keep the stage properly lit. Learn the difference. Learn the fundamentals. Focus on what you can do now. Go ask people in the audience for their honest reaction to your work.

Finally if you are a House of Worship technician (or you know one), stick around CB, ask questions, let us help you. You are doing good work without a lot of help. Let us be your tech support.

_Wow. That looks like a classic Ship post. _


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## MisterTim (Jul 11, 2010)

I'm a house of worship technician, and all I can say is I would love to have that kind of gear and that kind of church...I'm stuck with a good ol' 24ch Behringer. 

Really though, your post is exactly why I spend a lot of that volunteer time teaching the other volunteer sound people at church. Whether it's a huge band mix or just controlling feedback with a lav mic, it needs to be done properly, and I care, so I teach.


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## Footer (Jul 11, 2010)

Most mega churches do actually have a pay roll for their production staff. In fact, they pay pretty well. You can usually find postings on backstage jobs or occasionaly artsearch. It would not at all surprise me if they have a payed lighting, video, and audio guy on staff. They will hire outside of their church. I have seen more then a handful of great people that are not at all religious or church going leave great gigs to go to churches for DOUBLE the pay they were getting at their previous gig. When I was in OKC the head elec of the largest theatre in Oklahoma left her job their to go work for the largest mega church in the state. I doubt that anyone that was running that show was a volunteer. Mega churches have money, lots of it. They dump a ton of money into their "media" departments and will pay good money for good people. 

However, for the show you saw, I think you were a victim of a young touring crew. I doubt they brought in movers just for the gig, I bet the band bought them with them. If they were on some type ground support or hap hazard hung, this is usually the sign of a touring group that does not want to deal with any rigging in the house. It also would not suprise me if the lighting person was with the group.

Odds are also that the sound tech was with the band as well. If this was at all a big group, they would bring their own sound tech. 

One thing I have noticed in the religious rock area is very young techs. I worked local Casting Crowns a year or two back and 90% of their guys are under 30. Most were around 19 to 21. Because these guys get gigs through different channels as traditional rock guys, they are able to get up to the top faster. Many of the techs are picked up from other large churches that they volunteer at. They don't have the experience working on many different house systems. Also, from my experience, the "standard" gear found in many road houses and clubs throughout the country is not as standard in churches. In the rock touring world, there are a handful of audio consoles that are used and every house has one. Its even worse when it comes to PA. 

Don't give the church a pass. You paid to see a show, you should have been treated to one.


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## gafftaper (Jul 13, 2010)

Footer for the win! 

I wrote to the church and heard back immediately from the T.D. Even though much of the gear was in house, all programming, operation, and staging was done by the artist's road crew. The house crew worked only in a support roll. So now I've got someone else to bash. It is between tours for this artist and it was a one off on the way through town to go perform on a concert cruise. So I'm guessing the crew is a little on the new side. 

I apologized to the T.D. and take back anything I said bad about the house crew. This screwed up job was all the fault of "professionals"


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## Pie4Weebl (Jul 13, 2010)

Gaff I am curious which group this was as I've played house LD to many a Christian act. You ought to PM if you don't want to openly out the group.

In defense of the LD there are tons of challenges they face when trying to put on a concert in a church as churches are generally ill-equipped to put on shows like that. While a threatre would have a pipe to hang the moving lights on or an arena would rent a truss a church will be hard to convince that they need to spend a couple hundred dollars to rent truss and motors for a day. They also can be really resistant to refocusing their plot for the concerts. Also churches won't cancel earlier services in the day for load in. So if you are forced to load in at 3 instead of 8am you aren't going to be able to get done what you need to. Also who knows if the LD knew the desk there or if the venue had anyone to program it for the LD? I would expect a rock and roll LD would not be the most comfortable on an ETC desk.

So with all the factors at hand I don't think anyone can really say who is at blame for the show being the disappointment it was for you.


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## Footer (Jul 13, 2010)

Looping back around, how does this affect your idea of this thread? http://www.controlbooth.com/forums/...your-venues-name-outside-produced-events.html

Had you not been "set straight", would you have ever returned to that venue?


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## gafftaper (Jul 14, 2010)

Ahh you pose an interesting question Footer, it's late so I'll tease you with my answer and get back later... 

I definitely would not have gone back to the venue if I didn't know. While I was probably the only tech snob in the room, my wife found many of the problems highly distracting and complained that she had a hard time enjoying the first half of the concert. She said, eventually she was able to just get into the music and get past the tech issues, but it was a problem for a long time. How many people left thinking, "that it was a lame place to watch a concert". A couple of bad tours in the same genre could be devastating to a venue.

As for Pie's question, I don't want to throw anyone under the bus so check your PM's. Again, this was one of the biggest names in Christian music AND this was one of the biggest mega churches around. The facility is clearly well equipped, it appeared that hanging a truss would be quite simple. The fact that the band had to come to town to go on a week long concert cruise the next day means there was no cost for the band to get here. There were probably 3,000 people there who paid $10-$60 each, so budget to rent a little extra gear shouldn't have been a problem. Time, yeah that probably was a problem. But in the end there were just too many fundamental bad choices that can't be blamed on anything but whomever was making those artistic choices. Sure if you throw more crew, time, and money at it, the show would probably look better, but none of those things turns the front light on or gets rid of the omni-present screen saver from the forbidden planet.


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## len (Jul 14, 2010)

Pie4Weebl said:


> Gaff I am curious which group this was as I've played house LD to many a Christian act. You ought to PM if you don't want to openly out the group.
> [[snipped to save bandwidth]]
> So with all the factors at hand I don't think anyone can really say who is at blame for the show being the disappointment it was for you.



I have to agree. It's hard to know what could have/should have been done given that we don't know what the venue's limitations were. 

Some things, such as constantly tweaking the sound without actually making it better is bad, and it doesn't matter how little time you have for sound check. I've watched enough sound guys to know that once they have it dialed in, there's very little to do until the musicians start changing things. I remember watching one guy having to ride the bass player all night. When the player knew the song, he'd play really loud, but if he didn't (they were a pick-up band for a couple Asian vocalists) he'd really coast in the background and let the keyboard cover the part. It was pretty funny watching how annoyed the sound guy was at the bass player.


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## gafftaper (Jul 14, 2010)

Good point and anyone who has run sound for any length of time has had that experience. So it's understandable. 

Please note as this thread goes on I'm not harping on the mix or when the lead vocalist started talking into a muted mic. Mistakes happen. I'm focusing on issues with lighting and video that were clearly choices. You can use the screen saver of doom, or you can press the button to retract the screen and just use the cyc. You can shine your LED strips on a black curtain or you can shine them on a cyc. You can turn front light on in every song or you can keep 1/4 of the songs really dark. These are all basic artistic choices made by a technician that are not limited by the venue, budget, or load in time.


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## sjsufer (Aug 20, 2010)

I've seen this in the few acts that we let use their own people. On their rider they requested a Grand Ma Ultra-light. Their LD came in and didn't know how to use it. She programmed a few looks and then finally told our house LD to run the movers once she got too frustrated and that she would run everything else. The lighting for the show was just very poor and I could say I could probably have made it look better than that even if i didn't know the show. (I'm a sound engineer)

The worst part about it, was that we have been trying to get a that console for us to use permently. We currently are running Grand Ma on PC to a 2-port node. Now our president saw what someone can do with a real console vs. what we do everyday; needless to say we still don't have the console we want as we do a great job with what we have...

And I don't really blame her for the lack of knowledge on the console, she was a fill-in and the rider aparently hasn't been updated, but it just made us look bad.


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## bishopthomas (Aug 22, 2010)

sjsufer said:


> I've seen this in the few acts that we let use their own people. On their rider they requested a Grand Ma Ultra-light. Their LD came in and didn't know how to use it.


 
Don't you hate that? That happened to me the other day. The band monitor engineer spec'd an M7CL (showed up with his show on USB stick so he's definitely used one before). I couldn't leave his side to even take a lunch break without getting a phone call asking how to do something. He couldn't understand the pre/post fader relationship and how to leave sends on fader mode in order to push up the fader on the main layer. There is far too much spec'ing gear "because we can" going on in this industry.


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## Footer (Aug 22, 2010)

bishopthomas said:


> Don't you hate that? That happened to me the other day. The band monitor engineer spec'd an M7CL (showed up with his show on USB stick so he's definitely used one before). I couldn't leave his side to even take a lunch break without getting a phone call asking how to do something. He couldn't understand the pre/post fader relationship and how to leave sends on fader mode in order to push up the fader on the main layer. There is far too much spec'ing gear "because we can" going on in this industry.


 
I see that pretty regularly. It is usually a situation were someone else programmed the console and sent the guy out on the road with just enough info to get the show loaded into the console and played back. That is one of the reasons those shows push so hard to get the exact console they specified. 


sent from my HTC Incredible


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