Most church audio problems are not equipment problems. In the episode above, Dave and Curtis walk through four of the biggest mistakes church audio volunteers make: not knowing their equipment and signal chain, misunderstanding gain and adjusting it during the service, not paying attention while the service is happening, and carrying an us-versus-them attitude toward the people on stage. Their fix is not new gear. It is preparation, gain set correctly before the service starts, eyes up on the stage, and the humility to treat the whole platform and booth as one worship team.
Mistake 1: Not knowing your equipment
Curtis sees the same pattern in church after church: the volunteer arrives minutes before soundcheck, flips a few switches, taps a few microphones, runs the service, and never thinks about the board again until next Sunday. His counter is to treat the sound board as an instrument in worship, because that is what it is. Dave: “We are operating an instrument in worship.” Musicians practice their instruments all week. The audio team can practice theirs: arrive early, prep and test everything before anyone has to ask, and use rehearsals as your own practice until running the board is second nature.
Know your whole signal chain, what comes from what and goes to what. The fastest way to learn it is to help build it. When their church wired its own control room, running camera and broadcast cables through ceilings and joists, the later problems became easy to trace, because the people troubleshooting had put every cable there themselves. Scripture holds technicians to the same standard as the people out front:
“Sing a new song of praise to him; play skillfully on the harp, and sing with joy.”
Psalm 33:3 (NLT)
Mistake 2: Misunderstanding gain, and touching it live
Curtis explains gain with a picture of floodgates and reservoirs. Every channel is a reservoir of sound, and the board is a series of gates deciding how much gets in and how much passes on to the mains, the monitors, and the stream. Gain is the first gate. Let in too much and everything downstream floods. Let in too little and you crank everything else just to get a trickle.
That is why gain is set during preparation and left alone during the service. One live gain change moves the house level, every monitor mix fed from that channel, the in-ear mixes, and possibly the stream, all at once, and it also changes the microphone’s sensitivity, so your feedback risk moves with it. Curtis does not soften it: “Adjusting the gain line is a No-No. Don’t do it. Bad. Red light. Bad.”
Set it this way instead. Press PFL (or solo) on the channel and set the gain by the meter, not by the ear. Aim for peaks living in the yellows, not the reds and not stuck down in the greens, so the loudest moments have headroom and the soft ones are still usable. Soundcheck realistically: keyboard players play an actual song at real intensity, and vocalists sing into the microphone rather than talking into it, because people who talk loud often sing soft and the reverse is just as common. Protect the channels that are already right: keep the worship leader’s microphone for the worship leader, leave the pastor’s wireless channel untouched, and keep a saved setup for guest preachers, whose voices can sit at the opposite extreme from your regular speaker. Once gain is set, the fader is your live give-and-take, and it only works if the gain gave it somewhere useful to sit.
Mistake 3: Eyes down instead of on the stage
Attention is where the first two mistakes collect their bill. If you do not know the board cold, your eyes are down hunting for controls while the service happens without you. The job, in Curtis’s phrase, is “eyes up, fingers down”: hands working by feel, eyes on the stage, ready for the mic stand that gets knocked over, the pastor picking up an unused microphone at the edge of the stage to pray, the guitar cable about to be swapped, the drumstick that just broke.
The broadcast side has its own version of this. When the worship team lowers their microphones so the congregation can carry the singing, the room hears itself fine, but the stream goes nearly silent unless the broadcast mixer brings the audience microphones up in that exact moment. Their church puts the program feed and a multicam view on monitors right above the audio workstation so the person mixing the stream can see the cue coming. Dave also tells the story every booth needs to hear once: a youth volunteer who played Solitaire through an entire sermon, live on the lyrics computer, until the pastor stopped preaching to ask her to move a card. Present is not the same as paying attention.
Mistake 4: Us versus them
Curtis calls attitude the number one problem between the booth and the stage, and his diagnostic story makes the point. Visiting a church where the mix was painfully loud, he pulled the main fader down and the room volume barely moved, because nearly everything the congregation heard was coming from four floor wedge monitor mixes. The vocalist on stage found the sound almost unbearable too. Both sides had the same complaint and neither knew it: she could not hear herself, so she asked for more; the engineer turned the wedges up; the room got worse; she still could not hear herself. What she actually needed was more of her own voice, not more of everything. One small adjustment ended weeks of frustration.
That gives you a diagnostic worth keeping. If you pull your main fader down and the room stays loud, your wedges are running the room, and turning them up further will not fix what a singer is missing. Ask what they actually need before you reach for the knob. Underneath it is the posture the episode closes with:
“Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.”
Philippians 2:3 (NLT)
Their worship pastor taught the whole combined group, choir, musicians, camera operators, sound, and lyrics, one sentence: we are the worship team. One job, shared by the platform and the booth alike: create an atmosphere of worship with the fewest possible distractions. Curtis’s closing rule for the audio team is the one to keep: “Always have the attitude of being the solution, not the problem.”
The sponsor segment in this episode is Restream, which Dave and Curtis use to send one stream to YouTube, Facebook, and other destinations at once instead of paying the computer overhead of encoding every platform separately. Dave’s affiliate link is getrestream.com, and the episode notes it includes a $10 credit when you sign up.
Frequently asked questions
Why does changing the gain during a service cause problems everywhere else?
Because gain sits at the head of the channel. Moving it changes the house level, every monitor and in-ear mix fed from that channel, and possibly the stream mix at the same time, and it changes the microphone’s sensitivity, which changes your feedback risk. Set gain before the service and mix with the fader during it.
How do I set gain correctly at soundcheck?
Solo the channel with PFL and watch the meter instead of trusting your ears. Set it so peaks live in the yellows with headroom above them. Have musicians play and singers actually sing at real service intensity, because that is the signal you are setting gain for.
Our stream goes quiet when the congregation sings, though it sounds fine in the room. What are we missing?
The audience microphones. In the room, the congregation hears itself. On the stream, when the worship team lowers their microphones for congregational singing, only the audience mics carry that sound, and the broadcast mixer has to bring them up the moment the cue happens.
A singer keeps saying they cannot hear themselves. Should I just turn the wedge up?
Not first. Ask what they actually need: more music, more of everything, or more of themselves. In the episode’s story, the singer needed more of her own voice, and turning everything up had been making her problem worse for weeks.
How can I tell if our floor monitors are overpowering the main speakers?
Pull the main fader down. If the room volume barely changes, the wedges are effectively running the room and the mains have lost control of it. That is the moment to rebalance monitors against the house, usually starting with a conversation with the stage team.
The worship leader asked for something I think is technically unwise. What should I do?
Say once, plainly, what the likely result will be. If they still want it, do it gladly; you are under their authority. Then find the right time later, away from the service, for the fuller conversation. Being the solution includes how you handle the disagreement.
The episode runs about 51 minutes and includes Curtis’s Barcelona story, where a well-meaning helper plugged the board straight into a wall outlet in Spain and the team finished the show riding faders as human compressors. It is worth the watch for that alone.