Sound Man

I've played in bands ever since I was in high school - mostly at church or leading worship for youth events. That meant that I had to learn how to set up and run a sound system. When we moved to Philadelphia, I ended up being the only person in our church that had ever touched a sound board before, so I became the sound guy by default. This was one of those getting thrown into the fire experiences - I really was not prepared to maintain, upgrade, run, and train people to run a sound system. However, I really came to enjoy the experience of being able to serve the church and to lead a team of people.

Since our church here in Blacksburg meets in the Lyric Theater, which often holds concerts, we get to use the professional (and quite expensive) sound system that they have there. I don't think I've ever been more intimidated in my life than the first Sunday morning I stood behind that thing. I've slowly become more comfortable with it, and have even learned how to mix and run church much better as I've learned from experience and from people in the church who actually know what they're doing.

One of the big projects I've been working on lately is preparing to take our BCM sound system on the road so our praise band can lead worship at our statewide collegiate conference this weekend and at a youth event in Christiansburg at the end of the month. This has truly been a fun experience for me, and I'm excited to load it all up this weekend and see what we can do. It's challenging because we don't have much of a budget to buy system components, but have been able to piece together what will hopefully be a respectable system thanks to the generosity of our church, who gave us a bunch of their old equipment.

Sound has become one of those things I'm enjoying more and more. I feel like I have a lot of these hobbies that I'm not really all that good at, but have been given so much experience with that I enjoy and feel comfortable doing it (like cooking and playing drums). In fact, I'm excited to spend part of this evening reading the manuals for our EQ and our DriveRack - I know, I'm a nerd.