Church Audio: Finding Your Guitar Solo
Church Audio: Finding Your Guitar Solo
Finding your guitar solo. If anybody has ever had the chance to listen to Lincoln Brewster speak, his story will be familiar. He tells of when he first left the worldly music scene and was starting to play guitar in church, he played very conservatively because he wasn’t sure if the congregation was ready for “his style.” One day, he couldn’t stand it any longer and just let loose and played some amazing solo riff and thought “maybe they won’t ask me to play for the worship team anymore.” Needless to say, the results were extremely positive and Linc’s advice is simple – “Find your guitar solo in life.”
I believe there are a couple things to glean from this. One is very deep and is about finding a calling, a passion, a thing in life that “let’s you loose.” Ideally, if you are an audio engineer, running sound might be that thing. The second thing is much more specific and literal – find the guitar solo (or drum solo or accordion solo) in each song that your worship team plays and let it sing. Imagine what would have happened if the sound engineer on Lincoln’s big day would have turned him down or muted him.
Not every song is keyboard driven or guitar driven.
Maybe there’s a guitar solo during the verse or the chorus or whatever. Be musical. Find the variety and the spice of each song and run with it. It’s OK to push some instruments during one song and pull them down for another song as long as the right instrument leads the right song. Candidly, I tend to not push keys a whole lot but if it’s the only instrument playing, I need to turn it up. Sometimes, finding a guitar solo requires you to take some risks. I frequently (almost constantly) change levels during a song. It’s not just little tweaks or movements; it’s often using a fair chunk of the fader travel.
If your soundboard is locked in position and the knobs and faders never move, chances are you aren’t using it to its fullest potential.
Within reason and common sense, soundboards should be dynamic. Those knobs and faders can and should change between different worship teams, different songs and even within some songs. There are very few “magic” settings, whether is EQ or compression or an aux send. Certainly if you have a different person playing guitar from one week to another, their guitars may sound completely different.
A soundboard is an instrument just like a keyboard or a guitar.
Exercising good technique, you can use the board to help sculpt a song. What qualifies as good technique? Sometimes smooth, gentle changes characterize good technique. Sometimes, knowing that the song has a quiet part and a dramatic part helps. You can literally help add impact to a song. Try stuff — know what the knobs and faders do. Experiment. Practices are probably better places to experiment than Sunday services. Don’t think that just because it sounds good in practice that you need to freeze those faders — the room changes some when it’s full of people. Be flexible.
The best results come when a skilled sound engineer is part of the creative process. Don’t be stuck in a rut. Try new things. Explore. Learn. Improve. Build your skills. Risk. I’m not suggesting that you go crazy like Lincoln did, but I know that soundboards are not a “set it and forget it” type of tool. Listen, respond, and your mixes should improve. Every song has a unique identity — discover it.
