Hands off my Equipment!

Argh... Sunday morning I was in a great mood, till I got to the church, did some sound checks, and noticed most of our stage equipment had been tampered with. Levels on the monitors had been messed with and the monitor mixer board had been messed with. So I went about getting things reset to best guess levels as fast as possible before practice started. During practice I had a few issues with feedback on the monitors, but worked them out fairly quick and thought I had it all under control.

At this point, I was still in a fairly good mood, enjoying Sunday School and then the worship service. (well... enjoying might be too much of a word, During the worship service I am usually a wreck, nervous, fidgeting with the main board, trying to make sure everything sounds good, make sure it's not to loud, or too soft, etc.)....

Worship goes on, we are on the 4th or 5th song I think, then BAAMMM!! Huge low frequency feedback emitting from the stage. Panic city!! Gladly the worship team just kept going, no hiccups, no one stopped singing, just kept going. I will frantically dropping microphones from the mix one by one, trying to clear the problem, to no avail. I happened to look up and see Nathan (the pianist) missing with his piano, so I killed his monitor and that cleared the feedback. He kept his piano off and the 7 singers, along with a flute and bass guitar finished the song. It was actually really pretty sounding. After the song was over, I lowered levels on the piano monitor, and gave him the ok to turn things back on again, and the service went on.

I happily kept my cool, and last night during worship practice, my assistant and I completely re-set the monitor board from scratch. So we should be ok now. We figured out that possibly some kids from the spanish church that meets there on Tuesdays and Saturdays had probably been missing with the knobs and got things messed up. So, I had a little discussion with our pastor, politely stating that no kids should be allowed on stage for any service (unless of course it's planned that way) and to assert to both congregations that no-one should be touching the equipment. And I think that with the real life experience that our church just had, they now understand why I don't want anyone touching the AV equipment.