"Sound Basics" Video Transcription

Video Transcript: Sound Basics

All right, this next section is about sound. Music is a great thing. But if you can't hear it, it really doesn't do any good. So we're going to in this session go over some of the basics of sound. And even though you the music director might not be in charge of the soundboard and all the equipment and so on. The more you know about it, the more you'll be able to communicate with the song people. Nehemiah 12:43. And on that day, they offered great sacrifices, rejoicing because God had given them great joy, the women and the children also rejoiced, the sound of rejoicing in Jerusalem could be heard far away. Now, in those days, of course, they didn't have microphones and, and keyboards and probably not even guitars, they didn't have electricity. And so if you wanted to increase the sound, you had to either get more people or shout or sing louder, and in some ways, that's easier. And if you have a church that has really great acoustics, maybe you can get away with without a sound system at all. And really, that's the nicest, because then the sound that you make is the sound that you make. 

And if you want it good, you have to listen to each other. If someone is louder than the rest, then either the rest have to increase their volume, or that person has to go down a little bit. And so the musicians actually are in control of the sound that they make. In our modern world, we have electricity. And so we have speakers and mixers and amps. And then there's like 1000, buttons and levers and levels. And then so we're dependent on the of those things. And there's so many variables that it's really good to under have to have at least the basics of well, how does this all work? How did the sound systems work? And I think, the more that, you know, if you're not the sound person, if you're the sound person, then probably you'll know some of these things already. But I'm speaking here now to the sound, or the music director or the people in charge of music, and so that they have a better interaction and know kind of what they want from the sound person. 

First of all, very basic, there's inputs to the sound, there's microphones, there's the wireless, you can hook up a receiver and then the person with the mic can just sort of go where they want to, they're not attached to a wire. Probably the most common microphone in the world is the SM Shure SM 58. This one has been around for decades, people will keep trying to improve and come up with other ones. And people keep going right back to this mic. So if you're just looking for basic mics that work well, you can drop them not too much, but they still will work it's a great mic, it comes in the wireless form or the or the connected to a wire form. Then you have a keyboard that you want to connect, usually via direct box, usually keyboards have a quarter inch output, whereas the microphone has a core that has three wires to it. And this wire actually can go a lot farther without any noise. 

Whereas these quarter inch, develop noise after a little bit a while. So what you do is you take something like this from the you put it in the keyboard, and the other end you put in what's called a direct box and the direct box converts it into this kind of wire, this three prong wire, and that can go into a snake which is a box that holds all kinds of these wires and then sends them back to the mixing board. It's not so important that you understand all of that but trying to eliminate as much hum and buzz as you can. So we try to get it to those chords that have three wires. And that Dropbox is the way to do that. acoustic guitars at the same thing, they have a quarter inch connection and you want to hook up a guitar either via microphone, but there's a lot of noise with the microphone or that direct box again.

Then you got a guitar the electric guitar and that is via mic on the amp. Sometimes, electric guitar players like to play through their own amps often because they have different effects on their little amp that has a little special figure in it. So you can hook up a microphone right to their guitar speaker, if you will, or a lot of times those little guitar amp speakers have a direct out either either a three wire one, or if it's quarter inch, you just hook it to a Dropbox like the regular guitars. So now you have inputs, you have microphones, people singing, you have guitars, you have keyboards. But if you just sing into a mic, and it's not hooked up to anything, it's not going to do anything. And so the microphone needs power. 

And that's what an amp is. So the microphone actually has to go into something that can amplify it or the guitar, or the keyboard. The keyboard doesn't have a speaker in it often. guitars you can hear a little bit folk or acoustic guitars. But if you want to amplify it, it has to somehow get to the power mics and keyboards like it goes do that make your own sound. acoustic guitars and pianos do make their sound sound. But usually they're not loud enough. amps amplify the sound and amps are usually rated in watts. The more watts the more power the amp is, speakers absolutely boost the signal for each input. So if you have the input of the microphone, and it's put into an amp, now we have power to this. But amps don't make the sound. A speaker is needed to create a sound wave. So the speaker actually has a cone inside. And it actually vibrates and it makes the sound wave from the boosted signal of the amp. So the microphone has a little I'm talking to it, it has a little bit of it takes the the wave and then it sends it to the amp, the AMP boosts the signal, and then it sends it to this speaker that that makes the signal even bigger so that people can hear it. others the main speakers, those are the speakers that are pointed to the congregation. And that's what they hear. 

But the monitor speakers, our speakers pointed to the players on the stage, speakers for the congregation need to be placed facing the congregation, but in front of the worship team. So mics don't like to hear a voice at the same time they hear the voice going through the speaker that's pointed at them. So if I'm singing through this microphone, and I have the main speakers for the congregation behind me, then I say something into this mic, and it goes through the system and it comes out that speaker and it hits the same mic that I'm talking to. And so it it here's what I'm saying directly comes out. But then the the Amplified sound of the speaker comes in here again, just slightly behind. And microphones don't like that. And you get all this feedback. So you want to keep the speakers for the praise team. You need that in front of them and to the congregation. But then then often the worship team can't hear themselves. 

So then you need monitor speakers pointing the other way back to the praise team. Players and singers on the stage need to hear what they are playing and so they need some kind of monitor system, the soundboard. I have one sitting right here. It's just a small little soundboard. This soundboard actually has the the AMP inside. A lot of times the soundboard is separate from the amps. soundboard allows for multiple inputs that can be adjusted individually relative to one another. And the resulting mixed sound as sometimes it's called a mixer is set to the AMP which sends it to the speakers and the monitors. So so we have five people that want to sing, we've got a guitar, we have a keyboard, we have an electric guitar, maybe even one of the mic some of the drums. And it's all they all have their own volumes and their own different effects. The treble, the the mids, the bass. And so what you do is you hit hook all those inputs to a mixer.

Here's some soundboard basics. I have a drawing of, of, of a sound board here. This is like if you look at a soundboard or a sound mixer, you'll see like, you know, 100 knobs or 100, little faders and so on. And it looks extremely complicated. Looks like you know, you'd have to spend a year to learn what this is. But really, if you just understand that, that Yeah, there's 100 knobs, but they're divided into 10 So there's really only 10 knobs. So there's 10 strips.

And there might be 16 strips or the church, where I go, we have 32 of these strips. And each strip is for one input. So one singer gets all those buttons. So if you know all the buttons on one strip, they're the exact same buttons on all the strip. So really, it's learning what 10 things do, instead of what 100 things do, and then it's just all of them together to create the sound. So on the top, we have a place to hook in microphone input. And there's the what it's called an XLR. And that's what I was telling you is a three prong this has its three wires in it. And so these can be really long, they can be 150 to 100 feet, and you don't lose sound quality. So often, you know, microphones and XLR things are put into that slot. If you had a guitar and you were you wanted to hook it directly to the mixer, you have these one fourth inch inputs, line inputs and inserts that you can just stick it right there. But often what you'll do is is convert them to the XLR. With that direct box that I mentioned. There you can see there's a button called the gain control. And that is like a volume button. But that's it. 

We'll talk a little bit more about that in the next session, that that game button is something that you set with each instrument because some instruments have a lot of volume in and of themselves. And some don't, it's not really the the control that used to make someone louder or softer while you're while you're playing and singing. And then this particular picture that I have has a compression effect control, a lot of mixers don't have compression, that's sort of an advanced thing, it takes the sound. And if something's really loud, it sort of compresses it. So it's not very loud, it's a very helpful thing. But a lot of mixers don't have that. And then you have the EQ section, this one happens to have three bands. So there's a high and there's a mid, and there's a low and that controls. So the tone of each individual input, and we're going to talk about that too in the next session. And then there's some sends auxilary sends, that's a lot of different effects, a lot of that's sort of an advanced thing, you don't really have to know what that is. The next one is called an effect send. And that usually is where like reverb is controlled. And we'll talk a little bit more about what reverb does in the next session. reverb or echo or some kind of effect on the voice or the input that you put in. 

Pan control is left side, or right side or left side. In terms of your speakers, if you have two speakers set up, some churches will just set it up mono so that it's the same thing coming out of both speakers, sometimes you can set it up stereo, mute, on and off. So if you want to just mute one channel, this mic and this mic and this mic is not being used this morning. So we just mute them so sound doesn't go through there. And then you see the fader volume control, that's a slide that's really the the control that you use to you know, we need that singer a little bit louder, or here's the guitar solo. And we want him to stand out right here. So that's really the volume control that you use to control the volume as as people are playing. So that's just like an overview of the mixing board. In the next session, we're going to look at what are the common problems to look out for and and how do these controls help you fix them. So that's what that's what we're going to look at. We'll talk about these problems in the next session.