Few small to mid-sized churches have bona fide audio professionals on staff, which often makes delivering pristine, spirit-inspiring sound reinforcement for Sunday service challenging at best and discouraging at worst.
In light of this, Fits & Starts Productions designed the How To Church Sound Workshops to quickly bring novices up to speed on the most effective practices for turning their muddy, feedback-riddled services into paragons of clarity. Renowned sound engineer and instructor Mike Sokol teaches the workshops, which are currently on an 18-city tour of the East, Southeast, and Midwest from now until May. Hector LaTorre produces the workshops, and Symetrix is sponsoring them.
Sokol will introduce two of Symetrix’ signal processing solutions to common church woes, the Deuce 722 and the 528E Voice Processor. The Symetrix Deuce 722 is a simple two-input, two-output digital signal processor with all of the tools a church needs to tame problem channels or the entire mix.
Users configure the unit’s pre-amplification, compression, downward expansion, de-essing, automatic gain control (AGC), Ambient Noise Compensation, feedback elimination, equalization and more from any Windows® computer with an Ethernet jack. The one-input, one-output Symetrix 528E pulls the six most essential functions from the above list and presents them with adjustable hardware knobs. Although optimized for vocals, the 528E is ideal for any input source, augmenting or replacing the channel strip processing found on a mixing console.
“Church services are becoming more and more sophisticated, and expectations for audio quality are rising as people become more media-savvy,” says Paul Roberts, director of sales for Symetrix. “The How To Church Sound Workshop does a fabulous job of instructing everyone from church volunteers to sound professionals on the methods they can employ to bring their services to the next level. We’re pleased that participants will be introduced to the Symetrix Deuce 722 and 528E Voice Processor, since we feel they are the most cost-effective solutions to a host of common church sound problems.”