Africa (part 1)

For the last 5 years, I have had the opportunity(?) to go to Africa providing audio for an evangelist. I thought I had seen it all from all of the small churches that I have seen over the years but nothing beats the third world. I feel for these guys because I do understand that financial difficulties but still. . .

Someone, (I think I will blame the British for this since they were the last ones there), has told the Africans that seeing that little red light on the channel input or output is a good thing. Also, no one seems to have explained the purpose of the subgroup other than a way to increase volume to the stereo buss.

Honestly, I thought I might of had a just some isolated experiences. I had a conversation one day with an engineer that works for an evangelist that is in Africa so much that he keeps several extremely large PA's on the continent. At the end of conversation, I made some comment about the gain structure issues I have run into. He immediately understood :)

I believe that if that is the sound that they really want, then instead of beating on the electronics and speakers, just buy a cheap guitar distortion pedal and put it inline on the main outputs of the mixer. Seriously, its that bad.

Again, it is probably not their fault but does that really let them off the hook.

So you take all this in. I am traveling with the VIP and a camera crew. When we do individual churches, we arrive together and I have roughly 15 minutes to find the soundboard location, figure out what they are doing, and get a mix run to at least one camera. Not to mention that even if I am in an English speaking country, they still don't speak English. (Had an easier time in the French speaking countries.) Another interesting thing is that a lot of the churches that we ended up in put their soundboard up on stage (probably to save money on cabling). So you only hear what is bouncing back off the back wall to determine the PA mix.

The first thing that I have to do (after hooking up the camera feed, doing the grunt and point thing of that speaker is where on this board) is to rebalance the gain structure to try to clean up the main microphones so that at least my mix to the cameras is clean. Then try to do what I can for the mains. But gain change messes with the emotions of these people so all of this must be done gingerly.

The Africans are into putting all important people on the stage but they don't give them a separate mix or speakers. Let's just turn up the front monitors until they are loud enough to cover everyone, yeah that sounds like an excellent plan. My VIP doesn't want much if any monitor so I have to kill this speaker when he hits the stage to talk and deal with the local head Freds and their complaining to their audio guys who then try to tell me the issue (this is when communication problems can be a good thing - I know what they want, I just don't have to understand at that moment (see "rule one" blog entry)).

I will have to continue this later before it turns into a book. . .

(I will have to state that I did run into a few, very few folks that knew what they were doing.)