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[Bob L. Wilson]

I have a Service of Witness to the Resurrection tomorrow. A friend of the deceased wants to come in and play "Jesus Loves Me" in what can only be called a Hendrixesque style. I have heard the piece at an outside event and it is nicely done but very loud, as you can imagine. My music director asked me yesterday to manage the levels on Tuesday. Our usual musical style is more orchestra than praise band so we have generally avoided the volume wars. It isn't that we never have high SPLs but the congregation interprets the high SPLs we do have as appropriate. I measured our pipe organ doing 110-115db A weighted during various parts of our last Advent Organ Concert. On Easter Sunday when our music director encourages every singer in the house to join the choir for the Hallelujah Chorus, we have brass, and the organist plays with all the stops pulled out I have briefly seen 120db A weighted. The flip side is I heard about it when a harmonica player using a 5 watt Harpgear tube amp and an acoustic guitar player using the church's JC55 got "way too loud" while taking some liberties with "How Great thou Art" last summer. I didn't even have the amps mic'ed so there wasn't much I could do but the house level never went over 95db. Churches seem to fall in to four categories when it comes to levels:

1)SPL limit policies of various types in place that are sound technician enforced.
2)Backline policy that requires players to use church owned backline at proscribed settings.
3)An onstage music director that has the responsibility and authority to control levels.
4)Free for all with nobody in charge and/or no clear policy

We are currently in category 4. I am going to call the guitarist today and see what his plans for tomorrow are.

[TJ (Tom) Cornish]

As you've observed,  "too loud" is often "I don't like it".  Not sure that much can be done to use technology to solve a people problem, other than the obvious - have instrumentalist play as quiet as they are willing to, elevate guitar amp near player's head if necessary, etc.

[Jordan Wolf]

The flip side is I heard about it when a harmonica player using a 5 watt Harpgear tube amp and an acoustic guitar player using the church's JC55 got "way too loud" while taking some liberties with "How Great thou Art" last summer. I didn't even have the amps mic'ed so there wasn't much I could do but the house level never went over 95db.

Performance amps tend to be very "beamy" and, depending on the instrument being played, can seem very harsh to the ears (see "icepick to the forehead").

My guess is whoever told you that was getting harangued by the amps' pattern.  Equal Loudness Contours are your friend. :-)

You can definitely be proactive by advancing the gig with the guitarist.  It would probably be a good idea to have the amp fire across the stage rather than out towards the audience, or use it B.B. King style.  You could also have him lean it back and aimed up to his hears so he can get an idea of how it sounds.

If he's worth his salt, he's already doing this OR will have a low-wattage amp to get the tone without the ouch.

Good luck!

[Stu McDoniel]

I have a Service of Witness to the Resurrection tomorrow. A friend of the deceased wants to come in and play "Jesus Loves Me" in what can only be called a Hendrixesque style. I have heard the piece at an outside event and it is nicely done but very loud, as you can imagine. My music director asked me yesterday to manage the levels on Tuesday. Our usual musical style is more orchestra than praise band so we have generally avoided the volume wars. It isn't that we never have high SPLs but the congregation interprets the high SPLs we do have as appropriate. I measured our pipe organ doing 110-115db A weighted during various parts of our last Advent Organ Concert. On Easter Sunday when our music director encourages every singer in the house to join the choir for the Hallelujah Chorus, we have brass, and the organist plays with all the stops pulled out I have briefly seen 120db A weighted. The flip side is I heard about it when a harmonica player using a 5 watt Harpgear tube amp and an acoustic guitar player using the church's JC55 got "way too loud" while taking some liberties with "How Great thou Art" last summer. I didn't even have the amps mic'ed so there wasn't much I could do but the house level never went over 95db. Churches seem to fall in to four categories when it comes to levels:

1)SPL limit policies of various types in place that are sound technician enforced.
2)Backline policy that requires players to use church owned backline at proscribed settings.
3)An onstage music director that has the responsibility and authority to control levels.
4)Free for all with nobody in charge and/or no clear policy

We are currently in category 4. I am going to call the guitarist today and see what his plans for tomorrow are.

Put a plastic shield or something in front of the guitar amp and mic it.  Stick the guitar amp in the back stage room with the door closed and mic it and run it up through the monitors?  Good luck trying to get him to do that!  You have to deal with stage volume and that is an issue. 
Focus on the drums bass and what ever other instruments and vocals. Leave the guitar out of the mix
and build the mix up around the guitars stage volume.   Place the guitar amp on the side of the stage
pointing straight across the stage instead of facing out to the audience and mic it.   
These are just ideas and I have worked with all these methods and they all work.
Best of luck

[Bob L. Wilson]

Guitarist was great he met me last night at the church so we could work out our setup. He brought his two practice amps a reissue 57 Fender Champ and a 5 watt Marshall head with a single 10" cabinet. We set them up firing across the chancel but when driven hard enough to tone up like he wanted they were way too loud. Luckily he also brought the plexiglass enclosure he uses on small stages with his full size rig. He even had a custom fiberglass and foam top for it. We set that up I hung an EV308 on each cabinet. He played, I dialed in the right eq then worked out the threshold for the compressors. There were no head swivels durig the piece and no complaints after. Guitarist even liked my three monitor mixes(stereo + plus vocals only in the center box) for a solo player arrangement. He didn't believe me at first that the EV CM12-2 coaxial monitors we were using are over 20 years old.

[Arnold B. Krueger]

He didn't believe me at first that the EV CM12-2 coaxial monitors we were using are over 20 years old.

You are getting me all sentimental about the pair of EV FM-12 coaxial monitors (similar guts, plastic enclosure) that were stolen from my church about 10 years ago. ;-)

[Bob L. Wilson]

I think the coaxial CM12s are some of the best small footprint monitors one could have for church use. They don't have Microwedge 12 level output but at outputs within their capability they sound just about as good. Our monitor system for over 20 years was Orban 622 PEQs for notching and smoothing mounted back by the pair of Crown PS400 amps that provided the power and EV 2230 GEQs out at FOH. The contractor that installed them had the original 32Hz infrasonic filters in the GEQs moved up to 80HZ HPF for our specific use with the CM12 monitors. A few years ago the Orbans finally started dying of capacitor failures. Recapping them was going to be more than the units were worth so we pulled them and started using some Shure DFR11EQ units mounted out at FOH. They worked fine but there was no way to give an operator access to anything without giving them access to everything, and the built in limiter allows only a single ratio. We lost a couple high frequency drivers over the years due to operator errors so it seemed wise for the signal chain to include a hard limiter. As part of the monitor system upgrade we also reconfigured our system for four individual mixes, and converted all eight CM12s to Neutrik NL4 jacks and biamp only operation. Each of the four sends now comes out of the snake and in to its own Shure DFR22 each of which provides:
 
30 band GEQ
10 band PEQ
Cut and Shelf Filters
Soft knee compressor
These processor functions are accessible by any operator from the FOH computer

75hz 24db/oct HPF
24db/oct crossover at 1.2Khz
These functions are protected by the level two security lock, only myself and our head of facilities have the password.

Then arranged after the crossover we have

One five band PEQ on the HF and one 3 band PEQ on the LF
Two automatic feedback filters set in 1/70th octave mode one on the HF and one on the LF
Two more Soft knee compressors one on the HF and one on the LF each with different settings
Two Soft knee limiters one on the HF and one on the LF each with different settings
Two Peak stop limiters one on the HF and one on the LF each with different thresholds
Everything after the crossover(except the peak stop limiters which are on level two)is protected by the level one security lock, only technicians competent to make changes have the password.

We added a pair of Crown PS200 amps so the orginal pair of PS400 amps now power just the LF.

Being able to process a two way system after the crossover point without doubling the cost of everything is a nice advantage. We were able to optimize the thresholds, ratios, attacks, decays on the compressors and the limiters for the specific drivers they serve. The two layers of compression with assymetrical ratios on the second layer, followed by individual optimized limiters for the LF and HF takes full advantage of the drivers different power handling capacities. The result is a very smooth unobtrusive progression from no compression to infinite ratio peak stop limiting.

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