First Week of My Externship with The Church Next Door

For my first week of externships, it went better than I had expected. I kind of expected it to be slower especially during this time of COVID-19. I was able to accomplish a lot which I will detail later into this blog. A couple of my goals for this week were to get along with the staff of my employer and to build positive relationships. A couple other goals outside of building relationships was to get anything and everything my boss asked me to do done, and done to the best of my abilities. I want to take this time here to gain as much information and knowledge about the different aspects in the music industry as possible. Because as a prospective Live Sound engineer, you have to know different environments and genres so that you can keep a consistent flow of income going into your wallet.

A couple of my expectations for this week is to see the workflow of a church, see how they like to mix in a church environment, and how they handle streaming the mix to the online services. To set goals and expectations without perseverance will get you nowhere. So with these expectations/goals I want to learn as fast as possible and take notes on all of these. I personally like to transform my expectations and call them my goals because it forces me mentally to figure the answer out or get the job done.

Some Fears/Challenges that I have would be creating a mix for everyone to be content with and not too loud or quiet. Creating an environment with sound is difficult, so to find that happy medium and making it sound pleasing is my goal. A big fear that I have is messing something up on the soundboard that would ruin in ears, the live feed, and the house mix. A way to avoid that from happening is always asking questions and taking notes about their setup.

For the first week of my externship, it went really well! I built good relationships and got a lot done. They were having a problem with the stage lights splashing onto the back wall and had asked me to buy, cut, and paint wood to block it from happening. So Monday and Tuesday I bought the wood, painted it and cut it up. On Tuesday I took it into the church and drilled it into the wall as an overhang. It was successful! The lights had a good angle on the back wall until halfway up which is where the projectors would be projecting an image or video.

They had me go in on Wednesday as well to help setup, teardown, and eq audio for an interview. The audio ended up being about 5 minutes long. We used Rode mics to capture their voices for the audio recording which also captured the room reverb which gave me a good challenge when EQ’ing and cutting the audio clips up. It ended up sounding professional and my boss was pleased when he heard what the final product sounded like. So far, my externship is going really well! Stay tuned to hear what I do for the upcoming weeks and look for a vlog soon!