Make it Easy.

For the sake of your attention span and in light of my last blog which took about 20 minutes to read, I'll make this one a little easier. Our church meets in a school. Calvary is a special place with an abundance of volunteers which makes set up super easy...when everyone knows what to do. I made enemies of our tech crew pretty quickly by telling them to carve the sometimes one-and-a-half hour set up time to thirty minutes. I knew this was a lot to ask, after all, Sunday morning at 6:30am isn't a fun time to be awake let alone push carts and patch audio cables. Groups of people are capable of building incredible things together, just look at the Pyramids. Our "pyramid" was a thirty minute setup time and it started with getting everyone on the same page. I prefer to call it getting everyone on the same stage...plot. See how I did that? I probably insulted Illustrator and Adobe by using their baby to create a vector file of our stage plot, but I say always use the best tool for the job. Always.

    

I give you the Calvary stage plot. I took our set up team out to coffee and handed them this and an order of how to set things up: (I added the first one for effect) 1. Don't hate me. 2. Power 3. Avioms 4. Instruments 5. Audio Note: Coil the excess at the instrument. My tech director and I made a 25 ft quad box power cable that probably would have kept the Titanic from sinking (somehow). Aviom CAT5 cable runs on top of the quad box (we purchased the Aviom power distribution unit which replaced the need to have each Aviom individually powered, and audio cables run on top of that. The biggest thing that drives me bonkers on a stage is spaghetti. Save it for the Italian restaurant. XLR cables are notorious for not working, but you don't know that they don't work until everything is patched on top of them and you're starting sound check! Coil the excess at the instrument so there isn't a huge pile of linguini in front of the patch bay, and make sure all audio cables are laid on top and it makes re-patcing and tracing cables so much easier. Try it, you will thank me. Even if you don't set up every week, try it. For some reason, perhaps extra intentionality, we have less problems when we are tidier. The result? 25 minute set up time. What that translates into? Extra sleep. Nobody says "no" to extra sleep. Nobody. You're welcome. Collin