The sound techs at your church are at their best when no one in the worship service notices what they're doing. The only time that most of them get any recognition at all is when there is a sudden shriek of feedback or someone's mic isn't turned on, or the accompaniment track stops halfway through the song, and at that point, they're wishing they could hide under the mixing desk.

Many church sound techs don't come from the sound reinforcement profession--most are just ordinary folks, maybe a bit nerdy, with a penchant for knobs and buttons and blinking lights, and the willingness to give hours and hours in a thankless, anonymous role because they love what they do, and they love to serve the Lord and the church with what they've been given. And many of them could use a little help.

If you are a sound tech, and if you're looking for some help and encouragement as you hone your craft, you'll want to check out Behind the Mixer", a resource for church sound techs.

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(Oh, and by the way--we worship leaders may talk smack about you from time to time, sound guys, but the truth is that we love you and couldn't do what we do without you!)

(This is pretty much a no-brainer, but it took a long time for us to figure out that this might be a good way to do this, so I offer it for your consideration.)

We have three Sunday morning services at our church--the early service (8:30am) is our "traditional" service, where the music is mostly hymns and older worship choruses, accompanied by organ and piano. Our 9:45am and 11:15am services are "contemporary," where we have a full worship band (except for the last few months, when we've been without a drummer, but that's another story). As soon as most of the first-service crowd has cleared out, our sound techs begin playing walk-in music over the PA that is more geared toward our contemporary worship crowd. In the past, we have provided the sound techs with CDs that contain a variety of different kinds of songs, but for a long time we weren't too good about doing that consistently, so the same CDs kept getting used week after week.

Then one morning we were backstage before one of the contemporary services, listening to the walk-in music and observing that it was the same stuff that was used for the last several weeks, and someone suggested that we should get an iPod and create a new playlist each week and let the sound techs use that instead of CDs. (Like I said earlier, it seems like a no-brainer.)

So we got an iPod Nano, the 4Gb model, and now I take it home each week and assemble a playlist for the following week. This gives me the opportunity to tailor the playlist to the sermon content, if I wish, and I can also create several weeks' worth of playlists at once and just have the sound techs play the current week's list.

You need a cable for this--one with a 1/8-inch stereo plug on one end and a pair of RCA plugs on the other end is perfect, because the sound guys can plug it into the "tape" input on the board.