Fits & Starts Productions recently completed another “How-To” Church Sound Tour of the U.S. with a Midas Venice console as part of its P.A. system.
Fits and Starts founder Hector La Torre explains the progress of this year’s tours: “We’ve been offering workshops on many specialized areas of sound production and recording for 12 years. For six of those years, we specialized in seminars for people working in multichannel, surround sound configurations. We noticed a remarkably high amount of church sound volunteers were attending these surround sound workshops across the country. In fact, our research has shown that around 90 percent of people who operate church sound systems are volunteers with a rudimentary knowledge of sound production.
“These volunteers told me they attended the workshops because they couldn’t find any other hands-on instruction anywhere,” he continues. “The surround sound workshops were aimed at a more experienced level and the content was often over the heads of these volunteers. We came up with the church sound workshops as a means of addressing their needs more directly, by using equipment they encounter on a daily basis and by recommending equipment to improve their production capabilities.”
“The How-To Church Sound Tour educates volunteers so they can better operate the live sound systems presently in their churches and systems they are about to purchase. There is a national trend toward upgrading from consumer-grade to professional-grade audio equipment in houses of worship, and we’re here to help people make intelligent, cost-effective decisions to that effect.
“The Venice was part of a complete P.A. system that we bring to each host site. We operate the tour as you would a rock ’n’ roll tour: all the gear fits in a van, so it needs to be compact, yet sound great. We set out to teach students the entire signal chain, from microphone to speakers, so obviously the console needs to be top-quality, and it’s hard to beat Midas EQs and preamps, along with the Venice’s straightforward control surface. The Venice fits concert-quality sound into an easy-to-use, compact package, and working on it really does wonders for the volunteers’ confidence. And, since Venice comes in three frame sizes, we can match a console to a church according to their needs.”
