Hookin' it all up.
Work smart not hard.

I must say that this has been a very difficult lesson for me to learn. It's difficult to learn because it has a way of sneaking up on you in a very subtle way. Let's take a look at it.

Ok, you're a start up church on the move. The decision to have live music with a rock/pop edge is made and that means a full band, and that means work for someone. Considering you are reading this page, I'm gonna guess that someone is you.

Setting up a sound system for a portable church is going to be something you do every single week for years. When we started Fully Alive one of the choices that I made as technical director is one that I regretted every time we set up our sound system. Let me explain.

Most sound systems grow from humble beginnings to become the required tool for the job. It doesn't happen over night, it evolves. This is what usually happens.

You buy a mixer, you buy a snake, you buy some mics, and you buy some "stuff", you know, all that gear that sets next to the sound guy. A tape deck for recording a sermon, a CD player to play some "walk-in" music, maybe an EQ to fight feedback, or an effects device to make the vocals sound better. As this sound system evolves the amount of cables that have to be plugged into the mixer grows and grows. Eventually there is quite a number of cables.

Until December 2001 our sound system had 23 feeds from the stage, 5 outputs to the stage, 3 stereo playback devices, 4 stereo effects devices, equalizers, 8 channels of compression on inserts, all the "usual suspects". That makes for something like 63 connections at the back of our mixer. It didn't start being that many but it had grown over the years. All those connections, even though most of them were fairly well labeled, took time to plug in, and, it was very easy to plug them into the wrong holes.

If you are like most young or portable churches you have a small pile of gear sitting next to the mixer on the back table and a snarl of cables. Start adding up all the time you spend plugging that stuff in and think about what else you could be doing with that time.

Here is the answer, although it is a tiny bit confusing. The answer involves some boxes and special cables.

If we examine the way big rock and roll tours connect their gear we can learn some valuable lessons. If you take a look at the cases that big mixers live in you will notice an extra amount of space back where the cables plug in, usually there is a door that flops up to give you access to this area. This portion of the case is called the Dog House. The most important reason for having a dog house on your case is that it allows you to store cable that remains attached to your mixer. So what stays connected to the mixer?

The part of the cable that stays connected to the mixer is called the "fan out". A well-designed sound system will have a minimum of 3 wires attached to the mixer case, a power cord, a feed to the stage, and a feed to your local gear, which is usually stacked in a rack. The trick is to make the feed to the stage and the local gear as easy as possible.

Companies such as Whirlwind make large multi-conductor cables that have a single connector in the middle of it that easily disconnects, these connectors are called "multi-pin connectors". What this allows you to do is to leave everything connected to the mixer, fold the tail of the fan out back into the dog house and then put the lid of the mixer on for transport. The other half of the cable is coiled up and carefully put into the back of your rack. What this does for you is create one connection that could have been several. It also insures that things get set up the same way all the time because the connector can only be put together one way.

Likewise, Whirlwind also sells snakes that have disconnects in them so that you would disconnect the fan out, leave it in the dog house and then coil the snake into it's box. Once again, this would save you several connections that could be done wrong if you were in a rush.

Multi-connectors are an alternative to a "one cable at a time" method of plugging in, but amazingly enough I chose not go the multi-pin route. Why?

That is a question I ask myself every time I set up the sound equipment, and every time I'm on vacation and one of the guys calls me up and asks why this or that isn't working. So, what was I thinking back then?

This was my line of reasoning, and therefore, should NOT be yours.

One - "It doesn't take THAT long to plug in these cables, I can do this just fine".

Thinking back on it, there is a bit of pride in that statement. I just figured it isn't that big a deal and there is no reason I can't plug in a few cables, well that was over 5 years ago and since we do services 2 days a week that is over 500 times we have had to set up the sound system in the past 5 years. That's a lot of patching.

Two - "Well, if one of those pins in the big multi connector goes bad, it's gonna take a lot to fix it".

Well, considering I am completely "soldering iron illiterate" it would take a lot to fix a bent pin in a multi-connector BUT there are usually spares in most multi connect cables and I can always substitute a single cable in a pinch if something stops working all of a sudden.

Recently Fully Alive made the change from single cables to a custom designed Whirlwind multi-connect system and it is AWESOME. The guys at Whirlwind do wonderful work, they like to call it "art in copper" (the conductor inside the cables).

My recommendation is to "count - add - and purchase". Count the number of connections you currently have, add some for growth, and then plunk down the money to purchase and do it right. After 5 years of plugging things in one at a time I have to tell you that I will not be looking back.