WATS!!

This week, I made the harrowing, rainy trip across the state from Ann Arbor, to Kalamazoo, to Muskegon to go to the first ever Worship Arts Technology Summit, presented by Shure Microphones, Yamaha Corporation, Yamaha Commercial Audio, and Martin Professional Lighting. Sarah and I made the drive up on Sunday afternoon, and, after a long trip that included accidentally finding ourselves in the completely wrong township, we arrived at Maranatha, incredibly relieved to move in to the Gorton’s cottage.
On the first night, everyone attending the summit gathered to introduce themselves, and we all went around to tell what role we serve in the church, and, ultimately, why we were there. I began to feel increasingly pressured and uncomfortable as the people ahead of me explained how just last week they ran an Avril Lavigne concert, or how they’ve spent the last 45 years running boards at music festivals. “What do I say?!”, I thought. “How do I explain that I’m only here because I think I should be…?”
When my turn came around, I stood up and, despite my best efforts to fabricate some fantastic story about hobnobbing with Bono, I told the truth. “I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I’m a musician, and my heart is alive when I sing.” I glanced around nervously, almost certain that the bouncers were coming to carry me out by my elbows at that admission. I continued. “But God brought me here. Somehow He opened doors to get me out of class and halfway across the state – me, the least likely of anyone – and He’s beginning to grow a heart in me to get off the stage and behind a board. I don’t really know what I’m doing here, but ask me again at the end of the week, and I’m confident that I will have learned something.”
My experience at WATS really centers around those first moments of introduction and that confession. Over the following days, I took page after page of notes, halfway motivated by the expectation that God would come over the front-of-house to tell me exactly what He brought me there to do. After all that close listening, I could talk all day about dB-SPL, parametric EQ, the inverse square law, and microphone directionality. I doubt, though, that anyone really cares to hear every bullet point from the M7CL lecture school. So – as any clever writer would do, I will slyly use an analogous story to explain both sides.
On day two, I went to a lecture called “Sound Check and Monitoring Essentials”, and Randy Weitzel from Yamaha Commercial Audio taught us what’s called “ringing out” a microphone. The idea is to search for frequencies that cause a speaker’s microphone to feed back. Like the rest of your EQ, you do this by turning the volume up until you begin to hear the ringing over the PA. Once you hear it, you can sweep frequencies to figure out which frequency is ringing, and then extract it from your mix.
With this practical lesson under my belt, it occurred to me that maybe God didn’t bringing me here to teach me how to ring out a microphone. Maybe He brought me here to ring ME out.
Again and again throughout the week, various different people asked me about MY role in the church, and MY feelings about worship, and what I’M doing to worship, and to help others do the same. I often chuckled nervously and tried to contrive an answer, but God was slowly turning up the intensity and starting to show me the distracting frequencies in my life that are a barrier against clear communication between my heart and His. For me, these frequencies are things like worrying about school, worrying about my career, idolizing relationships with people I love, and trying to better myself to overcome self-doubt. God boosted the gain on all of these concerns this week by taking me out of school, causing me to question my future, causing instability in valuable relationships, and surrounding me with people who are professionals, and amazing at what they do. The extreme discomfort and painful ringing that resulted really served to show me what some of these bad life frequencies are, and there He was, clear as if He were wearing the Shure Beta 53 headset, and coming through the PA: “Seek first His Kingdom, and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you ask well”.
I learned a lot about technology this week, and probably have residual lung damage from the smoke coming off of my pen as I tried to take notes on ALL of it. I’m really excited to be a more competent audiotech, and to be on a first-name basis with some really premiere people in the industry. Put me behind an M7 – I can tweak your compression, fuss with your EQ, pan you, fade you, pad you, give you a high pass filter, or mix your monitors. I set out to learn so that I could stop worrying about what God wanted me to do with technology, and, in the end, I kid of did. But God works in great ways that are not always our ways, and instead of teaching me so that I could stop worrying, He is teaching me that WHEN I stop worrying, and those nagging frequencies fade away, then I will finally be able to hear His voice clearly.