John Mills:

Volume Control at

Bayside Church

When Shure Notes first hooked up with John Mills, about five years ago, he was doing FOH for Chris Tomlin. Later, he had signed on with Shane & Shane to manage their new production company. And two years hence, he is ensconced in Northern California, heading the Worship Arts team at Bayside Church and doing FOH for its breakout Worship Leader, Lincoln Brewster.

A longtime friend of Shure and contributing columnist to Worship Musician, we knew that John would have practical hints for audio teams taking that first, important in-ear step.

Were you involved with Bayside before hooking up with Linc?
No, I knew Lincoln from a few dates he had done with Chris and they knew each other. We met at a couple different festivals I was doing with Chris and hit it off since Linc is actually kind of a tech-head, too – he’s a very accomplished sound engineer as well an amazing musician. He has actually mixed a good portion of his last few nationally-released CD projects.

Where were you living then?
In Birmingham, Alabama.

And now you’re in Northern California.
Right. I grew up in Pennsylvania and spent a few years with a ministry in Michigan. After that I moved to Birmingham because some of the friends I met in Michigan were going there to start up a new ministry. I was part of that for a few years and then worked for a company called Student Life, as their technical director, for about four years. That’s where I met Chris. From there, I went on with Shane and Shane for about a year managing their production company – roadies LLC. Then on to Bayside to work with Lincoln.

You’ve been at Bayside a little over a year now. So you must have faced some of the issues that we’re talking about this month in terms of The Quiet Stage – keeping stage noise down. Can we talk about that?
We’ve done a lot of things. Bayside is actually a great representation of a place where the worship leader, Linc, understands it and it’s benefits to him as a musician as much as all the people in the house. He’s even gotten the band to understand. We have no amps on stage. The only sound coming from the stage is an acoustic drum kit. And we have that behind a shield.

What do you do for the guitars?
They are all direct, through Line-6 POD pedal boards. The POD is basically just a little pedal board that does it all. You don’t need an amplifier; it has a cabinet emulator in it, so we run it direct to the sound system. Linc made up a bunch of custom presets. He sat down with a bunch of great guitar records and tweaked and tweaked until you couldn’t tell the difference between the part he was playing and the one on the record.

And everyone has personal monitors?
Yes. That’s the biggest thing. Everybody has them. Since there are no amps, the musicians have to rely on our engineers to get them a great mix. We are blessed since we have 2 Digidesign Venue Consoles, one at Monitors and the other at FOH. We can do just about anything a musician needs. If you don’t have the ability to have a separate monitor desk as we do here at Bayside, then invest in an AVIOM system where the musicians can dial their own mixes. It’s essential that you have good personal monitors when dealing with a quiet stage.

I’ve found that most people don’t like personal monitors when they first start using them. The problem is, most people shove them in their ears and expect to have them sound great immediately. It’s a brain game to getting them to sound good. Your ears are plugged and even though you’ve got to get everything you need to hear in there, you don’t have the most important part, the ambience of the stage or room.

With wedges, you still hear the drums and amps on stage, but with personal monitors, you might not think of putting drums into your mix, so with a silent stage you are only going to hear drums through plugged ears and that’s not an articulate sound. You need to put a bit of EVERYTHING in your mix.

A couple of our background singers were having trouble with their pitch. I listened to their monitor mix and realized there were no keyboards or guitars for them to get a pitch from.

It’s a learning process.

Personal monitors can make the band sound great, but sometimes performers can feel cut off from the audience. So we use ambient mics to capture the sound of the audience. The trick is to use them as a little spice – a tiny bit of ambient sound in the mix goes a long way. That’s the trick.

 

We thank John for his helpful insights, the result of over fourteen years on the road and behind the scenes with leading Christian artists. To learn more about what’s happening at Bayside, visit www.BaysideOnline.com.