Asking Questions
In Pursuit of Excellence at Willow Creek
Shure Notes: Obviously a place like this doesn’t just spring up overnight. Tell us something about the history of Willow Creek.
MIKE: “The church began in 1975 as a high school youth group located in Park Ridge. Its first home was a movie theater in Palatine— the Willow Creek Theater — and for lack of a better name, it became Willow Creek. The church moved to this campus in 1981. Original construction was an auditorium with seating on the main floor and the center balcony —over the years pull-out seating was added and balconies as well. The church is undergoing construction again and the new auditorium should open in about a year.”
MIKE: “We have about 17,000 people on a typical weekend. There are five services on the weekend, three in our main auditorium and two “Axis” services, which are geared towards young adults in our activities center. We also have 2 mid-week worship services. In addition to these, “Elevate”, our junior high ministry, meets in here on Saturday mornings and “Student Impact”, the high school ministry, is in the Activities Center on Wednesday night.”
Shure Notes: The size of the congregation suggests that you probably have a large technical staff. How many people are involved with audio and production?
MIKE: “There are eight people here on the audio staff. But our entire production staff is around 30 and that includes video editors, lighting people, technical directors and people who kind of dabble in everything. But, as staff, we’re also the facilitators and we lead over 700 volunteers, who participate somewhere in the production ministry —everything from audio and video to lighting and staging. For the audio ministry, we have maybe 25 or 30 volunteers and we’re looking to at least double that because we have a very large building.”
Shure Notes: “Training so many volunteers must be a challenge. Are most of your volunteers musicians, or the kind of people who might have home studios?”
JEFF: “The people we try to look for are mostly people who are passionate about learning. They might know a little about sound engineering, but they are tenacious about asking tons of questions, getting their hands on gear, and are willing to learn the theory behind the technology. At the same time, for audio engineers, we really believe that these people are artists, and that as well as having this technical aptitude, there needs to be that musical gift as well. There is a dance that happens on the console and not every tech savvy person can be behind the board. These kind of people are the gems – extremely hard to find, so it’s a challenge. We have an unwritten policy of starting people in the children’s ministry or smaller venues because they have less complex gear – they can learn the fundamentals on a smaller mixing console in less demanding environments and then eventually kind of work up to what we have here.”
Theory and Practice: Getting Started
Shure Notes: Did all three of you start as volunteers at Willow Creek?
MIKE: “I grew up in this church and was in the junior high ministry. In high school, I thought production stuff was kind of cool, so I started on a little 6 channel mixer. Before I knew it, I was using a 12-channel mixer, then a 40-channel mixer. I grew along the way.”
JEFF: “I grew up in the area and started going to the church around my sophomore year of high school. After graduating I went to Columbia College of Chicago, studying sound engineering, and also was concurrently serving with the High School Ministry as an audio tech. So I was going to school learning the theory then would come here and get all the hands-on stuff. It was great. Soon, I was hired to take over as technical director for our children’s ministry, so I did that for a couple of years, really learning how to work at a church and I learned a lot technically as well. Eventually, the church added a monitor mix, something we hadn’t ever had. Another perk was that I got to build that system from scratch.”
SCOTT: “I’m a little older. I came in as a musician; I put myself through college playing music and obviously was around all of the gear and Shure products. I grew up in southern Illinois and ended up finishing my education at Webster University in St. Louis. They had a recording studio there, so I took some classes. I wanted to find a school that would teach audio, but I ended up learning in the school of hard knocks. I also worked for a local sound company and toured a little bit. I finally ended up getting involved in a church there, and engineered for seven years. When I was 28, I switched from being a musician to being the audio guy. I think the years of being a musician, playing in bars and clubs and on the concert circuit…all that experience just kind of contributed to what I do here.”
Personal Monitors at Willow
Shure Notes: What has your experience been with personal monitors here at Willow Creek?
MIKE: “A volunteer in one of our bands played guitar and was a Shure employee. He was on the development team for the PSM 600 — the first one. So, in 1997, right before that launched, he gave us a call and said, “Hey would you guys be interested in trying this out?” I was picking up the demo units the same week they were shipping. We were loaned a number of systems and started playing around with them, kind of figuring them out. The first time she used one, my wife who sings here, said, ‘this is unbelievable.’ So we’ve had not only production support, but also music and vocalist support for getting them. We started out small and we bought two units, then two more and now we have sixteen.”
Shure Notes: “Are they all PSM 600s?”
MIKE: “We actually now have a combination of wireless PSM 600’s and PSM 700’s. We really believe in investing in quality audio equipment. You know, we hold a church audio conference every year. We have eight hundred church technical artists show up and we talk about church technical ministry and gear. One of the things that Willow Creek has attempted to demonstrate is the real benefit of using professional-quality equipment. We are trying to educate our colleagues about the right tools to use.
“We’ve learned the hard way with buying equipment over the years, that if you buy something that is semi-professional at the consumer level, you’re not going to get the life span out of it and it can actually cost you more in the long run because you’re going to have to replace it or repair it more.
“We really strive to look at the options, and try to get the best value for the dollar. Nine times out of ten, Shure fits that, as far as value versus the cost and performance.”
Shure Notes: Who uses in-ear monitors here?
MIKE: “We started with our worship leader or lead vocalist because we only had one unit. They immediately fell in love with it because they didn’t have to share a mix.
“As we added more, we moved most of our vocalists over and got rid of our wedge monitors from the stage. Aesthetically, it really cleaned up the stage, and let everyone sing better. Then we moved our instrumentalists to personal monitors.
“Now we’re trying to move everyone toward using in-ears, but we still always have “old school” players, especially horn players who are kind of hesitant. Some of them say having an earpiece in their ear interferes with their ability to actually blow through their instrument.
“A lot of musicians are so used to using wedge monitors in live environments, like loud bars, that these in-ears are a complete change for them. They feel that they lose that sense of connection with each other and with the audience, and that’s a big drawback for in-ear monitors — that loss of ambiance. There are tricks you can do with ambient mics, placing them in strategic places to give back some of that, but even that is limited, especially during rehearsals. It’s a definite learning curve, and takes some education to get musicians comfortable with IEM.
“We have so many different services in a given week that our bands are not always the same ones. Our vocalists rotate, our bands rotate, an orchestra is set up on stage one week, a four-piece rhythm section the next. It’s always different. So we can’t keep it dialed in just right for a specific person because the next guitar player may not like the way that mix sounds.”
Click here for part II of this interview.
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