Shout 2009 Conference 2

Here’s some photo’s from the Shout Event

Shout 2009 Conference 1

Over Easter ‘Equippers’ had our annual church leadership, youth and arts conference, Shout 2009 “A Genesis Moment”. We held the conference in the Auckland Town hall from the Thursday Night through to Saturday night, then we had Sunday services there.

Our Guest speakers were Chris Hill, Reggie Dabbs, Sam Monk, Russell Evans and Libby and Wyne Huirua and they were awesome and the whole event was amazing along with a bunch of other superlatives.

From the technical side it was a big ask on our Equippers technical teams, but with a huge amount of planning, dedication and work we not only got through it we did an awesome job. Our music and dance teams like to do things big so we had to cater for a lot of people on stage and a lot of transitions which adds up to a lot of gear. This year we wanted to focus on trying to reduce the stage sound, we did this through placing the guitar amps off stage and hooking them up with extenders, the other big noise reduction was to use in ear monitors for all the stage performers which meant we could run a minimal number of stage wedges. We also this year used some frontfill speakers for the first time as we always had a hole in our sound in the front 4 rows as our line array is not large enough to cover the whole venue.

We had a great event, not much sleep but a whole lot of fun. Our only gear failure was our trust Yamaha M7CL which decided to go on the blink 15min before Friday nights main event so all our sound check settings were lost and the mix had to get built on the fly. We learnt a valuable lesson on backing up to external media for all things digital. We had to eventually replace the desk with a rental on the Saturday as it fell over again several times on the Saturday, the difference being we had backups on USB thumb drives that we could reload from in 30 seconds but it don’t help the heart rate when you are about to go into the final night with unreliable gear. So our Yamaha went into get fixed and is back now good as new, it appeared that a poer surge did some damage, I am awaiting the final report.

See below for our setup diagrams that I created for the event as part of the planning process.