Hot Spot

We schedule three musical teams, or praise bands, at our church. Each Sunday, we hold two services and, in regular rotation, are the three praise bands.

They have become huge bands. When I first started leading the Audio Visual ministry at our church, we had a relatively small group of volunteers staffing the sound and visual systems. A typical praise band consisted of two or three vocals, a keyboard, a guitar, a bass and drums.

Now, our base of volunteers has grown substantially and our typical praise band consists of four or five vocals, two keyboards, two guitars, bass and drums. Sadly, our lighting and sound systems have not kept pace. We rehearsed last night and two of the vocalists were basically without monitors. So, yours truly, went out on a mission to find some hot spots and provide some relief to the monitoring environment on stage. I picked up four passive hot spots and one active hot spot. A hot spot is a point monitor that is specifically designed for vocalists on stage. A rather tight and focused dispersion pattern, along with a restricted low-end, makes this an excellent choice for praise bands with four and five singers on stage.

Our sound system only supports four monitor mixes… which would have seemed very generous when fielding 5 or 6 players. We field 10 or so players and the existing sound sytem is showing its limitations.

I picked up the hot spots from an online dealer’s home today as I needed them in time for this coming Sunday. What a fascinating little home business. All run out of their basement. They have a staff of six people and all their offices, service areas, and stock was scattered around the lower level of their house. Funky and cool.

We took the hot spots and wired them up this afternoon. Everything worked well. I will be interested to see how they work when we play on Sunday.