Line 6 PODxt Live: Let He Who Is Without Amp, Kick The First Jam
While Britton may consider amp modeling to be a mortal sin, Mike Ward of Suncrest Christian Church considers the Line 6 PODxt Live a blessing when it comes to controlling stage volume. It also helps keep guitarists happy, once Mike helps them see the light about the benefits of playing through a massive Bose PA, that is.
Bassists, of course, are used to plugging in direct, and present Mike with less of a hassle in an amp-less setup. I am reminded of one line from the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed be the Bassists, for they rarely start fights with the lead singer in the middle of a set, and are so often punctual."
MIKE WARD: Hi. I’m Mike Ward, and we’re at Suncrest Christian Church in St. John, Indiana, and we’re about to walk through the system design of the room.
This is just a standard microphone plugin box. This is where we plug in all our XLR cables and then we have five boxes on the stage that we use, and they run through a snake that goes through the floor, up the wall to the sound booth. This setup right here is for our bass player, so our bass player plugs his bass guitar in and it runs through the direct box, and then from the direct box runs into that box through the snake up to my console.
GRETCHEN HASSE: Yeah.
MIKE WARD: The bass player, why we don’t have our bass player use an amp is basically if you get an amp on the stage it’s going to be very loud, which is going to cause the audience to hear the bass amp versus the house sound, and in church sound the main obstacle is for it to sound good without being loud, and so that’s how we fight that. Instead of running an amp on the stage, we have no bass volume on the stage. It only comes out the house which allows for the house to sound better and not muddy it up.
[SUNCREST CHURCH PRAISE AND WORSHIP BAND/TEAM REHEARSING]
It’s not only -- The guitar players also go to a direct box. We use Line 6 POD pedals which have amp emulators built in them, and the way I like to look at this is electric guitarists like their amps really loud. Once again, they would cause a lot of volume in the audience, and I would be unable to manage that volume from the booth, so we have him run through a direct box with an amp emulator. And the way I like to put it, instead of him having the amp on the stage, the PA is now his amp. And so we actually do create sounds around how they sound coming out of the amp or the speaker versus now. So, it’s basically just another way of killing stage volume. Stage volume is a menace when it comes to church sound in my opinion because it really -- I mean if you look at the room it’s not very big. I’m very limited on how loud I can run it, so basically I can either run the PA over the stage or just not have any stage volume.
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