9:16AM, Sunday.
Church starts at 9:30. Up walks the guy doing special music to close the service with his iPhone in hand and asking that question, and expecting a sound check, too. He was supposed to play the piano and it had been ready to go since a little after 8:00, but that's another story that I won't share here.
What's a sound technician to do? His song was the final illustration of the pastor's message, so we had to find a way to get things plugged in. Well, it should have been easy. An "iPod cable" with 1/8" stereo mini plug on one end and pair of quarter-inch phone plugs on the other and we'd have been all set. But we weren't able to find a cable like that since someone had "borrowed" it.
"And you can't play the piano?!," I ask. No.
Hmm... Okay, let's see what we can do.
More and more, we're seeing iPods and iPhones used as music sources for accompaniment. There are a couple things that you can do. One is to use the infamous iPod cable at the console. That's the easy way, but don't forget that you can also use a laptop or computer audio interface to convert the 1/8" output to XLR.
That's particularly handy, especially if the musician wants to control the iPod or iPhone from the platform/stage.
When using an iPhone for audio playback, make sure to set the phone to Airplane Mode in order that when the phone rings (even if in Silent Mode) that the song isn't interrupted. But who would ever get a call during the worship service?
Thankfully, I don't speak from experience on that one. Just a word of caution.
1 comment
Matt Shaffer
Dave,
We had a young lady show up with an Ipod a few Sundays ago. You know our kit includes plenty of ways to get the Ipod into the mix, but she brought with her one of the old 1/8" to Cassette adaptors. HAHAHAHA. We used it for kicks and giggles and it worked fairly well. We threw the cassette into the deck, hit play and away we went!