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I’m reading HaVeFuN — the neck crane is the reason we have a hard time getting folks to run the projection computer — I can hear my kids now “aww mom, if something goes wrong, everyone turns around and stares at me.” Of course this happens whether the error is their fault or not.

Not neck-craning is KIND — a fruit of the spirit. Learning not to neck-crane is actually VERY spiritual. Trust me.

OK, I’m a former PowerPoint/video guy (I quit a little over a year ago now) and sound guy (only because they could never find a sound guy so they assumed I could both sound and video at the same time). For those of you complain about PP don’t just blame us when things go wrong. I’d show up one night not planning to anything but worship like everyone else and 10 minutes before service starts a band member would had me a outline for the night and expect me to be ready to go on time. Thankfully after about the first year or so I got used to this. I did it 7 minutes. Another big problem is when the band decides to repeat a verse or skip a verse–or add a whole new verse–and they just assume that the video guy knows. Video guys aren’t mind readers you have to tell them things! And working in the youth service with equipment that handed down equipment old than me (I was 14 at the time–rather young to be the sole tech guy during the service!) isn’t easy. I’d have calculate about a 7 second delay between the time I press the key to the time that the next slide would show up on the screen. Being a sound/video guy is like be an umpire, the good one are the one you don’t notice. Tell your sound/video guys they’re doing a good job every now and then–and not the sympathy I feel sorry you wrecked the whole worship service you did good, please not that.

I used to BE the sound guy at my church. Quick and easy solution: I made a little sign in Photoshop and printed, matted, and framed it. What did it say?

“Please stare at me; it will help me fix it faster.”

It pretty much stopped after people started noticing this.

As the sound man at my church, I have been on the receiving end of a few of those neck cranes. I like to thank that those little sound freak outs are Gods way of waking up someone sleeping during the service(maybe the sound man). been there, done that, love your post

Tracy M. Lapeer Mi

I’m married to the sound guy. I see it as one on my marital duties to crane my neck when something goes wrong.

I used to have a Pastor in the early days of our church plant who would regularly (like every week) make a comment at the start of the sermon about needing more “foldback” or something similar. He was not known for suffering fools and was rather Type A/Choleric and it always made me cringe a little and feel very, very sorry for the sound people especially in the weekly debrief meeting.

Probably the Pastor knew to much about sound mixing as he was probably the sound guy as well as the Preacher when the church first started!

It’s a knee jerk reaction for me. Also… as a sound technician, I hear stuff most normal church goers might miss. I probably do the neck crane more than anyone at my church.

The other thing I tend to notice (as a musician) is when some one from the worship team plays a bad chord or botchesthe lyrics… bonus points when it’s our worship leader. He makes a funny face everytime he screws up. I often think I’m one of the few in the crowd that actually notices.

So true! I stumbled upon your blog and think it’s laugh-out-loud-sitting-in-a-room-solo funny. Nice.

Guilty as charged. Had to pass it on to the sound guy at my church with an assurance that I will never neck-crane him again. LOVED Jessica’s circle-dancing sound man (how creative is THAT?) and Andrew’s Photoshopped sign. Perfect. (“I AM the pot.. only keep watching if you NEVER want it fixed” might be another good one).

I was raised by a sound guy so I knew from a very early age how horrible it is to be the sound guy when something like that happens. As I got older and I learned the system I got my first hand experience at being on the receiving end of the neck crane and must say it.was.awful.

The worse part was that the first time it happened it was because the pastor was messing with his very old wireless and it caused sever problems up in the booth. I’ll admit I did cause feedback a time or two myself, but it’s one of the worst feelings you can imagine. Standing between God and his congregation. lol.

The absolute worse feeling is being the sound guy and dropping a hymnal while adjusting the aging equipment, that deserved a neck crane. lol.

Since giving a side hug with a crick in your neck can be awkward, it’s in your best interest quit the sound guy crane!

As a sound tech, I have a little secret to share…when you turn around and neck crane us, 9 times out of 10 we will frown studiously, bend over the board as if we were doing something serious and intense, look back up and smile. And 98% of the time you think it’s better. Not kidding.

Can I also just add that I think saying “the sound guy crane” makes it sound like some cheesy white guy dance from the early 90s?

I like when there are sound glitches. And other mishaps like when the pastor forgets his place or the praise team starts singing too early. It reminds everyone that church isn’t a formal production. How about let’s let church “happen”, bugs and all. It’s more real. So I wish for more glitches.

My husband is a sound guy. And he feels the same way. You small churches out there don’t know how good you have it. You will do well to keep things simple. As cordless and cueless as possible.

What you people need is quality equipment.

Be nice to your soundpeople – and especially the projector guys – I’ve been both myself, and the projector guys basically have to tune out worship and ignore God so they can concentrate on flipping slides on time, and not distracting you.

That said, probably the time I felt worst for the sound/projector guy (luckily not me this particular night) was the Ash Wednesday service where, a couple minutes in, up pops up on the screen “Windows has installed updates and needs to restart – will restart in 5 minutes” – the “Restart Later” button was greyed out for some reason. So, he did his best, pulled the dialog off the screen, but 5 minutes later we all got to watch windows reboot on the big screen.

There are probably 2 causes of sound malfunctions at church – Acts of God and Acts of the Sound Guy. I think God is probably in total control of the microphones and often uses them for his purposes (and he has a great sense of humour).

Can you blame the sound guy if God really wants to wake up the guy in the 3rd row because to sermon is so awesome, or teach humility to the worship leader?

God works in mysterious ways, He is more mysterious than the sound guy.

I’m the director of production at my church, which means the audio department reports to me, and for the most part, they are the consummate professionals. But in that rare instance where you actually notice the sound department (meaning that something has gone wrong), I find myself doing this neck crane, and it bugs the crap out of me that it’s a knee-jerk reaction with me.

On the other hand, I don’t run sound. Not because I can’t, but because I won’t. I’ve got too much other stuff to wrangle on Sunday mornings.

I’ve done production team work for years, so I always keep an eye on what’s happening with AVL. It’s purely habitual, I suppose. Many times, I’ve had to slip back to the booth to help resolve an issue during service, so it makes sense.

The general neck crane, though? E-V-I-L. Good on ya, Jon!

AMEN!!!!!
I’m a sound person of a 3 yr old church that just moved into our new building. Truth is, whether the church is mobile or in one location, microphones have a huge vendetta against the Most High…
and sound people constantly have to repent of their vendettas against a ‘sound guy neck crane’ congregation

THANK YOU JON!!! As the Stage Manager for my church I can’t stand it either when we get those annoying feed backs and buzzes in the sound system it just makes it worse when we get the “Sound Guy Neck Crane”. I hope that you start a movement to quit the “Sound Guy Neck Crane”!

I LOVE reading your blog!!! Keep it up!

Microphones hate God.

Microphone stands hate Jon Acuff, and cause him to sit uncomfortably close to Carlos Whittaker on a stool.

I think you’re writing is great and hilarious too! I’d say the lengths of the posts are fine with me.

I have been the recipient of the “sound guy crane neck”. My old church had just gotten a new fancy sound system and my ADD got the best of me. It was in the very back of our church and one of our lady singing groups was up front singing a “special” and I was playing with a pen and trying not to touch all of the buttons around me. It got to the spoken word part of the song at the EXACT time I dropped my pen cap in between the CD and tape player. Silly me, I try to grab the cap with the pen, and accidentally hit the “Play” button on CD player. And “Flood” by Jars of Clay comes over the sound system in mid-sentence. Yeah, got the crane neck and a talking to from the parents over lunch about paying attention and not being distracted (not easy to do)

On the PowerPoint subthread:

Anybody else have a PowerPoint Preparer at your church who agonizes over how to illustrate long vowels? Ours feels compelled to add dashes (—) after the word that gets held over a couple of beats, so “Let me be your servant, too” becomes “Let me be your servant— too.” I keep thinking I’m supposed to sing the dashes, maybe with deet-deet-deet sounds.

w/v booke: the Olde Englishe spelling of “book.” Same book, just soundse bettere.

Oh, if only I wasn’t the 76th commenter!

Of course, everyone knows that Satan is the prince of the power of the air, and microphones have electricity, which is “of the air,” thus it is governed by “the prince,” so he easily messes it up.

That’s how it was explained to me by a lady pastor.

I get the sound guy neck crane pretty regularly. Since I am the youth pastor, too, the crane ususally involves every one of the kids turning around in sync with each other with giant smiles on their faces like, “Haha, Steve screwed up again.”

It’s always helpful when one of the “professional singers/musicians” makes a very obvious (i.e. verbal) “suggestion” during the service.

I also have had someone come upstairs to my booth and tell me that “everyone” in the crowd is complaining about the loudness of the music, so I need to turn it down. Meanwhile it’s just two people (i.e. his parents) who are complaining, everyone else is happy.

By the way both of those were the same guy. And he is partially deaf. Fun times.

wv “tring”: the fake way sound guys “fix” the levels to satisfy everyone without ever doing a thing. “I’m tring to get the monitor turned up for you”

I have some friends in a band from Illinois and they’ve noted how remarkable it is when they are playing at a church in the south and the sound goes wrong the preacher always seems to pray and ask that satan be banned. So true we always seem to blame satan for tampering with the sound.

Our PowerPoint is run from a different room, so there’s no one to neck-crane to when the words are wrong. We have very few sound issues at our church (which is generally attributed to the fact that our sound guys are actual pros with both training and the ear for it).

The fun part is when we have issues during the sermon. Our pastor used to be a coach and will actually call out the sound guy while he’s in the pulpit.

Satan ain’t messing with your sound system…it is lack of knowledge…

SIDEHUGS!!! Hahahaha!

Glad to know that it happens everywhere…mega churches, small churches, anywhere! And oh yes, it happened last Sunday…..

We used to always have two techs on the board. Whenever something like feedback or missing mic cues happened, the neck cranes would start….they would only see one tech standing there as one of the techs would just duck, so it looked like the one standing up was the culprit!

Oh wow. This is so true.

Every Sunday, I silently congratulate myself on being a computer tech, not a sound tech. Computer techs get to sit in chairs, hidden behind the rising walls of the booth. Sound techs generally stand up.

Mwahaha, sucks for them.

I do not like side hugs

but i DO like this post. I laughed out LOUD and I can think of no better way to end a stressful day than by laughing about funny things we do at church. Thanks for the laughs! (and yes, that was me before about the side hugs…that was rude huh? Sorry! )

hhaha… you forgot about the people who blame this on “the enemy”. believe it or not, i actually know someone who used to “bind up the spirit of the airways” (also whenever her computer went down) and managed to refer that back to a passage in Daniel!

I work at a mega-church doing tech stuff. Lighting, mostly. My booth is behind and above the sound guy, separated by several rows of seating. And we’re good at sound, so we don’t generally get neck cranes. However, I have gotten the close cousin to the neck crane, the ignorant thanks/request. Common requests to the lighting console include:

-Could you turn the heat up/down?
-Thanks for making [insert] sound good.
-Can you see how my child in children’s ministry is doing?
-Could you unlock that door?

Being a lighting guy is much more fun than an audio guy. Trust me – if I screw up, you know – as the entire sanctuary plunges into darkness. MUCH more annoying than bad sounding audio. Either that, or when a bulb explodes in the middle of a sermon (sounds surprisingly like a shotgun, and of course I’m the only person who knows what it is and doesn’t duck).

I am the sound guy at my church and I agree that microphones hate God.

The sound guy at my wedding was a hero and even made the newspaper. He put my dad’s telephone call from the hospital through the sound system so he everyone could here him give me away.

I long for simple acoustics in musical worship however…

Something sound geeks and God have in common, when we do our jobs prefectly, no one knows we are there.

{realist}
Most audio problems in church are a direct result of not having the proper equipment due to shoestring budgets, and being expected to maintain concert level production standards with said sub par equipment, all in very poor acoustic spaces where sound re-inforcement was an afterthought.
{/realist}

Its always a good challenge!

it’s not just microphones that hate God; it’s technology in general. some weeks i spend more time wrestling with technology than i spend with people … “killed by technology” will be on my epitaph.

I must say… as a sound guy in a fairly mega church in Memphis, these things should not happen with the frequency that you have explained. So I say… go ahead… crane your neck at the sound and let him/her know that they suck and should know how to prevent these things from happening. It should not go from a perfect sound check to unbearable feedback during the service. Whoever is behind that board needs to get their act together.

i am a sound crew & i lead a volunteer team consist of video & powerpoint crew as well.

the video control and powerpoint crew are not visible to the congregation – they are seated in a tinted glass room. because we work as a team, anything from slow lyrics, powerpoint, video not playing, and all the sound problem you can possibly imagine happens, the stage sound person gets the neck crane.

he/she is the most visible crew -seated by the stage. :-p

love all the comments. at least we know we are not alone. haha.

Andrew LONGHOFER, the little sign is a great idea!

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