Bridges Community Church in Fremont, CA has a special place in my heart. I attended there for several years, played on various worship teams at multiple venues, brought my baby girl there to enjoy band practices (she loved to climb the stairs with me while the band belted out Lincoln Brewster songs), went to Bible studies, spent time with their pastors, went to celebrations with my wife, changed oil for single mothers there, made deep friendships and many more memories. I’ve since moved on to call Resonate Church my home after Bridges helped plant it.
I met Pat Caples while at Bridges and always respected his ability and ear as a soundman. I remember the first time I played on a team with him behind the mixing board. I was on a “I want to play flat wound strings and sound like a Motown record by rolling off the tone control” kick with my bass. It wasn’t quite working. I asked him for feedback after practice and I recall him gently saying something along the lines of “I know what you’re trying to do but there are better ways to achieve it”. He made several suggestions. I went home and tried them. They worked at home. That Sunday I tried them at service. He was right.
I have made it a point to always get the soundman’s perspective since then. Once I started this blog, Pat was one of the first people I was anxious to interview…
Interview conducted April 10, 2015 on location at Bridges Community Church.
Ted: Easter just completed, can you help my readers get a sense of what its like preparing for Easter?
Pat: Easter and Christmas are the Church’s two biggest events on the calendar that we focus towards. We want to make as big an impact as possible in those things as we recognize that:
1) We want to celebrate those [events] (and especially Easter as that is the essence of our faith – we’re celebrating the resurrected Christ and we want to make the most of that moment.)
2) We also recognize that is one of the two times of year that people who don’t regularly attend (or never attend) are gonna show up. So we want to make that impact with them – not that we want to do a show, but to help them see/experience that moment we are celebrating of the risen Lord. Celebrating the fact that Christ did what he said he did – that He is God and that He came back.
So we want to structure our programs, our services for that. In the case of Easter we do an event on that weekend starting with Good Friday, a big Easter Egg hunt on Saturday and services on Easter Sunday. We structure it to be a celebration of who Christ is. So we tend to pull out all stops for Easter. We’re not a church that does a theatrical type production. We try to do something that is impactful with our music, our programming, our staging, lighting, etc.
Ted: Would you say Easter, in terms of the amount of work involved as a tech director, is more than Christmas?
Pat: Objectively I wanna say more, but that is because I just came out of it [laughs]. Honestly, I really think it is more than Christmas. For us here at Bridges it is a full weekend. The Easter Egg hunt attracts our community and had four to five thousand people this year. Now as the tech ministry we do some stuff [at the egg hunt], its not the biggest thing we do, but it is another thing we support. The Children’s ministry are the point people for that but we support them with sound systems and different things. But yes, to answer more directly, Easter is more work. With Christmas its spread out over a month, we have different events but is really focused on one day, Christmas Eve. Easter tends to be three days, more rehearsals, more lighting, more musicians, etc. One thing we did this year which we really haven’t done in the past, is with our staging we made a decision to make each event unique. Good Friday is more somber, darker and the set designs, songs, band instrumentation etc is different from Easter Sunday because of that. This leads to more rehearsals for the sound, lights and video.
We brought in some rental lighting this year so we had to do more programming. Because it’s rental equipment, and like every known church in the known universe we have budgets, we have to maximize budgets and we made the choice to not have the rental lighting for the entire week because that costs more. We bring it in on Thursday and scramble from our preparation to execution. Everything takes longer than you think it does. With the Easter Egg hunt we really couldn’t dive into the lighting changes until that event was over. Good Friday ends late, we did some set changing and setup afterwards to prepare for Sunday, Easter Egg hunt is early the next [Saturday] morning… so it is a compressed schedule and it causes late hours.
We’ve created our own grief but we want to make this time impactful. Its hard and the stress is that you want that moment to be amazing for the congregation. Again, we’re not trying to put on a show but we want people to have face to face encounters with God. We want Easter to be something really, really special. Not that we don’t want Good Friday to be as well. But Good Friday is generally going to be the Church body [regular attendees], Easter is where people are generally going to invite others to Church so we want to make it extra special for them. As a tech team we are trying to enhance that experience to make it more impactful for them.
We went all out this year, and we had a lot of people come to Christ this past week. Its totally worth it but it does take its toll. We’re doing this interview on Friday, a week after Good Friday, and honestly it took me until yesterday until my body felt normal. I had aches and pains from going up and down ladders, being on my feet all day, running around and not being as young as I like to think I am [laughs]. It does it to everybody on staff – everybody gets worn out. You expend yourself but it was totally worth it.
Ted: Next question: Let’s say there is a new soundman for a Church, somebody brand new, what advice would you give them?
Pat: Our process is a little more streamlined than some other Churches. What we wanna do is… we never want to set someone up to fail. Because everyone has pretty high expectations for themselves. The more you learn, I think the higher your expectations become. And those are the expectations we put on ourselves. Number one, what we want to do is have the person observe and that is key. One of our big training elements is you’re not gonna touch the board for a while. You’re going to sit in a position we call an A2 (audio 2). You will be learning the setup and assisting the front of house A1. A lot of it is watching and understanding what is going on.
Now, there is only so much you can learn from watching obviously. We want the A2 to experience what the A1 is doing – the cues he’s hitting, how he communicates with the band, how he arrives at his mix, how he walks the room… nuances and technical stuff. Its a mentoring experience where you are watching someone who knows what they’re doing. And not everyone is suited for audio – its a unique gift. You have to be part musician, part babysitter and part technician. You have to have real people skills.
The best people I’ve seen do this have really excelled in people skills. If you aren’t able to break the barrier (and we’ve done a pretty good job of breaking the barrier between musicians and tech team)… I hear horror stories of the people in the booth (the tech team) and the people on stage (the musicians) who are at odds with each other to the point where it is uncomfortable. There is a real tension at some churches. I learned a long time ago that you have to be part of the band if you will. It needs to be a cohesive team amongst the tech guys and the musicians. It can create uncomfortable moments and major distractions where people in the pews are never going to get those face to face moments with God because of that tension. Its a point where Satan can use real spiritual warfare.
If the tech lead and worship leader create a culture of working together it flow top down. Its a culture that’s created from leadership. Its something that a new guy has to pick up on and realize that it is part of his job. So after observing, little by little we increase the responsibilities for the A2. I tend to go slower just because there is a lot to learn. Some people think you can just walk in and do it, but you really can’t to be good at it.
Doing sound is almost as visible as a musician. Because if you have a bad day and your mix is not good, its how people are hearing the Gospel. Whether its the music or the sermon, if its not done right, you’re not gonna tell the Gospel. We look at each Sunday as being a story. If the tech guys are butchering the sound, you’re not going to tell that story.
That’s kind of long winded…
Ted: No, that’s great information! In fact you mentioned the tech person being a musician. The best soundmen I’ve observed were “playing” the mixing board like an instrument.
Pat: That’s exactly how I look at it. It takes a little while to get there. As a sound tech you have to know the songs. You have to know the songs almost as well as the band. You know where the bridges are, you know where the solo is going to come up and be prepared. You have to know when to pull stuff out. You have to know how to make space. If you have a wall of sound, generally speaking there is no space for the music to breathe for those dynamics to really come out.
Ted: So I take it whoever is doing sound for a given Sunday will be present at band practice.
Pat: Yes. There are always exceptions but 99% of the time the answer is yes. You may have listened to a Hillsong recording, but that’s not exactly what the band is going to be doing regarding the song. The arrangement and the cues all could be totally different. But here’s the thing: you may have been at practice and know the songs well but come Sunday, you have to be prepared as a sound tech for the moment when the worship leader is going to change things up. Its a Spirit lead thing – you can feel how the Spirit is moving in the room. The leader might want to emphasize a certain chorus [by repeating it]. As you get better at it you can feel it coming.
Part II of this interview can be found [button style=”” url=”https://www.sonicnuance.com/2015/04/22/patrick-caples-interview-part-two/” size=”” block=”false” target=”_self”]here[/button]
For more information, contact:
Patrick Caples
Technical Arts Director
Bridges Community Church
Fremont, CA 94539
