South County

Last weekend, and for the next two weekends, I was asked to help out at Rock Harbor's satellite campus in Laguna Hills. Dubbed "Rock Harbor South County," this is a fully self-functioning extension of the main campus with live worship and teaching. They meet every Sunday morning at Laguna Hills High School in their auxiliary gym; therefore, this means that everything - sound equipment, lighting, chairs, decorations, and even flooring - needs to be portable and must be easily assembled and torn down. Lucky, much of the equipment being used was already available from when Rock Harbor used to hold services at the Shark Club in Costa Mesa.

For the production and decoration crews in particular, serving at South County means the start of an early morning. Both crews show up anywhere between 6:30 and 7 a.m. to haul all the equipment out of a storage unit and and begin setting it up in the gym. Since I was on the production crew, my main job was to help set up the stage and main speakers. All instrument and speaker cables needed to be plugged into a master unit, which was connected by a long cable to the sound board at the back of the room. After plugging in all the speakers, monitors, microphones, and DI boxes each individual channel was line tested to make sure that everything was plugged in correctly. This entire process could take anywhere from 1 to 1 1/2 depending on how fast we worked and how correct we were in plugging in everything. Our goal is that by the time the band shows up to sound check, everything should be up and running.

Since setup and tear down was my only job for the morning, I didn't do much during the service. At the end of the service, however, everything that I had done before was now put into opposite motion. Instead of plugging everything in, we were racing to disassemble everything as quickly as possible. Tearing down always seems easier than setting up since all we had to worry about was wrapping cords and putting speakers back in their cases; however, we still needed to be quick because the flooring team could not remove the temporary floor until our equipment was cleared out. After putting everything back in their cases, we simply carried and rolled the equipment back to the storage unit, where it will be kept until the next week when this entire process will begin all over again.