What are the opening hours?

Monday 5pm - 9pm Tuesday 5pm - 9pm Wednesday 5pm - 9pm Thursday 5pm - 9pm Friday 5pm - 9pm Saturday 9am - 5pm

https://www.facebook.com/597833010076138/

B-Sides Music, Houghton, NY (2026)

04/04/2025

Fear of Snakes

It’s hard to drive past an accident on the highway without wanting to turn and look. By our nature, we’re inclined to rubberneck; How bad is it? Is everyone okay? What happened? Is it someone I know?

Church audio can be that way too. There are numerous facebook groups dedicated to sharing AV disasters, Rigging disasters, etc. The traffic on those sights is incredible, and the comments are - usually less than edifying.

Even though these sites sometimes reveal the dirty underbelly of church production, there’s a lot that can be learned. We’ve all learned from our mistakes. It’s a process that can be painful for sure, but you can also learn from the mistakes of others and spare yourself the pain. I think that this can be beneficial for the church, so long as we aspire to be light in a dark world, and are careful to keep the salt out of the wounds of others.

That said, as I continue to present this weekly blog I want to share some success stories. These are times when things started badly, but turned into something exceptional. More often than not, these are situations where someone didn’t have good information going into a situation and as the problems created by poor initial decisions, spectacular compounding learning opportunities resulted. In every instance I won’t be sharing names or locations, not only to protect the people and churches where I found these missteps, but to protect myself. I’ve learned a lot by making some spectacular mistakes and I’d love to spare you some of the pain.

To kick this series off, I want to tell you about a great church. They had a small but active and growing congregation. They were leveraging social media well. Their pastor and the ministry team were presenting daily devotional messages online. They had an active praise band, and their hearts were for worship and serving the Lord well.

Unfortunately, the sound of their livestream was, in their own words, “awful.” What you could hear was overdriven and clipping. Most of the sound was unintelligible or inaudible. This is one of those situations where an incomplete understanding of what resources and technologies are available created a situation that slipped into the disaster zone unnecessarily.

Here is the situation:
The sound board was in a beautiful, newly constructed sound booth. The primary mix engineer was also a band member, and the tech that ran the board on Sunday mornings was only able to turn the system on and off, and run the master fader.

The worship band consisted of an acoustic drum kit, a B3 organ with a Leslie, a bass guitar, 6 vocalists, and an occasional choir. The pastor and first lady each had an additional wireless microphone. The only mics in the building were 12 inexpensive wireless handheld vocal microphones. These were fed from the receiver’s mix outputs into 6 channels of a mixing amplifier. The actual mixing had to be done using the front panels of the microphone receivers. Good sound never stood a chance.

The real issue was not the wrong mics, the underequipped volunteers, the lack of gain-staging, or anything to do with the equipment, but a lack of understanding of the technology. Why was this church continuing to buy more and more wireless microphones? They had been adding more microphones each time they couldn’t hear an instrument or a voice on their livestream, and they bought exclusively wireless microphones because they didn’t have a snake from the front of the church to the board.

The church didn’t know, and no one knew what questions to ask.

Ideally, I would have loved to set this church up with a digital snake and stage box, a new digital board, a set of good wireless vocal mics, and a full set of wired microphones for the drums, organ and choir. In the end, their budget limited what we could do, and we settled on a small, rack mounted digital board that could be remotely piloted from the platform as necessary. We couldn’t mic the whole drum kit, so a large diaphragm overhead and a kick mic were all the budget would allow. Another condenser and an SM57 on the Leslie, and a couple of pencil condensers maxed out the budget for microphones. The bass player was added to the mix with a DI box, and the best of the church’s wireless mics all got discrete outputs and their own channels on the board. Sound: 1,000% improved.

The digital board gave us the ability to mix and monitor a separate broadcast mix, something that was absolutely necessary with the big acoustic drum kit and the Leslie filling the sanctuary with so much acoustic energy. With a decent 2-channel interface and a quality set of passive isolating headphones to monitor the sound, the broadcast mix finally stood a fighting chance.

The most important element of this transformation was three hours of training. From gain staging, to effects, to basic mix theory, to using scenes to reset the board when things ultimately go sideways, we took time to listen to each other, hear from one another what the ministry goals were, and found a place where we could start to build out their tech toolbox.

Was this the best solution? Probably not, but it was the best solution within the church’s budget. Is there room to grow? Absolutely. The pencil condensers for the choir will make great overheads for the drum kit. The large diaphragm mics will be great whenever they use their piano, or even to mic a guitar cabinet. Better vocal mics will likely be their next big investment. In the meantime, this church can now deliver a better experience for their congregants and their livestream audience. Now, the word goes out with clarity, and passion.

Soli Deo Gloria

03/26/2025

I See it Frequently

There’s a lot going on in churches. At any given moment you may be planning for the Summer Vacation Bible School, fixing the furnace, updating the kitchen, holding a missions conference, raising money to send kids to camp, adding handicap accessible entrances and bathrooms. Churches are busy places, and sometimes things get missed in the business of daily operations and the unexpected challenges.

I bring this up because when I visit churches for issues with their sound systems, many times the calls start with, “Our wireless microphones are cutting out.” Sometimes it’s a broken connection on a lapel or headset microphone. Frequently is a microphone that was purchased over 10 years ago, and is now operating on a frequency that has been reallocated by the FCC. The government has sold your airwaves out from underneath you.

It’s hard to believe, and sometimes hard to conceptualize, but stick with me. The airwaves are like a multi-lane highway in a crowded city. There’s only so much room between the buildings to put a highway, so you're limited to just the lanes that are already there. The high-speed left lane is only for certain vehicles that either have bought special passes, or meet “high occupancy” requirements. Think of this as the world of wireless communications for the masses - cell phones, TV stations, radio, etc. The other lanes are open for travel, but when the red or blue flashing lights of emergency services turn on everyone has to get out of the way and move to the side. That’s more or less how our airwaves work. There are bands of frequencies that are much like the lanes of the highway, and the FCC tells us which lanes we can use without getting in the way of other services. It’s all about preventing interference.

As new wireless technologies develop, the airwaves get more and more crowded, and the FCC makes changes to free up space for the “high occupancy” technologies like cell phones. And when they need to make room for essential services like emergency services, fewer bands are open for less used channels like wireless microphones.

Right now, most of the microphones in churches are limited to a few frequency ranges, and I’ll have links at the bottom of this post for you to learn more. The point of this article is that if you’re one of the churches that is having issues with your wireless it may not be the fault of the gear, and it’s not going to get better on its own. You may need to replace your microphone with systems in legal frequencies.

Wireless microphones are great, and they continue to get better and better each year. Buying a system can be intimidating. Prices are all over the place. From under $100 for 2 handhelds to $1000 or more for a single microphone. The old adage is true, you get what you pay for, but where do you start when the variation in prices are so extreme?

Here are a couple of general rules:

Figure out how many wireless microphones you need. Not how many you need now, but how many you need for your biggest event. You want to make sure you buy a system that will work well together, and not fight itself for airspace. If you need more than 8 microphones, we should be looking at a frequency management system that will keep the lanes of traffic all moving in the same direction and combine your antennas so they’re not creating additional interference. They look nicer too.

Once you know how many microphones, let’s look at what’s most important; price, sound, reliability and support. In my local mechanic’s waiting area there is a sign that says, “Good, fast, cheap. . . Pick two.” There’s a lot of truth to this.

A good wired vocal microphone costs $100. This is fact. There are many you can choose from, but $100 is the cost of entry for something you can count on, and will sound great.

How will two wireless microphones for $100 sound compared to the $100 vocal microphone? [Enough said.] There are less expensive microphones that are fine for spoken word, but I wouldn’t want to use them for a vocalist. If you don’t have singers, you can save some money. Good costs money.

If you don’t have to have a wireless microphone for your main vocalist, or even your other vocalists, you can save a lot of money using wired microphones. You can buy four good vocal microphones for about the same price as one quality wireless microphone. This is what we did at my home church, and the transformation was remarkable. It’s easy to talk about the difference in sound quality, and how much easier it was to mix with good sounding mics, but the real benefit was to the vocalists. Immediately, there was a boost in their confidence because they could hear the difference, appreciated the investment that was being made in them. We could have bought wireless microphones and had fewer wires up front, but convenience costs money.

Stewardship is something that I appreciate. I especially appreciate the desire to stretch the life of gear as long as possible, but in the case of old wireless gear, good stewardship is also recognizing that it’s time to retire non-compliant gear. If you are still operating in the frequencies that have been re-allocated to emergency services, you are potentially interfering with first responder's ability to communicate. That’s like pushing a wheelbarrow down the middle of a busy freeway. You’re holding up the works. If we are to model good stewardship, we need to get out of the way, and decide whether an upgrade makes sense.

There’s a lot going on in churches, and good stewardship should always be a priority. I’m happy to help your church work through the decision making process; identify the priorities in your ministries, identify the areas that need improvement, identify opportunities to save responsibly, and to grow courageously. If these ideas connect with you and the needs of your church, send me an email or message me on this platform. Let’s ensure that the good news is available for all to hear.

Soli Deo Gloria

03/18/2025

Let's be "Realistic"

Like every kid growing up in the 80’s my favorite store in the mall was the Kay-Bee toys store. To be allowed to go into the toy store was a special treat. Unfortunately, Kay-Bee Toys like the shopping malls of my youth weren’t long for this world.

Enduring slightly longer was the toy store for the electronics aficionado - Radio Shack. From clock radios to radio controlled cars and boats, soldering stations to wireless doorbells, transistors to loudspeakers, Radio Shack had something for everyone. Our first family computer was a Tandy TRS-80 (look it up, kids!), and I spent hours wiring up projects with the 200-in-1 Electronic Experiments Lab I got for my birthday.

Radio Shack was the electronics supplier to the masses. There was a radio shack in every mall, most every large town, and their Realistic brand was everywhere. And the products were, . . not awful. They were cheaper than the major brands, and usually didn’t sound all that good, but they got the job done. Unlike the many of the cheaper brands we find today, Realistic products would last for years.

Despite the fact that Radio Shack closed all but a couple of its remaining stores in 2015, and had effectively closed up shop a decade before that, I still see Radio Shack brand PA amplifiers from the 80’s going strong. These things never die. Unfortunately, by the time that I find them, they’re well past their prime and starting to sound dirty and scratchy. More often than not, they’ve been cobbled together with piles of Radio Shack adapters and years of limitless ingenuity to make an output “fit” where it never should have input. The end result is usually an “unexplainable” hum that prompted the church to call me for help.

I have a particular admiration for Realistic’s longevity. “They last until they don’t.” That’s what I always tell churches, and while there’s not always a reason to replace them on the spot, they should at least be regarded with some suspicion. Nothing lasts forever, and even if I clean the scratchy k***s, and I can connect everything properly to make the humming stop, there’s no guarantee that the amplifier will keep going indefinitely. If we’re going to be “realistic,” it’s time to think about a replacement.

For a small church, a mixing PA amp of the same quality as the one they bought from Radio Shack is a lot harder to come by these days. The simplicity of a “set it and forget it” amp in the corner was perfect for many congregations. Times have changed, markets have changed, and prices have changed. To get a quality amplifier similar to the old model is a lot more expensive now, and the inexpensive models are just bad. Very, . . very. . . bad.

Let’s look at what else has changed since 1988. Your church is probably not recording the service on cassette tapes. You’re probably not singing along to “split-track” accompaniment tapes. The organ may not be the primary source of music in the sanctuary anymore. We may have a guitar and a vocalist at least some of the time. Churches will sometimes have guest speakers that want to share a video or a powerpoint. You may be using DVDs or streaming videos for worship or sermon illustrations, and you may be considering assistive listening devices for the congregants that are struggling to hear. These things are happening in even the smallest churches, and that 4 channel amplifier from Radio Shack was never built to keep up with a church in 2025.

So where do we begin? Let’s look at what you need. How many microphones do you want to use on any given Sunday? We should probably add a couple more for Christmas pageants and Easter Sundays. How many music sources do you use? That’s 2 channels per source if you want stereo sound. Are you amplifying any instruments?

Unless budget is an issue, I will almost never recommend less than 16 channels to an active church because they will likely outgrow it and have to replace it with something bigger right away. If you have even a small worship band, plan to buy at least 24 channels, because you’re probably considering streaming your service. Even if you aren’t amplifying all of your instruments, you will need to mic them if they’re going to be heard online. Extra musicians, microphones for special services will quickly push the limits of your system.

For the church that hasn’t done anything with their sound system except (maybe) turn it on and off for the past 30 years, this is overwhelming. How much is this going to cost? Do we really need all of this? Who is going to run this? These are all valid questions, and the answer will vary from one church to the next depending on their needs, their growth trajectory, and their desire to invest in growth. Investing in growth is not just buying a bunch of gear. Instead it’s investing in people. Providing the training and the time to grow. Bringing more than one person into these roles of great responsibility so that there can be time off to rest, and time to worship without responsibilities for the sound or slides. It’s an investment to provide patience and grace while learning takes place and mistakes are made. An investment is made when you prioritize loving your people that are willing to serve.

This is where a discussion of stewardship comes in. The amplifier you bought for $129.99 in 1988 lasted you 36 years. That’s like spending $3.50 per year. That was an amazing investment!

So what is reasonable to spend on a PA system? It’s better to ask, “What does my church need to be successful in serving our congregation and our community?” If your church only needs one microphone with no hassles on Sundays, this can be done. There are some reputable brands that are still making a quality system similar to the Radio Shack systems.

If your church needs a couple of microphones, and some channels for special music. This can be done for a little more. If your church is regularly having weddings, presenting plays, inviting the community in to use the space, inviting the youth, or hosting movie nights this can be done. The question is “realistically”, how much should the church spend to ensure the word is heard loud and clear?

For every church, this is likely a very different number. While $3.50 per year won’t get you as much as it did in 1988, you can still share the gospel with a simple sound system. A church doesn’t need to buy big complicated systems to fulfill their mission, and for churches that are led to do more, but have very little, sound systems can be designed for growth or to be purchased in stages. Old gear can be repurposed and redistributed. An old sound system can sometimes become a great mobile system for “worship in the park” or even serving ice cream on the church’s front yard. Your old system may be a blessing to another church just getting off the ground. True stewardship is being faithful with what we’ve been given, to bring glory to God through His provision.

If what you’ve read here resonates with you, please give me a call or send me an email. I don’t sell gear, so I will never try to upsell you. Instead, we can talk honestly about where you are as a church, the challenges you may be facing, and where you want to see your ministry go in the future. We can look at who you have in your church, and how I can help your congregation reach their goals with the resources you have. I charge a reasonable rate to help churches navigate the decision making process. I design systems that are easy to use and take the mystery out of what cables are the right ones to make it all work together. I’ll visit your church and identify what’s broken and what’s worth fixing, and I’ll train the people to be able to minister through sound and video. I’ll even work alongside you to clean out the nest of old wires that have been cluttering up your closets and sound booths. Whether the need is large or small, I pray that together we can meet the needs of your church as we work to fulfill the commission of the church.

Soli Deo Gloria

03/13/2025

It's official. Now booking consultations, installations, and more. B-Sides Music is ready for business.

03/12/2025

It's a Global Issue

For many years, I worked for a major drug chain, and like many large organizations, the Help Desk was our lifeline in times of failing computers, registers, and printers. When calling the national hotline, it was not uncommon to wait on hold for an extended period of time, relay our tales of woe to a tired voice on the other end of the phone, and then hear the all too familiar phrase, . . “It’s a global issue.” Translation: “We know. It’s everywhere, and we either don’t know how to fix it, or we don’t know how long it’s going to take to get it working again.”

I left that company and went back into music to work as an installer, trainer, and troubleshooter for a small family-owned music store. They were great people with a heart for churches and church people, and I was incredibly blessed by the opportunity to work for great bosses (Thanks, Sr. and Jr!). The best part of my job was traveling to churches to help them with their sound and video systems. It was the best job ever.

Most of the churches I visited were small, well under 100 people, and they were struggling. Their sound systems had been purchased from the local Radio Shack in the 80's and cobbled together with adapters and a seemingly endless supply of ingenuity. There were assistive listening systems that were collecting dust as congregants complained that they couldn’t hear the message that was being preached. There were sound booths hidden behind plate glass windows or hidden away in the choir loft. There were mysterious hums, k***s and faders taped in place, threatening notes taped with divine authority, and boxes and boxes of cables that didn’t work, but no one dared remove them from the church.

It’s a universal issue.

Now I’m in a new city on the other side of the state, and as I continue to work with church people, they continue to tell me stories of their churches that have bad sound and terrible livestreams. They tell me about frustrating worship services and situations that haven’t changed in years. Even though the names have changed, the problems remain the same. Unlike when I worked in the drug store, there are fixes. These are issues we don’t have to live with, and can often be fixed without buying more gear or adding complexity to an already intimidating system.

We are called to “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” Ephesians 4:12. My goal is to help churches achieve excellence in ministry through faithful stewardship and care for their people.

This is a first taste of what is to come. I will be sharing stories from the road, tips from the tool bag, and connecting with churches personally. There is a world of people out there who are ready to hear the word (Romans 10:17). Many of them are already in our pews. Some of them are watching our livestreams. They need to hear the word, faithfully preached. That’s the global issue.

Soli Deo Gloria

B-Sides Music

04/04/2025

03/26/2025

03/18/2025

03/13/2025

03/12/2025

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Monday	5pm - 9pm
Tuesday	5pm - 9pm
Wednesday	5pm - 9pm
Thursday	5pm - 9pm
Friday	5pm - 9pm
Saturday	9am - 5pm