My name is Curt Taipale. My wife, Jeanna, and I started the ChurchSoundcheck Discussion Group and web site in September 1997. They are a ministry service of our consulting firm, Taipale Media Systems, Inc., a company that I started in 1981.

If you've just found this web site, you may have some questions about who we are and where we're coming from. If you've just joined our discussion group, you may be wondering how you can make the most of your membership in the group. In either case, this is a perfect time for us to share our heart with you.

If you haven't already done so, one of the best ways for you to gain some perspective on our philosophy about church tech support ministries is to simply read a handful of my articles on our web site. Reading those articles is just like you and I sitting down over a cup of coffee and talking about church tech support.

I was raised in the Midwest U.S. and have been interested in music since elementary school. I received my Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Miami in 1980, studying Music Engineering Technology with Bill Porter (engineer for Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and others), and began working in recording studios soon after that. In 1982 I went on staff at Grace Church in St. Louis as their Audio Director, and worked there for a total of eight years. We moved our family to Dallas in 1999 to take the Technical Director position at Hillcrest Church where I served for a year.

Later, I mixed FOH at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas for three and a half years, including three seasons of their Dallas Christmas Festival. The main sanctuary at Prestonwood seats nearly 7,000 people, and I have to admit it was a sheer joy to mix some of the best musical talent I've ever worked with on a sound system worth roughly $1.5M. But as the travel requirements for my consulting business increased, something had to give, and it was with sincere regret that I eventually gave up my role as a hired gun at Prestonwood.

It was at Grace Church in the early 1980's that I started recording albums and CD's for Integrity Music, working with producer Tom Brooks on the early Hosanna series projects. That relationship brought me into a position to do live sound for Worship International, the ministry extension of Integrity (now known as Seminars4Worship). I was blessed with the opportunity to travel and mix live sound for many of Integrity's artists including Ron Kenoly, Marty Nystrom, Eugene & Joy Greco, Randy Rothwell, Kent Henry, Alvin Slaughter, Bob Fitts, Paul Wilbur, Jamie Harvill, Carl & Leann Albrecht, and many others.

In the midst of all that excitement I discovered that I really enjoyed teaching people about sound, and since those early days of my career I have trained literally several thousand church music pastors, tech support staff and volunteers. In fact I taught a lot of those classes for Worship International in the early 1990's. I also began some personal study of sound system design and acoustics, and eventually moved my career from being a live sound and recording engineer to being a sound system designer and consultant.

In late 2000, God opened the floodgates with consulting work, so we decided to focus on consulting with churches, expanding our design capabilities to include room acoustics, mechanical noise and sound isolation as well as sound, video and production lighting systems. During that time we have continued refining our skills at training church tech volunteers and staff.

Jeanna and I published a magazine for church tech support ministries in the late 1980's. It was originally titled Clarity Magazine, and later changed to Soundcheck® Magazine. We produced sixteen issues of the magazine, most of those being forty-eight pages each, and ultimately let it go because we were simply before our time, undercapitalized, and didn't really have the business savvy to make it thrive. It's one of those ideas that God gave us that He probably wanted us to wait on, but we were too impatient to wait, and ultimately paid the price for jumping out in front of Him.

That was a hard lesson to learn. We sometimes joke that it was the most expensive resume ever written, because it certainly introduced us to a lot of industry leaders.

It seemed a waste to let all that great material sit there collecting dust, so we decided to make it available on the internet. That's the day we started designing the Soundcheck Magazine web site. Our site continues to grow today as we discover new technical realities to share with our friends.

The idea for the ChurchSoundcheck Discussion Group was included as part of the web site from the very first day. Our objective is to communicate technical excellence to the church. It was started on a very simple premise — people like to get mail. More than that, they like to get mail from their friends. Most church tech support staff or volunteers don't know the name of their counterpart working in the church right across the street from them. And isn't that sad, because they could be a tremendous support to each other. Teaching about tech support issues crosses all denominational lines. Our group works because we've decided to stick to the technical stuff, lift each other up in prayer along the way, and let others consider their doctrinal differences.

That's our background in a nutshell. The most complete picture I can paint for you about our background and our consulting firm can be found on our web site. Just download the PDF file called Designing Your New Sound System. Of course that booklet is written to encourage you to hire us as your consultant, but it also contains some detailed information on my background, where we came from, and so on. Enjoy reading. <g>