When the Stage and the Booth Finally Talk It Out: Lee Fields and Chris Kuti on Building Trust Between Worship Leaders and Audio Engineers
There’s a tension that exists in almost every church production environment, and if you’ve been around church tech long enough, you’ve felt it. It’s that moment when the worship leader walks off stage frustrated because “the mix didn’t feel right,” while the FOH engineer sits behind the console thinking “if they’d just stay on the mic, this would be so much easier.” It’s production versus worship, or worship versus production, depending on which side of the equation you’re on.
At the Churchfront conference, we captured an incredibly honest conversation between Chris Kuti, a well-known worship leader, and Lee Fields, a legendary mix engineer. What made this conversation so valuable wasn’t just their expertise—it was their willingness to dig into the uncomfortable realities of why these relationships break down and, more importantly, how to build them back up.
The Real Problem: It’s Not About the Gear
Lee started by framing the fundamental issue: what happens on stage generally gets put into the “art bucket,” while what happens in the booth gets put into the “technical bucket.” As Chris pointed out, creatives tend to feel like technical details are going to squelch creativity, when actually those technical elements might be the very fuel that enables the creative vision to happen.
But here’s where it gets deeper. Lee made this observation that really landed: something happens to a sound engineer when they walk behind the console, similar to what happens to a worship leader when they step behind the microphone. There’s a weight, an exposure, a sense that hundreds or thousands of people are about to see how good you are at something. For the worship leader, there’s an eternal weight to pastoring people in worship. For the mixer, there’s still this very real exposure of skill and competency.
The identity of the mixer gets wrapped up in the execution and the skill. The identity of the worship leader gets wrapped up in the spiritual calling and the performance. Both are carrying their own insecurities and fears, and maybe they aren’t even going toward the same target yet. As Chris put it, “I am not my role as a worship leader. I am not in the eyes of a heavenly father as good as my last weekend set.” But if you come to the microphone with that feeling, of course you’re going to be at arm’s length with your audio engineer, because you don’t know what each other is carrying.
Building Poker Chips: The Currency of Difficult Conversations
Lee introduced this brilliant metaphor of poker chips that became a thread throughout their conversation. You have to be able to reach into your pocket and get a chip out to use it. If there are none there, you’re filing bankruptcy. So how do you build those chips?
First, it starts with things that have nothing to do with the task at hand. Where are you from? What’s your wife’s name? How old are your kids? This is green room stuff, coffee shop stuff, Monday through Friday stuff. You can’t have hard conversations on Sunday morning if you haven’t built relational equity throughout the week.
Second, you have to be good at your job. Both people in the relationship need to excel at their craft. But here’s Lee’s challenging perspective: “I don’t need you to be good at your job for me to be good at mine. And I’m not going to be upset at you for not being good at yours.” He compared it to marriage—you sacrifice for each other regardless of what the other person is or is not doing. You bring your best no matter what.
The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
Then they got into the territory that makes everyone uncomfortable: what do you do when you need to tell a worship leader they’re not a good singer? Lee’s answer was both strategic and compassionate. The very first conversation you have can’t be about this. You need to make sure the first time you talk isn’t about their vocal problems.
Instead, Lee suggested starting with something like, “What can I do to make your job easier?” Then actually do that thing, even if it’s a three-month task, because you’re building chips. Because the conversation about someone being a terrible singer is going to spend all of those chips. Every single one of them.
His next move is brilliant in its subtlety. He suggests starting to make board mixes every week and asking the worship leader to listen and give feedback on the mix. Notice what he’s doing here—he’s not saying “I want you to go listen to yourself and hear how bad you sound.” He’s asking for feedback on his mixing. But what actually happens is the worship leader starts listening to board mixes and naturally begins to hear themselves.
Chris jumped in here with something athletes and performers understand instinctively: you have to love watching game film. His wife watches back the video and listens to the tape of everything she ever leads. She never gets into a second or third service without listening back and asking one question: what’s one thing I could do that would make an incremental change in my performance?
The best vocalists aren’t ashamed of this process. They’re comfortable staring at themselves in the mirror and fixing what needs to be fixed. And here’s the thing Lee was learning through this board mix process—he was learning about Chris’s self-awareness. Every time Chris came back with fifty things someone else did wrong and none of them included himself, Lee was learning how to approach the next hard conversation.
The Jedi Mind Trick of Development
Lee laid out this progression that’s essentially a Jedi mind trick. After a few months of board mixes, the next step might be asking to spend ten minutes at rehearsal talking about microphone technique with the whole team. Not singling anyone out, but giving everyone practical tools. Maybe video would be a great asset to send with the board tape, because then you can’t argue with facts when someone’s four feet off the mic trying to hit their biggest note.
Then you escalate again. Maybe next year you carve out some budget to bring in professionals for team development nights. A professional drummer to talk about playing to a click. A guitar player. A vocal coach to work with singers. Maybe a lighting person. You see where this is going? The pros come in, and they tell the worship leader their pitch needs work.
Is that a cop-out? Lee doesn’t think so, and honestly, neither do I. Some things you say to someone you can’t take back. Talking to someone about their voice—not one time has Lee had that conversation where they’ve been happy about it. It’s worse than critiquing a golf swing because you were born with this voice. There’s literally nothing fundamentally different you can do about the instrument you were given. And when you’re telling someone that what they feel is a spiritual calling on their life isn’t measuring up, that feels really crappy.
What You Can Actually Change
Chris offered some incredibly practical perspective for audio engineers about what’s actually changeable when it comes to vocals. You’re probably not going to change someone’s tone. If there are tonal qualities about a vocal that aren’t your preference, you need to understand that’s just the characteristic of that voice. But what you can address are things like projection, mic technique, placement, and breath control.
Sometimes the issue is just that the vocalist has too much of themselves in their ears, so they’re giving the mic nothing. The more gain you add, the more bleed you get from everything else. One thing you might need is just more projection. Or maybe it’s about keying songs appropriately. Just because Chris Brown sang that song in a certain key doesn’t mean everyone needs to attempt it in that key. It’s okay to transpose. He sang it once in a studio with unlimited takes and comping. You’re doing this live for multiple services.
Chris’s wife actually keeps a document of every song they do and the keys she sings them in. She doesn’t let a Planning Center schedule get shipped out without knowing what her songs are and confirming she’s going to bring her best. That level of intentionality prevents so many problems before they start.
The Low Register Secret
Here’s a vocal hack that Chris shared: you can tell an under-seasoned vocalist not by how they hit the biggest notes, but by how they carry the lowest register. The best vocalists have pitch precision on the lowest octave that’s just as strong as their biggest note. What tends to happen is everyone brings their energy and focus to the big note because it’s the loudest, so we think it’s the most important. But in contemporary worship, so much is living in that lower, conversational register.
Chris learned this by recording himself in a studio and looking at the waveform. He tried to make his low octave laser-locked. If there’s an auto-tuner on, it should barely have to work. The only way he got there was by studying his waveform and realizing he was singing way louder on the top end, and his air-to-tone ratio was way off in the lower range.
Building Equity Goes Both Ways
It’s not just the audio engineer who needs to build chips. Chris emphasized that the best way to grow equity as a worship leader is to never correct on a microphone. Always ask for feedback instead. In rehearsal, if you intend for something to go a certain way, ask your engineer, “How did that translate for you?” You’re inviting them into the process versus saying, “Hey, I’m giving you what I’m giving you. You’ve got to make it work.”
And Lee’s suggestion for engineers: be honest with that answer. The options aren’t just “sounded good” or “sounded bad.” Sometimes the honest answer is, “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I was doing something else.” Because if you just say “yeah, sounds good” every time, that gets noted, and over time the worship leader stops asking because they listened back and it wasn’t good.
When You Need to Make a Sonic Shift
Both Lee and Chris talked about what happens when you need to make a wholesale sonic change to your worship environment. Chris used this analogy that really clicked: what behavior changes would you make if you saw your team not as individual instrumentalists but as a band? Bands obsess over guitar tone. They make sure the keys patch complements what the guitar’s doing. They think about how the bass interacts with the kick drum.
If you can bring your team into a band-type conversation about tone, you build massive equity for when you need to have harder conversations. Chris had to have this conversation with his own dad, who’s an incredible guitar player. But the songs they were doing needed more reverb and dotted eighth delays than big power chords. That’s not an easy conversation, but it’s necessary when you’re trying to achieve a specific sonic landscape.
Lee used this perfect analogy: if you don’t paint a unified target and say “here’s where we’re all going,” here’s what you’re doing instead. You’re serving a dessert to your church, and you’ve invited everyone into the kitchen to cook something. They all get to bring whatever ingredient they want, and they don’t know what they’re cooking. You’re going to put it all in a pot, bake it, and start slicing it and handing it out. It’s disgusting.
The shift is saying, “We’re going to make tiramisu. You’re bringing the espresso, you’re bringing the lady fingers, you’re bringing the custard.” Everyone knows what they’re making and their specific contribution to it. The same thing happens at front of house. It’s not “I’m bringing my own thing to the console.” You’re working together toward a unified sonic vision.
The Hard Truth About Musicianship
Lee borrowed this from Scott Ragsdale, and it’s worth sitting with: you don’t have to play an instrument to be a good mixer, but you do have to be a musician. If you’re not, and you don’t play an instrument, you’re not going to be as good as someone else who has musical intuition and abilities. That’s just the reality.
When you start talking about what you can bring to the console as a potential worship leader—being equal to what’s happening on stage with navigating the room and feeling where people are at—that requires musical sensibility. That’s the kind of thing where you’re looking at people in the room thinking, “We’re going to try to get those hands out of his pockets this weekend.” How you do that with faders and reverb and being emotive and painting a picture all has to align with the unified vision.
It’s About People, Not Just Roles
Toward the end of their conversation, Chris made this pastoral observation that really matters: you need to separate the task or the role from the human being, but you can’t forsake the fact that you’re talking to a person with real feelings. Cultures typically break down when the statement is, “Well, we’ve always done it that way.”
It’s your job as a leader not to skip past that. Transition has weight for anybody. There’s a season of mourning what once was. Some leaders try to come in and say, “I’m the new person in charge and I don’t care how you’ve been doing it for thirty years, we’re going somewhere.” That’s leadership, but not the good kind. Leadership recognizes that the best path to your destination has to begin with a clear understanding of where you’re starting from.
Chris used this great analogy: if your phone picks you up in the wrong location and starts telling you to make a right turn that isn’t there, it’s a headache. That’s you as a leader coming in without recognizing where people are starting from.
The Real Win
What made this conversation so valuable wasn’t just the practical tactics—though those were gold. It was the heart behind it. Both Lee and Chris were willing to acknowledge their own insecurities, their own growth areas, and the reality that these relationships are hard because they involve real people with real identities wrapped up in what they do.
The pathway forward isn’t about getting better gear or finding the perfect system. It’s about building trust, having hard conversations with compassion, recognizing what’s actually within your control, and remembering that you’re on the same team working toward the same goal. You’re not here to build a church of high performance. You’re here to build a great community of worshipers.
Sometimes that means the worship leader needs to get in the woodshed and work on their craft. Sometimes it means the audio engineer needs to spend relational equity before making technical demands. Most of the time, it means both people need to divorce their identity from their role and remember they’re serving something bigger than their own preferences or insecurities.
If you’re in the middle of this tension right now—whether you’re the worship leader frustrated with your mix or the audio engineer frustrated with what’s happening on stage—start here: go have coffee with each other and talk about something other than church. Ask where they’re from. Learn about their family. Build some chips. Because the hard conversations are coming, and you’re going to need every single one of them.
