Feedback during the sermon, and how to see it coming
April 22, 2026 · by Matt · volunteer guide, troubleshooting
Almost every church we have ever worked with has had at least one Sunday where feedback rang out during a sermon or a prayer. It is one of the few audio events that everyone in the room notices. It is also one of the most preventable, once your volunteer learns to hear it coming.
What feedback actually is
Feedback is what happens when a microphone hears its own speaker, and that loop gets loud enough to sustain itself. It usually starts as a quiet ring at one specific pitch, gets louder over a couple of seconds, and then becomes the embarrassing sound you remember.
The key word there is “starts as a quiet ring.” Most feedback events have a warning. Your job as the operator is to learn to hear that warning.
What it sounds like before it gets loud
Listen for a thin, hollow ring underneath the speaker’s voice. It sounds a little like a finger running around the rim of a wine glass. It is usually a single pitch. If you hold your hand near your ear with your palm cupped, you can almost mimic it. That sound is the room starting to resonate at one frequency.
If you hear that and do nothing, it will grow.
What to do
The first move is always the same. Pull down the offending channel just enough to break the loop. Two or three dB is often enough. The speaker’s voice will get slightly quieter, but they will still be heard, and the ring will stop.
If you do not know which channel is feeding back, pull the channel of whoever is talking. That is the right answer ninety percent of the time during a sermon. For a worship moment with multiple open mics, mute or pull the channel that points most directly at a monitor.
What to do later
After the service, write down which mic, which speaker, and where they were standing. Most rooms have a small number of feedback frequencies that come up again and again, and most of those happen when a person stands in a specific spot relative to a specific speaker. The third or fourth time it happens, you will recognize the pattern.
If you are on one of our subscription tiers, this is also exactly the kind of thing we work on during a coaching session. Some rooms benefit from a little EQ notch on a specific channel. Other rooms benefit from a small change in monitor placement. There is no single answer, but there is almost always a fix.