New Yamaha M7CL
Posted by Travis on November 4, 2007
We moved the console for our new building into our current sanctuary for training purposes last week. We will use it here for the next few months so we are comfortable on it when we triple the inputs and double the monitor mixes in our new facility. Today was the first live service I have mixed on the Yamaha M7CL and boy is it nice! At rehearsal Thursday when we first cut it on and Fred sang and played on his keyboard we knew it was going to be a treat. One of our vocalists, who has been with the church praise team for over 7 years, said she had never hear her voice that clear before. We had guys in the crowd who didn’t know anything had even changed asking what we did differently because “it was just so clear today.” If it made that much of a difference on our current setup (3 Peavey mains and 2 BagEnd Dual 12 subs) I can only dream of what it will sound like in the new system (two 8 speaker Meyer M1D line arrays and two Dual 18 700HP subs).
Props to the Yamaha preamps and its easy operation. It sounded great right out of the box. On top of that, it is extremely user friendly, especially considering how powerful the board is. I spent the better part of last week learning the board and then resetting the wiring in our current sanctuary to connect to it. I was very comfortable sitting at the board this morning for our first service even though I had only had it for a week. It just really makes sense how it is run. Contrary to our other board, the incredibly UNintuitive Soundcraft 324 Live. Don’t get me wrong, that board has NEVER let us down and produced a good sound for 5 years now. We just really didn’t realize what we were missing on the console end of things until we switched them out.
One of the nicer features of the board is its offline editing software that is available free on their site. A file of about 70k in size contains all the data for the board. I sat at home last night watching college football and checking my console settings on my laptop. I found a few settings that I had missed and was able to make the changes at home, save them on my USB key and in under a minute, load them into the board this morning.¬† I have also been able to show this software to my awesome volunteers and they are able to ‘play’ with the console at home if they want. I can give them a copy of the setup we use and they can learn their way around it and even make improvements and bring them back to us.
Well, enough on the M7 for now, I am sure you will here more later as we integrate the full system.
Anyone else out there using one?
-Travis
we are now more jealous… congrats!
Travis,
Sounded great - you da man … looking forward to maybe running it on this Sunday unless Kim needs me to play!
Fred, the ever-grateful-for-a-great-tech-dept worship director-worship leader-superhero-utility-belt-wearer guy.
Great console. It’s so wonderful when you have the right gear. We don’t have the Yamaha board, but we did go digital last year and the sound quality and ease of setup and management are wonderful.
Anxious to hear about it in it’s new home.
[...] reverberation and one room definitely has some reverb but nothing abnormal or unfavorable. I posted a while back about getting our new soundboard in hand for training purposes and how much of a difference it had [...]
I have a question about this console. It looks like we may be going from a Soundcraft K2 to this unit in the very near future. Any thoughts on the learning curve?
Seven Rivers,
I think you will be pleased. The learning curve not only for myself but also for my other three engineers was easy. (At least I think so.) I have used a Soundcraft Spirit 42 channel analog console quite a bit, it seems similar to what you are using now. Based on my experience there, I think you would be in great shape. I spent the better part of 3 days when the console first came in to make sure I was comfortable with it before live use. I have felt fine with it ever since. We are now running about 32 inputs a week (most with 2 dynamics processors on them), 4 FX sends, 11 monitor mixes, 32 direct outs to record, and a few other sends all easily manageable by one engineer at a time. I think two features that you will quickly grow accustomed to are visual EQ curve adjustments and “Sends on Faders” which lets you instantly mix monitor sends on the main faders.
My advice for starters is two things: one is to download the Yamaha Studio Manager and M7CL control for your computer. (I installed Parallels on mine so I can run it on Apple.) Two is to save snapshots as duplicates and save often. Still today when I am building a show I save three copies as snapshots in the console. This was VERY valuable early on in case I did something I soon regretted.
I’d be happy to share anything else I can to help out with the transition. You can email me from here if you want. travis(at)travispaulding(dot)com
I along with Alex are very jealous! I hope that some day we can purchase one for our sanctuary and have as wonderful of an experience! Keep us updated please!
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