Senheiser USA just added a plug about our new facility on their website. I was at an Expo in Chicago while at the Willowcreek Arts conference and one of the Sennheiser guys saw my name tag and told me about it. I gotta be honest, it felt kind of cool to be “noticed” by their East Coast rep. Apparently two of the guys in Chicago had worked on our wireless coordination. Even though I am not mentioned in the short article, I think I am famous by association right? I mean, A LOT of people read the Sennheiser Houses of Worship news feed right? Hmmm. I think this blog may have more readers (6) than that. Anyway, in a geeky sense, it was cool for them to “know me,” same thing happened at the Meyer Sound booth as well. EDIT: Turns out as I was about to post this, Bo found another article at Lighting & Sound America about the build. REMEMBER, these were written by our systems contractors and not us.

On that same note however, this “new building” thing was already on my mind. Nancy Beach, one of the creative leaders at Willowcreek, said something that really stuck with me yesterday. She discussed how much Willow strives to be known for making a difference in their community and the world and NOT to be known simply as the church with the big building in town. She actually teared up during that part of her talk. It really hit me hard.

I don’t want SSCC to become known only as the big church on the island or anything like that. I don’t think that we SHOULD be known only as that. But it is an important challenge to never forget. The baptisms we regularly hold and the missions teams we send out each year are a constant benchmark for the work that God has called us to do… Even if I do get excited about tech toys and the like. I like the exposure that the facility can give us, I just pray that we use it only to more greatly glorify God.

So we are one week away from “launching” our new facility. We will have a worship service for our body next Friday night, the 29th, and then our first services in our new home on Sunday the 2nd. On my end of things we have been working with mainly 2 companies, Baker Audio (who also is doing our video systems) and Mainstage Theatrical Supply. I was reading through our bid package with Baker to check and see if we had in fact gotten everything we paid for. I stumbled across an astonishing number (besides the price). In our facility in just the A/V systems (not power or house/theatrical lighting) we have run approximately 40,500 feet of cable. This is made up of speaker cable (Speak-on for the nerds out there), Cat5e network cable, and mostly mic cable. There is 7.56 MILES of signal cable in the floor of our three main rooms. Holy cow. Like I said, does anyone have money invested in copper?

We have had two rehearsals now in the new sanctuary and a partial rehearsal in our children’s ministry’s Clubhouse Theater. Rehearsals in the youth’s Rooftop will ramp up next week. I have to say I am pleased with the outcome. We have three very clear and clean sounding rooms. Two of them are very tight acoustically with almost no natural 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 made acoustically the moment we plugged it in. Well, we hadn’t seen anything yet. When we patched into our Meyer line arrays, subs and front fills it was a beautiful thing. Once again we were hearing things that we hadn’t heard before with the same people and instruments passing through. (I want to stress that while I AM an audiophile and LOVE great sound, that is not the drive of these systems. It is our desire to create a space where the Word of God and the Worship of God can go forth clearly and warmly. We want to make people long to come back again to worship Him.)

We also have gone to wireless in-ear monitoring systems for up to 11 people on stage. We have 8 transmitters and 11 receivers. Our plan for now is to have vocalists share mixes. It DID seem like a little bit better plan that it actually is but it still works well. We have one male and one female vocalist sharing a mix with the vocals panned left and right in their ears. I thought this would be a perfect solution but it seems when your voice is in your head and your ears are plugged at -26 dB, you tend to hear the OTHER voice in your ears more than your own. I am confident with some level and balance adjustments we can make nice though. The HUGE plus of the in-ears far out weighs those hiccups though. We are able to get very clean & crisp mixes because there is very low stage volume with no monitor wedges firing at any of our sources. Also, the stage doesn’t look like a disorganized warehouse with boxes strewn about everywhere.

One other big factor in our clean sound is the drum shield we built. I got an idea for it at another church and did some research myself. I’ll post on it separately later because I really think it will be helpful to other churches and theaters trying to control stage volume and not look wrapped in plastic.

Well, thats all for now, kind of a tech update on the new facility for the four of you that care (my parents, my in-laws). Actually, I don’t think they care THAT much, its more of, hey, where have you been the past 3 months and what have you been doing… update.

-Travis