For some reason, in the past week I have had a handful of people ask how we were set up for production in our main sanctuary at SSCC. I decided I would just post a couple pics here and describe what is happening.

First, the main booth. (Click on the image for full size.) This is 4 separate iPhone pics that I stitched together, so the quality isn’t great.

SSCC Sound Booth

From left to right… first is our lighting control, we have a Strand Classic Palette with a 15″ monitor. It is covered in the image because I had already programmed lights during rehearsal and shut it down. Next is a 20″ iMac. It is used for Smaart Live, PlanningCenterOnline live mode, iTunes and M7CL control primarily. (It checks a lot of facebook and email during second services too.) In the rack is CD recording & playback, a storage drawer and a Presonus Firepod. We use the Firepod as an I/O for Smaart Live mainly. Next is the Yamaha M7C-48. After that is our tracking rack. In it are 2 Alesis 24 track HD recorders. We use two 16 channel optical I/O cards from the M7 to record 32 simultaneous tracks. Editing takes place in Logic or Pro Tools, depending on who is editing it. The last two racks are our wireless racks. The first has 13 channels of mics: 4 countryman, 4 hand held, 4 countryman OR hand held and one guitar pack. The second rack has 8 channels of IEM transmitters. We use those in stereo and dual mono depending on how many we need that week. Not pictured is a battery backup for the Palette, a key switch for power sequencing our entire A/V system (except presentation computers & projectors), and a rack with 2 GEQs for floor wedges (rarely used) and a wireless router for connecting to the M7 and Alesis wirelessly.

Second, the video booth. (Click on the image for full size.) This is also an iPhone pic so pardon the quality.

SSCC Video Booth

From left to right… first is a 20″ iMac that is used with ProPresenter for lyrics, notes, and nursery calls. Next are two preview monitors for our video switcher (one is blank). After those are the monitor, keys & mouse for our Power Mac G5 that we use for ProVideoPlayer. All graphics & video are run from this computer (the tower is underneath the counter). Last is the video rack. The rack contains a DVD player, an audio 8 input mixer for sending the video sources to FOH, a HME wireless com main station, and two video switchers. The first switcher is a FSR switcher used to send camera or computer sources to our distributed TVs and rooms. The bottom switcher is a FSR Eagle 200 used for the main screens. Not pictured is a rack of cat5 patch bays for getting video signals to and from various optional locations and a wall plate switch for turning the main projectors on and off.

That basically covers our two main tech positions without getting into even more boring detail. The main gear at the other end of those control systems is: 2 Christie DW6K projectors, Meyer M1D arrays, MM4 front fills, UPJ side fills and 700HP subs.

I hope this answered some of the questions that have been asked recently. If you have other questions, feel free to ask. We all learn from these conversations.

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