Church Tech Tour – Audio, Video, Lighting, Stage

  Speaker 1 Hey, everybody. My name is Mike. I’m one of the coaches with Worship Ministry Training, and I’m also the executive pastor of Worship and Creative Arts at Bloom Church in Branson, Missouri. And in this video, I’m going to walk you through our full Sunday setup, everything from our redundant playback system, to how we manage broadcast audio, our pro-presenter flow, and even how we train our teams to handle it all with excellence. And whether you’re looking to upgrade your current setup or just want a behind-the-scenes look at how we do it, you’re in in the right place. Also, if you’re curious about any of the gear we mentioned, just drop your email below. We’ve already put together a full gear list with links and model numbers, and we’ll send it straight to you. Guys, let’s jump in. Guys, this is our front of house console. This is the Avid Venue SC-48. We’ve had this console since 2018, and it’s worked great for us. The infrastructure on it is actually just XLR on the back here. When you move into a new building, you’ve got a budget, and our budget was that we were just going to go XLR, and there are actually two 24 channel snakes that are underneath our stage up front that are just running to the console here.

Speaker 1 That’s our infrastructure for the SC-48. We also have paired with it virtual soundcheck, and we’re able to record with it through Logic, through a little Mac mini, which is great for replaying Easter services and Christmas services and things like that. But yeah, that’s our front of house console. Our PA is Grundorf. These are Grundorf front fills. They are so, so loud. There’s one on this side, there’s one on that side, and then down here are the subs. These are actually built into the the stage. There are eight subs. There’s four on this side, and then four on this side. It gives you an incredibly, incredibly great low-end, especially for kick drum, bass drum, and things like that. Really gives you a great low-end in this room. Audience mics, we have three of them. We have one on this side, one on that side. We actually have one in the front-of-house booth as well. These are Rode NT5s. So For the amp rack, we have a Grunendorff Crossover, and then we have eight QSC amps for the subs, and then also for the line arrays. This is our monitor console. This is the X32. It’s one of the original X32s.

Speaker 1 I mean, there’s 32 channels, but I think we actually run 38 channels by using all of the OXs. That’s where our audience mics are for the band, the MD, the BVMD, all of those things are all in those OX channels. As far as our microphones go, we’ve got these Sure ULX S4s. Pretty standard, I think there’s eight of them, something like that. We run wireless on our acoustic guitars. We have Sennheiser when it comes to our pastor’s microphone, as well as a countryman. We have our in-ear monitors. Most of them are Sennheiser. Some of them are new, some of them are old. These are really old G2, G3s, and then we have some G4s. There are 14 separate mixes for the band and for the vocalists. These are the wireless, and then there’s also wired for the drums and also wired for the keyboard as well. Down here, we have our MD channels. We actually run 10 of these different We have a worship leader channel, which I actually have a wireless way to use a wireless mic on the platform. We also have our bass, MD, EG. We have one in the production room.

Speaker 1 We have one for our drummer, our keys, our main MD, our background vocal MD. And then we have these two little personas. We actually have these in the warehouse. And these are just preamps that we can just basically boost the signal without having to turn these all the way up and get a bunch of noise. We’re able to just use these preamps to be able to do that. We also have the ability for the A2 to be able to see what is going on in the service. This little screen is super, super helpful as they’re watching what’s going on live and things like that. Also, this is their talk back mic to the band, which is a nice little feature to be able to have. And yeah, this is our monitor set up. So we made it to the stage. And before I jump into the drum kit, I actually want to talk about the drum frame and actually the drum shield. We actually just took lexan, had it cut, and then we had a custom frame made for our setup from a local company, Branson Steel Company. And what they did is they created a slot to where the lexan actually just slides right in, and that’s how we made our custom frame.

Speaker 1 It was still a little bit too loud, so we actually took old panels from the Clear Sonic days of our old drum shield and actually put those on the top and on the sides. The drum kit itself is a Pearl Session custom kit. It’s a four-piece. It’s actually a five, but we’re only running the four. We run a 12-inch tom and a 16-inch tom. The snare drum is a Black Beauty 8 by 14 and a half. The cymbals, we use a a different mixture. Right now, we’ve got a Dream Energy crash ride. Looks like a custom projection, and then a Istanbul Agat. The high hats are the HHX evolutions. The hardware we use is DW9000 on most of everything. Then we have the tractor style DW Throne. Then for the electronic elements, we have the Elicis Sample Pad Pro. For the overhead mics, we have SM81s on both sides. For our snare drum mic, we have just a straight SM57 top and bottom. For the hi-hat mic, we have the I5. Then the toms, we’re using SENHEYER E604s. Then the kick, we go back and forth between the Audix D6, and I think the D112 is actually in there right now.

Speaker 1 For in-ears in here, we just have a little four-channel Pile Pro, headphones amp. Then we also have the talkback for the drummer. It’s just a little on and off, natty microphone for the drummer when he needs to be able to speak to the MD. Our bass rig is pretty simple. We’re just using a tone hammer for our tone. We’ve got a few odds and ends for effects and things like that, a tuner, and then also a volume pedal. This entire pedal board just sits here. It just lives here, and every bass player just brings their own bass guitar. I wanted to hit really quickly the MD setup. This is our main MD setup, and this is just the XTouch mini. It’s got for us to be able to fire whatever song we want. We’re able to flow in sections, tap tempo things, able to turn on an original track if we to listen to something in rehearsal. We also have a philtre, which I’ll explain later in the tracks session. We have the previous next buttons, play, stops. Love this Oak Tone mini controller. It’s fantastic. Then we have an iPad here just for mixing ears.

Speaker 1 The MD is doing a lot of different mixing, actually, sometimes for people who don’t have maybe a phone that can connect or things like that. So he’s able to mix for people. As well as For our MD microphone, we have the SM58, and we have it paired with the Optogate PB05, and that’s just a laser automatic microphone switch. So the next thing we have is the electric guitar. Everyone brings their own pedal boards for the electric guitar, but I wanted to show you this really quickly. This is the XLR to quarter-inch adapter. Everyone has an Iridium or a Ruby, some digital amp. We We don’t really use real amps much anymore. Then everyone brings their own electric guitar. Then this is also a talkback system here. This is the Hot Shot DM1. It is a momentary switch. Press this down here and talk to whoever you need to talk to and release. Everyone has their own talkback microphone. For our keyboard setup, we have the Nord Stage 3. This was actually a gift, which incredible, incredible person donated to us, which is amazing. We used to actually use computers and an Arturia controller and things like that.

Speaker 1 But we found that I really love the sounds inside the Nord. I love the way it plays. I love the way that it feels. We just decided to just go with the internal sounds and then just change it through the Nord stage, the manager software. If you come back here, we have our wired in-ear setup. This is the Berenger Micromon headphones amp. Sorry, it’s a little bit messy there. Then we’re just using some radial DB1 direct boxes that go into the Nord for our sound left and right. This is the talkback mic for the keys, and this is the panic button. And this is incredible if you have a piano player who sings, but you also want to be able to communicate. And we have figured out that green is sing and red is said. So if they’re on green, they are singing, and it is going through a channel on our console. If If they are on red, it will then be able to flip over to the MD side of things, and we will be able to hear exactly what they need to say. Maybe there’s something that they need to communicate. Maybe there’s something I said to them that need to be communicated, and they’re able to do it in that way.

Speaker 1 So we’ve come to it. This is my favourite part, the tracks rig. And we’re running Ableton Live 11 for our tracks. I’m going to talk I’m going to talk about this in two different ways. I’m going to talk about it in the audio world and also the video world. But I want to do a rundown of our gear first. The first thing is that we are using Ableton Live 11, and it is an incredible incredible software if you’ve never used it. We also use the Multitracks software playback for our students, for our auditions, and also for any just smaller events and things like that that don’t require Ableton Live. For our Gear rundown, we have the Mio XM. This connects our computers together, so we can use multiple controllers on two computers. We have two Mac Minis, so we have a 2021 and a 2023 Mac Mini. We’re using the FocusRight Scarlett 18 i20s. We have two of them for redundancy. We’re also using a FocusRight Sapphire Pro 40. We’re using Radial SW8. There are two of them because they are paired together. At the top of the desk, we have… Well, first of all, the desk itself is awesome.

Speaker 1 It’s actually a dry erase board that you can write on to make notes or anything like that when we have a Side Stage MD back here. We also have our MIDI controllers. This is just a backup MIDI controller in case we have a big night or if something goes wrong with one. Then we have one of our main controllers here. We can be able to select what song we want, however we want to do it. This is really cool. We actually have this big knob, and this is just a passive monitor controller, and I actually found these in our warehouse. These big speakers are actually outdoor speakers. They work really well back here. I’m able to play whatever I want to play without having to turn the big sound console on, the amps on, everything like that. If I hit play on my console, I’ve got control over everything right here. It also, you’re able to hear the talkback for the MD back here as well. You’re able to hear that as well. Another talkback microphone for the MD back here. A great little bonus that we have is that if you have someone who’s on side stage, MD, and they need to be able to see the worship leader, how they’re going to be able to do that?

Speaker 1 Well, we’ve actually set up a GoPro, and you can actually see the shot right here. This is the GoPro cam on top of our LED wall. It’s just a shot for them to be able to see the worship leader call anything they need to call. They also have a foot switch here in the front that they’re able to be able to speak to whoever they need to speak to. But this is a great little tool for us to be able to see, even at the end of service, if pastor is speaking, we’re able to see the entire stage in the congregation. It’s just a great little add-on bonus. If we talk about our video piece of tracks rig, this is just an old Black Magic design switcher we have lined around. The audio doesn’t work anymore on it, but it works great for our video piece. What we’re able to do is we’re able to switch between computers. So one is actually tracks A, two is tracks B, and then three is our main feed. And we’re able to… If tracks A goes down, we have someone back here that’s able to flip over to tracks B, so we’re able to see everything that is going on still.

Speaker 1 And after the song and the pastor comes up, our monitor world guy over here, our A2, will come over and flip it over to three so that we can see how many, how how long the crash out needs to be, what he’s saying because we can’t see his mouth, things like that. So this is a great little tool, just an extra thing for us to be able to have a little bit more flexibility. You can see whatever I have selected on the switcher, it actually comes up on this screen here. Then these are just duplicated, essentially, bass and electric guitar. That’s what I mean by the video side of things. It’s actually a really cool tool to be able to have your tracks off the stage, but still be able to have full control. Quick reminder, if you’re watching and you want the full list of everything we’re showing you, if you want the gear, the software, the hardware, we have made it super easy. Just enter your email below and we’ll send you the complete list with all the links, the model numbers, so you can reference or duplicate any part of our setup.

Speaker 1 All right, guys, back to it. So I know I’ve said a lot on this tour that everybody has a talkback mic, and everybody has a talkback mic, even the worship leader. The worship leader has this radial JR1 remote. It is connected to a Relay XO. What this allows us to do is be able to have a wireless microphone when they are leading. It actually goes to the monitor console and then also to front of house, but then it also splits to the MD channel, so they’re able to momentarily switch this over. The other thing that we have is this background vocal talk mic, and they actually have their own channel. This is made by revival. Actually, if you press down here, this will just go the background vocalist. Again, wireless system. They’re able to have their wireless mic, but then be able to talk to the background vocalist in their own channel. Everybody has a talkback mic. This is our LED wall. They are three by three panels, a little bit bigger than your one by ones normally. We have nine foot high, and then that is about 30 feet wide. What we’ve done is we’ve actually split them into sections.

Speaker 1 The cool story about this wall, this was actually donated and given to us by an LED wall company where he felt like God was saying, Hey, I feel like I need to give you this wall, which is an incredible blessing to us. But I wanted to show you really quickly the infrastructure on what the back looks like. The infrastructure of this is these are all powered by PowerCon. The signal is all Ethernet. Essentially, these Ethernet cables. There are two Ethernet cables that are going up to our broadcast booth to get us this signal. A little bonus that I hadn’t planned on sharing was actually our teaching TV. I thought this might be super helpful if you’re looking for a teaching TV at your church. But this is the Dell 55-inch touch screen. We’ve had this now for a few years. It works really, really well. It has all of these different touch points that you can press. It’s all run with ProPresenter right behind us here. The pastor can come up and just tap once, and then he’s onto his scripture or onto his point. This is how our pastor teaches every single week or any teaching pastor.

Speaker 1 Twofingers actually does it back and you can go back and things like that. But this is all connected via USB. We use a Geffen USB extender, also some Ethernet and things like that to be able to connect everything together. But there’s actually a ProPresenter operator back here in the back, which I’ll show you in just one second. There’s a ProPresenter operator that’s able to help. If this teaching TV goes down or something like that, they can also scroll through the slides for him as well. So this is the ProPresenter teaching TV computer. It’s a Mac mini, 2020, 64 gigs of RAM. Basically, we have two outputs on this. We have one to the teaching TV, and then we have one to our stage display. That really just has the current slide and next slide. Our pastor doesn’t use notes, paper notes. The stage display is super important. But yeah, this is the ProPresenter teaching TV set up. Our director will come in every single week, throw his notes in, and off we go. The lighting we are Chauvet rogues, and about 90% of them are Chauvee rogues moving lights. We’re about phase two out of three.

Speaker 1 We’re actually going to add some more lighting here pretty soon. We also have some batons that we absolutely love. They don’t give off a tonne of light, but they give a lot of texture. Then we have some cheaper hair lighting at the top. Then the front lighting, there’s a couple of different lights we have there. There are ellipsoidals, some digital ellipsoidals, and then also some franels. I believe they’re all show bay as well. Some great front lighting, great textured lighting. Really, really great when it comes to all of that, when it comes to pastors, when it comes to worship and things like that. Our lighting console is the Champsys Quick Q30. We love this console because it has four universes at a very affordable price. We use all these universes universes. We have all the rogues on a universe. We have all of the front lighting on a universe. We’re able to have room to expand and room to grow. It’s a great console at a great price. But yes, our console is the Champs’ Quick Q 30. The cameras we use are the Panasonic UX Series. They’re all 180s. They have All of them have the vera zoom focus and also the zoom function that we’ve added to this.

Speaker 1 With our cameras, we felt like this worked a little bit better than this. We also have the iCan viewfinder, which is a little bit better than just the little one that we have on the side there. They’re fantastic. They work great. They work great in our lighting. For our comms, we actually have the Pro Intercom comm system, and this is on all of the cameras as well. The other camera that we have, most of the cameras we have are all the same. We do have one that’s different. This is a Sony A6300 camera. This is actually an unmanned camera. It’s just a side shot camera that we use for when pastor’s on this side or if there’s a vocalist or anything like that on Then we have this little trusty decimator to make it work so that we can connect everything and make sure everything’s good to go. Then we have a drum cam camera, which is just a GoPro on a slide or on a track. So this is our production room. As they say, this is where the magic happens. In our production room, we’ve got two 55-inch screens, we’ve got the multi-view, and then we also have the live feed, the programme feed.

Speaker 1 We’re running ProPresenter7, and this is running our LED wall graphics. It’s running our projector graphics, and it’s also running just a mirror of whatever is going on in the auditorium in our lobbies as well. We have a Mac Studio, 64 gigs of RAM. We have a UA interface for our time code, which we’re using inside ProPresenter. We also have this separate computer here that’s just running Internet, essentially planning centre, our control inside Resi. And then we also have our Black Magic the ATEM video switcher as well as the iMac to be able to run all of the elements, the lower thirds, all of those things in that. If we move over to this rack, this is where our encoder and decoder is for our campus. And this is the decoder screen here, which we can switch between the encoder and the decoder if we need to. And then down here, we have our LED wall controller. We have our LED display controller, which is what the two Ethernet cables go into. Then from there, this goes into the LED video processor, and we’re running HTML on that. We also have the Pro-com interface as well as some headphones outputs.

Speaker 1 This is the wireless headphones in your system for the Rover, so they’re able to hear what’s going on and the calls from the video producer as well as a switch. And this is a stage display just mirrored essentially from downstairs stage display. So we’re able to see what’s going on, what the band is able to see, what the vocalists are going to be able to for stage display. Everybody has a talk back. This is the talk back mic for this production room. Be able to speak to us and be able to mute time code if need be and be able to tell them exactly where we want to go in the song. So Yeah, this is our production room. Hey, guys, here’s what we call the Blue Room. This is our broadcast audio as well as our online, which I’ll explain in a second. But the infrastructure of this is we are running an X32 that is being connected over AES-50 to give us 32 channels of raw audio that they can then EQ and mix and everything like that they want to be able to do. And I told you earlier, we ran 38 channels.

Speaker 1 We’re actually running six channels of audio over Ethernet so that we’re able to capture every single channel in this console. Also a great feature, speakers, for them to be able to hear. There’s also headphones, of course. Here’s This is another talk back for them with an on and off switch so that they’re able to communicate with anyone they need to communicate with, as well as this TV. Guys, also in the blue room, we have our online setup. Our online setup consists of ProPresenter It’s also Resi or Living is One. We have the old boxes. But essentially, we want to have as much flexibility as possible. Our online setup, again, is Resi, Living is One. It is a switcher that we had lying around. This is our old switcher from our old building. There’s a headphones box for them to be able to hear. Then all of these screens here, which we just like this big, giant screen for people to be able to see everything that’s going on, the multi-view. And And this is our ProPresenter Mac mini here. This is a 2022 M1. And then these are the screens for the decoders for Resi.

Speaker 1 So as you can see, I actually have the message pulled up on one decoder. And then if you scroll over to the other screen, you can actually see the worship from a couple of weeks ago. I’m able to have two different points in the service. It’s an incredible way to have a lot of flexibility. In our auditorium, we have projectors. These are NEC projectors, 4K projectors. We have two of them, one on each side. It’s to be able to do everything that we need it to be able to do. Our projector screens are actually custom-made. These are Karls Place screens with a wooden frame. I actually want to show you how we built these. If you come back this way and you come underneath here, you can actually see these are just wooden two by fours with bungy straps, essentially, is how we stretch this out. And this screen is actually from Carl’s Place, I believe. I’m not sure if he’s still in business, but we bought both of these screens from Carl’s Place, and that’s our projector set up. So very affordable, but it works very, very well for us. So we’re The auditorium is about 650 seats.

Speaker 1 We were actually running at our old building, we were running about six services. It sat about 240, and we actually were just out of space. So when this building came about, we prayed about it. We sought God. We’ve been praying for actually this building for years. Back in 2017, we did a remodel on this thing. This used to actually be a theatre, a magicians theatre, believe it or not, with tigers and lions and a bunch of different things. A helicopter used to be able to be on the stage and everything like that. God has just transformed this place into what it is today. But we got this place, we finally got in about 2019, and COVID It would hit in 2020. So we got in here for about four months, and then we had to shut down, and it became really a glorified studio up in our lobby. But yeah, this is our church. This is our space. This is God’s house, and we’re just completely blessed to be in here. Hey, guys, thanks for coming along the tour. I hope it gave you some ideas and inspiration for your own church setup. And if you want the complete list of everything we covered, the gear, the tools, all of it, we’ve compiled it for you.

Speaker 1 Again, just drop your email below, and we’ll send you a clean list with all the links and specs. Again, guys, thank you so much for watching, and let’s keep building with excellence.