Church Tech Tour – Production & Worship Upgrades (Shoreline Church)

Speaker 2 But first, every day in churches across the world, production techs go unseen, unheard, unhugged. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, making sure your mic is on, your lyrics are correct and your screen doesn’t suddenly show that TikTok dance you’ve been trying to master all week. These selfless black clad heroes, covered in gaff, tape, lint and running on cold coffee, stand guard in the booth. They nod politely every time someone says.

Speaker 1 Hey, can I get more me in the monitor.

Speaker 2 Despite their devotion to excellence, they receive no affirmation, no eye contact and worst of all, no donut holes. For just the price of free 99, you can make a difference. Give a high five, offer a mildly sweaty side hug, whisper nice work, bro, as you walk by. Because when you hand a tech a hot coffee and they look up and smile and that single tear falls, you’ll know you made an impact. If you’ve ever heard clear vocals, seen clean lighting cues, or marvelled at a perfectly timed bumper video, it’s time to say thank you. Visit your local front of house today. Affirm a tech, adopt one with a heartfelt fist bump. Let them know they’re not just pressing buttons, they’re pressing hearts.

Speaker 1 Operators are standing by somewhere, probably power cycling something. All right, well, welcome back. So before I jump into what our gear is, I want to make clear that it’s not just the gear that makes the difference, it’s the team. I really utilise and rely on a team and get to introduce you to a bunch of them as we go through all this stuff. But it’s really a team effort. We’re a volunteer based culture here, but we do a really good job with our volunteers and really put out a great product. My hope is that you get to glean a little bit of gear stuff, but also it’s not about the gear that we have, it’s about how we’re using it and who’s driving it. So without further ado, Front of House. Alright, so this is Front of House. Our console for Front of House is the Dlive system here. So we have a CDM 64 as our mixer and then our surface is the C3500. And I really gotta say that Allen and Heath has been the best console I’ve been on for churches. I’ve worked on Yamahas, I’ve worked on Midas, I’ve worked on the m and the X32.

Speaker 1 I’ve worked on plenty of consoles and this has probably been by far my favourite for church. It’s got a lot of tools that you need to accomplish what you need to accomplish for church. So yeah, we’re on that. And then over here I’m running waves. So we’ve got a WAVE server down in Iraq right here. And mainly what I’m using Waves for is Auto Tune live in the room. Not that we have bad singers, but when you’re doing things you just want to give that extra level of security to your singers. And so we run autotune, which leads me to my stream deck here on my stream deck, if you look here, I’ve got Waves tune. That’s the pitch correction I’m running. I can scroll between channels here and then I have all the keys programmed on the stream deck and then also to turn off Waves tune. In a panic, I try to avoid using as many Waves plugins as possible. I will use them, I’m not afraid to. I do use like a C4, C6 on vocals and things like that. But for the most part I actually try to avoid using waves because I.

Speaker 1 When I went and got my DLIVE certification, the instructor in the class said that because DLIVE has that phase coherency thing going on, everything going out is going to be in phase. The only part they can’t control is waves and Dante. So that’s where you are running the risk of introducing phase. So the least amount of processing you can do, the better. That’s why I don’t really do a whole tonne of processing waves, although I really love it. And I make sure I’ve got an SSL channel on each thing so hopefully that helps with some of those phase issues. Over here I’m running smart. So we run that for our levels for SPL measurement as well as running graphs and frequency spectrum analyzation in real time. And I’ve also used that to do some tuning of the room with some some transform functions. And I will say not everybody needs to be using smaart. You have to know how to use it. But one of my biggest things is we don’t hear with our eyes. So I actually don’t use this as much. I really focus on my SPL levels and just make sure that I’m living in what we agreed on and that I’m not just dousing everybody in audio.

Speaker 1 And then sometimes if I’m really having a struggle, I’ll use the spectrum to analyse what I’m doing. But for the most part I really try to trust my ear and at the end of the day, if it sounds good. The other thing here at Audio Land is squawk box here. So the band, currently the drummer and the keyboardist have talkback mics. I’m working on actually getting talkback mics for more band members. And then we also have a talkback system backstage so the band can talk to me when they’re side stage. So I just keep that low during service, but they can get my attention. And then I’ve got my talkback mic here just going to their ears or everywhere else that they can hear me as well talking to them. So that’s a big crucial part of this and letting them have that opportunity to communicate. As I mentioned before, communication is key. So we have other ways. The other thing here is that I have intercom, we’re running clear comm for our wired party line. I mean it’s just simple, good old fashioned party line. And then we have Hollyland wireless. I’ll give you guys the specs on that.

Speaker 1 But we have Hollyland wireless and that’s been really good. Mainly our cameras, stage managers and floaters, system techs that we have are going to be on wireless. But really that’s what we have here at front of house. The other cool trick I have is a lot of times I’m calling service like a stage manager would from audio if I’m mixing. So I had our broadcast guy give me programme out here so I can see what’s going on with programme, as I call things out. I can see that the director’s tracking. He doesn’t have to talk to me to let me know like, yeah, I did that. Like I can see that it’s there, I can see what’s going on and I can really help troubleshoot anything that might be happening during worship. I have it on smart and then I’ll switch it back over to, to the programme feed when we get to the sermon and other parts of the service that I need to check in on. Down here at our front of house rack, I’ve got a computer to control my WAVES server. I’ve got my WAVE server right here. Right here is a transmitter.

Speaker 1 So we offer Spanish translation. We’re in an area that has a lot of Spanish speaking folks, so we have a Spanish ministry and we do in person live translations. So we use radios. So this is my transmitter, so they hear the translator do that. We also have a separate Spanish broadcast feed. Here is my smart computer. So I’ve got a Black lion audio interface, the Revolution 2 channel interface and I take my mic and my board feed from in there. And then I’ve just got the computer for that, got my apc, my battery back up there. It’s a trip light. And if you guys aren’t running battery backups, you really should be because. Because that is of the utmost importance on some crucial pieces like your control stuff. Right here is our Hollyland wireless system. We’re using the Solidcom system. And so this is the transceiver. It has an antenna built in, but I chose to do bigger antennas. It gives me pretty good range interfaces with our two wire party line here. So that’s how I’m getting wireless, camera, comms and everything that I need to have. And then they also are using the these packs here.

Speaker 1 So they just come and grab their packs and grab their headsets. My staff knows to come grab their radios here as we get ready for our morning. And so to have really good communications and just have things in place that help you be accessible as well as a director leader of any sort over ministry to have your volunteers and your people just being able to reach you is a huge thing. So that’s why we have that and have a little station set up for that too. And then the most important drawer here is the candy drawer which is looking a little sad right now. So this is our lighting console. We’re running Onyx Obsidian. Onyx on PC. I think it’s been the best bang for your buck. Don’t get me wrong, there’s better systems out there. But I think Onyx is a really solid control system and I’ve been really happy with it. For the amount of money you spend or that you would spend on any of the big names, MA or Ion or any of those things that this does what I needed to do, we’ve been able to really accomplish some really great things.

Speaker 1 It’s got all the functionability of that and I really think it’s been a great system for us. I’ve got a touch screen here so I can go through all my presets without having to use the mouse. I’ve got a keyboard and mouse here if I need it and then the control surface here which is great for certain things. And for the most part we just use the command section here and build our stuff. And then we have a few submasters and things built out. This is our graphics position. So. So first thing foremost, again communication is important. So we have intercom right here. The graphics position does fire off a lot of cues for us. And I’ll get into that in just a second. So they need to be able to hear whoever’s calling the service, calling all those cues out. They need to be able to hear them and communicate with the rest of the team. So they have comms here. We’re running Propresenter for our graphics software. So for all our content and slides, lyrics, things like that, we’re running Propresenter. Our stream deck here is using Companion to talk to both our broadcast switcher.

Speaker 1 So we have ability out here as we’re programming and doing things to control that. But also it switches our main content projectors from Propresenter’s output to programme output. So we do use IMAG during service. So during worship we have imag. It just gives it a dynamic, makes it feel like, you know, this is bigger than us just in this room right now. So stream deck, that’s the main thing we’re using that for during service. And then the other piece of software we use is Resolume, and that drives our centre projection, which we’ll get into in a minute, but we use Resolume to drive that. It does all our backgrounds, it does the scaling, it does all the effects that we want it to do. And so the centrepiece of Everything here is ProPresenter. We use MIDI commands to talk to our lighting console and our Resolume machine in order to control those and have everything fire off at once. So we actually don’t run an ld, we don’t run a lighting op at all. It’s all based off a propresenter and we time it out with different things. And so that’s why it’s crucial that our graphics op is hearing what’s going on with service and that we can make sure that they are nailing their cues and have their back on that.

Speaker 1 The other thing to note is that this computer out front of house is actually just screen shared. My propresenter computer is upstairs in Iraq. Our graphics ops like to be here, sit down here. Instead of trying to reroute all our infrastructure down here, which would have been quite a nightmare, we did leave it up there and then just screen shared here. Same with our resolund computer, which is actually backstage driving those projectors. That’s backstage and we screen share here. So this is really just a control thing. And at the end of the day, you really don’t notice the difference for the most part. So this is our broadcast audio room. So we actually split off through Dante, split off audio up here, and then they get to mix down our broadcast audio up here separately, so that’s I think a very crucial key piece to having great audio for your broadcast is actually having a separate broadcast mixer, not just Knox feed off of your console. Even if someone’s managing that, like, to actually have a separate system that works well is going to be crucial to having a great online sound. So here we’re using Pro Tools.

Speaker 1 Pro Tools is my main thing that we have for mixing this. Now we do multi track every service as well. We do go back and mix down some things or edit some things and use it for releasing on Spotify, YouTube, whatever we may do. We just want to record everything and make sure we have all that stuff ready to go. So we have that and that’s why we use Pro Tools to mix. My goal would be to actually switch to a console sometime in the future. Running our audio off of a computer has proven to be unstable at times. Actually. Originally we were on Logic, but we switched to Pro Tools because Pro Tools has been more stable. But even then, sometimes the computer can get a little finicky. So I’d rather have a console. They just seem more solid to me. But we would still run Pro Tools for recording and multi track everything. We have the ssl. They are just our mouse. Basically they control Pro Tools, but it’s like having a mixer in front of you. So angel, our broadcast guy, really likes having those faders. He’s really good at nailing those cues.

Speaker 1 The having that physical surface is actually going to help you nail a lot of cues. Because during rehearsal, that’s when you’re dialling in all your plugins. We use a lot of plugins and stuff here. So that’s when you’re dialling in your sound. And then once you get to service, you really should just be trying to hit cues. Same at front of house. Just nail your cues. And the way we really achieve that is with the physical faders and having them in front of us. We’ve got the audit Nero for just monitoring and that goes downstairs and comes back to us through Dante. And then we listen to that. Here we have Atom F5s for our monitors. Those have proven to be really well. And we’ve got a Yamaha Sub down here. We’re running a Mac studio for our computer. And then we run external storage off of SATA drives. And then we have these different monitors, choices, backs here. They’re mono, but they actually sound like a really bad tv. So we listen to those because we try to listen on multiple things that are going to give us the representation of what people are listening on, whether it’s their laptop, their tv, whatever.

Speaker 1 So we try to listen to multiple things, not just the great sounding atoms up here we have multi view. We do want to make sure that things look like they match what you’re seeing. Not just checking sync but also yeah, that reverb sounds like it belongs in that room or different things. So yeah, that’s what we’re using here and how we achieve our broadcast. And the most important thing in this room, and if you take nothing else away from this is this. It’s the most important thing in this room. Go see chickens. Me and one of our old broadcast guys are both Seahawks fans. So that lives in here and for good reason. So I’m going to introduce you to a friend here. This is Drew. It’s a dummy head we have on a mic stand. We have a lot of fun around here. But actually he does serve a real purpose which is when we need to focus lights or check cameras or different things will throw him out on the stage and he gives us somewhat of an accurate thing. If you don’t have another person to go stand on the stage for you.

Speaker 1 Works out really well for us. So we use our old buddy, old pal Drew here to achieve that a lot. Alright, so now we’re to the part where it’s really crucial to be collaborative with your worship team. And that is in ear monitors. I have our worship pastor here, Aaron. He’s just going to answer a few questions on how we got to where we are with our in ears we right now. Because I think that was a crucial piece. So first off, what was your experience when we first got here? Because that was a big thing.

Speaker 3 Oh my goodness. So I don’t know if I can name. Can I name the. Maybe I don’t name the actual product so that I don’t put anybody in.

Speaker 1 It might make them better.

Speaker 3 So it was cling, right? That’s what it was. Clang. That’s what it was called. And for us, for my experience, it was really hard to hear things with clarity and have some control over that. So thank you to Danny. And one thing I’ll say too is it’s the relationship of worship pastor, production director is so crucial those of you that maybe it’s difficult. I’ve been there too. I feel for you and also know that keep going after a good relationship, a healthy relationship, a unified relationship, because it goes a long way. Because things like this conversation of moving from one system to a new system was a lot of good conversations. And Danny really took the lead after that point. Of helping to get us there to d live to one mix. And that’s been a game changer. So much clarity in our ears now. And when we could hear better, we’re going to play better, we’re going to enjoy it. Our volunteers are going to love how they sound. When they love how they sound, they’re going to execute really well because they’re having fun now, because they. Yeah, they’re just enjoying playing because they could hear really great sounds in their ears now.

Speaker 1 So I’ll say on the relationship thing too, for me, a lot of my experience was taking care of artists in the secular concert world and even taking care of CEOs in the corporate world. So those little things. And I’ll show you as I continue on this tour, I’ll show you guys the little nuances. And they’re not even tech things that. Just those little things, those little details that go a long ways and help with that relationship. So, Aaron, let me know what you’re looking for in a mix.

Speaker 3 Everybody’s going to be different and so different worship leaders might be going after different things, but for me, I wanted more control of the tracks, to be able to hear things with more clarity. Even pads being on its own thing and separate from piano, so that I could bring up the pad level of the volume that I want, because I want atmosphere, but I don’t want it taken over. I’m such a fan of reverb in my ears in my mix, but it’s going to be different in the house. And so that was another thing that I wanted broken out and living on its own. I wanted control over just my specific reverb because they’re going to want something different out there and I’m going to want something different in here. That was also a game changer to be able to have my own control over how much reverb I want in my ears and even what type of reverb. Danny worked on and gave me a couple choices of different styles of reverb. And the biggest thing for me was I was after efficiency in our rehearsals. And so what I realised was that more control over our mixes individually across the stage of every position, everybody being able to have more control over their mix.

Speaker 3 Minimise. Hey, raising your hands in the middle of a song or after a song. Hey, can we put that down more? Can we put this down more? And five, 10 minutes later, when you’re spending a lot of time on getting our ears dialled. Now that’s definitely really helped minimise rehearsal so that we could really focus on the music in general, gelling together and leading in the spirit and playing with skill.

Speaker 1 And that’s how we got to actually doing an analogue split. Separate monitor, consoles. And all I do is come in and check your gains as you guys start line checking and noodling around in the morning. And then as rehearsal goes on. Another pro note for sound engineers is to really read your band’s body language. Read your band’s facial cues. You can tell by the way they’re holding themselves or if they’re playing with their pack a lot or running back to their mixer to change their mix. Be proactive. Ask hey, is there anything I can do? You know, I notice when Aaron’s running back to his mixer, like, hey, is there something I can be helping out with? And just take your pack for a minute and listen and see what I can do to fix it. But for the most part it’s pretty set and forget on my end. I just make sure games look right and then they take care of it themselves, which is nice because I hate taking care of monitors from front of house. I don’t like having what I do at front of house affect the band. That’s not fair to anybody.

Speaker 1 We were all much happier after we decided to do this split out.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it’s been fantastic.

Speaker 1 Wireless in ears, we’re running PSM3 hundreds. I’m running ULXDs for my wireless mics. I’ve got a quad and then two duals and then I’ve got some ur4ds that are old and they’re just here as OS and backups. They’re all going into antenna management and things like that. I’ve got four channels of vocals for the band on wireless and so I run that into a Cloudlifter because the band really needed a lot more headroom. It’s a little unorthodox. I don’t recommend this for everybody. People are probably seeing that I have a Cloudlifter and hearing what the heck is that for? Because our band wanted more headroom on their vocals. So that gave me that opportunity to add a little bit more headroom there without gaining the sound out of it on the console, which has really helped out a lot. Another fun thing that’s just right here we have. We don’t use it much these days because people are using modellers most of the time. But we do have an amp room. So we are using the amp room currently and that just gets patched through the patch bay. We’re using SGI’s to get from the stage Back here.

Speaker 1 But if you’re having trouble with stage volume and things like that, isolating your amps like this is key and it’s not always the most ideal sound wise, but it’s a great trade off because you’re not getting your head ripped off by a guitar amp. So I highly recommend running an amp room if you’re going to run real amps. Right here is our resolume machine. So that lives in the rack, but we’ve got control over it here. And then we have this output so we can see what it’s actually outputting out to the projectors and then we can just monitor it from back here so you’re not making a bunch of laps back and forth because that can get tiring. But this is our resolume machine. And then we’ve just got a bunch of storage. I’ve got my mic locker here, here, things like that, things we use. We have a lot of other venues, we have a lot of other things that we support. So this is also our storage area for that. I’ve got a bunch of gear that goes out and basically this is our warehouse back here. So onward to what’s actually out in the worship centre.

Speaker 1 Before we go out into the worship centre, actually we want to show you the green room because production does have a couple pieces in here. So we have our in ears and our mics. So we come in here every Thursday before service and we label our in ears for them so they know whose is whose. And it’s just one of those nice little touches that I talked about before about taking care of your artist. Makes them, gives them ownership over something. I try to make sure each of these bays is what you are using. So Aaron, when he comes in, he sees his pack, he knows he’s always this pack. He grabs that, they grab their mics, they put them back on chargers. But we have these in here just living there, so it’s just convenience for them. But we do every morning set them out for them. Just one of those nice little touches. Again, another one of those nice little touches is making sure you have water prepared for people. I’m picky. One of those things. I just don’t like having branded water bottles. So we make sure we peel the labels off and have water bottles ready.

Speaker 1 I’ll set those out too for people as we do that. And walking out of the green room too. I’m to going currently in the process of setting up talkback here. So after this filming we will have this little squawk box, much like Front of house where they can hear the talkback channel and a mic with a switch back here. So when someone needs to talk to me at front of house, but they’re back here, they can just quickly, quietly talk to me and get a hold of me back there. So it’s just easy communications that’ll be driven through our front of house console. The other thing too, we run multiple capsules. So these are my wired backups. I’ve got my main input set as my wireless mics. But if a wireless mic fails, whatever battery dies, start taking RF hits. I’ve got cables ran in my floor pockets ready to go. So me or one of my other folks that is here on a Sunday can just grab the same matching capsule that’s on their wireless mic. We try to run the right capsule for the right person. And whenever we get a new vocalist, we make sure we find the right mic.

Speaker 1 This is a Neumann KMS104 and I’ve got a dpa de factos. I really like beta 87s. Basically anything but a 58 I’m pretty happy with. I got some Telefunkens, I’ve got some KSM’s, just different things. And we try to make sure we fit the mic to the person. We’ve got those matched on wireless as well. So if there’s any failures, someone runs out to the stage, pulls the cable out of the floor pocket, plugs it right in and they’re good to go. And then it’s a matter of a button click at front of house. But yeah, this is our little wing area that we have set up for quick deployment and things like that. And then we’re out here in the worship centre. Quickly, talk about audio before I talk about lighting here and some backline stuff. Our PA is an L Acoustics KIVA system. We’re running arrays and they’re great. I love it. Here’s Piano Worlds. I’m running a hot into the floor pocket there to get him there. That’s Aaron’s pedal board there. So that’s where he’s running wireless for his acoustic. And he’s got everything there he needs. Our guitarist, his pedal board loose here and I like to run neat hods here.

Speaker 1 So just looks. Keeps your cables neat, makes it look nice and clean and so he runs that world there. And then our base rig is pretty simple and I just take an XLR and run power to it. So here’s drumworld. Our drummers control tracks. So this is our tracks machine. And then we run tracks through Dante. So I’ve got a Focusrite Dante card, a Rednet Dante card in a chassis, so it runs separately outside of the computer. We’re running playback, much like plenty of other churches. And then I can show you the Interface for the DLive software. Right now, all my in ears are run off of Dante. So this is my Dante IO. So that’s how I get out of the console out here is just through that. And then I hit a headphone amp and they can do what they want to. And then they control it with this software. So it’s pretty easy. All I do is set it up so they can just move faders and pan and do what they gotta do. It’s kinda cool because you can customise what each person has. So the drummers, they get to control each individual mic of theirs that’s on the kit and then they get everybody else as well.

Speaker 1 But then for other people, I have just a drum mix that’s generated off of a mix on the console. And then I can assign that to their mix just on its own. Before I get into what drum mics we have, I also have a talkback system. So our drummer gets a talkback mic, just good old 58 there. And they like to swing it in and out as they need it. And then let me tilt this real quick down here on the floor. We’ve got a whirl in mic mute, so it’s disengaged normally. And then they just kick it on when they need to talk to everybody. And then that way we don’t get blown out in our ears with tonnes of cymbal noise. As far as mics on the kit, these are some of the only mics I have on the stage. Everything else is pretty much direct in. So I’ve got a beta 91 in the kick. I’ve got a D6 on the kick as well, on the kick out. And then I have a sub kick as well. So I’ve got three mics on the kick. Then I’ve got Sennheiser 904 on the rack Tom just gives it that perfect rack tom sound.

Speaker 1 Over here are floor toms. I’m running Audix D6s and I know those are really mostly kick mic, but they sound really good on big floor toms. Gives us a lot of body and oomph to those floors. Floor tom. Then I’ve got the crush mic here, so that’s just over the kick drum pointed right at the snare ish area. And then what I do is just squeeze the snot out of it with a DBX compressor. And it gives you just that aggressive, almost parallel compression sound. But it sounds really good. And then I am running a pair of 57s on snare top and bottom SM81s on hi hats here, these guys here. And that’s just mounted on my overhead. And then on my overheads I’m using C14s matched pair. And I really don’t use overheads a tonne in the room. Those are mostly for broadcast. So that’s why we went with a really high end overhead mic. The key here, one of the biggest things to having your drums in a drum cage is you lose a little bit of clarity and fidelity. And really the way I combat that is I use triggers. So you’ll see these triggers on all the shells.

Speaker 1 So even including the kick, I’ve got these roland triggers. And that roland brain lives back in the backstage rack. And so I picked samples that worked with our room, worked with the kit play really nicely. And then I blend those in together with the real drums. And so really I use those for that clarity, that attack. But I use the Rochelle mics for that body, that depth to the drums. Because if you don’t blend the two, it can sound really fake. But we really find that right ratio. And it’s about playing with that, with each drummer. They’re a little bit different on where I’m going to have those groups sitting when I’m mixing. But it’s just a matter of playing with it. And as long as the end of the day it sounds good, it sounds good. So that’s why I use tr