Making the M7CL sing

I’ve been blessed to spend the past 4 years or more mixing on some really great, really big desks.  When I first arrived at Kensington, we owned a Yamaha PM1D that, while I’d had previous experience on years before, I enjoyed learning inside and out.  Then 2 years later we changed directions and embraced the Digidesign (now Avid) platform.  Along the way I also was able to get my hands wet a bit with Yamaha M7CLs.

There are some tricks I’ve learned along the way from absorbing content from accomplished engineers in the field that made life mixing on the Venue and PM1D a bit easier and gave me better mixes.  A new challenge since coming to NLC.tv has been trying to find creative ways to get the same bang for the buck out of the M7CL.  I had already started exploring some of this process in my last few months at Kensington but I’m working now to flesh them out a bit more.  I’m going to share some of my favorite M7CL tips and tricks over the next few entries (there’s too much here for a single post).

Today we’re going to tackle parallel compression.  I’ve written on this before, as have others, but in its simplest form, parallel compression means double bussing a set of inputs to two different signal paths on the console.  In the first path, everything remains clean and unprocessed.  In the second path, a nice compressor is placed over the signals and they are compressed as a group, usually pretty hard with variable attack & release times depending on the song.  Then the clean and squashed signals are recombined before going to the stereo bus on the mixer, for me usually at a 2:1 ratio of clean to squashed.  This is especially magic for vocals and snare/toms for me.  Mixing the styles of music that I do, vocal intelligibility is normally one of the most important goals I’m fighting for and getting the vocal to sit nicely in its place with the rest of the band can be challenging.  Since I started implementing this parallel compression trick last fall, it has done wonders to the ease with which I can accomplish vocal consistency I really like.  It becomes an even more powerful tool the larger the vocal group becomes.  At Kensington it was normal to only have a single lead vocal and perhaps a BGV or two.  At NLC.tv, 5 to 6 vocals is the norm with sometimes as many as 7 or 8 on a given weekend.

Doing the parallel compression thing on an M7CL is really easy.  First, I like to set up 2 busses as fixed busses instead of variable so I don’t have to worry about making sure the sends to them are all at unity.  This can be accomplished under Bus Setup in the console setup menu.  Next, as long as I have enough mix busses available, I like to set up one buss for the clean group and just call this one VOX.  I unassign the VOX channels themselves from going straight to the L/R buss and instead route them to this VOX “subgroup”.  While I plan to keep the processing here as clean as I can, especially the larger the vocal group you have, it can be really handy to have a single place you can grab an EQ and deal with a problem area that effects all of the vocals during the heat of mixing.

Now I also route the VOX channels to the 2nd group that I call VOX Smash.  This group is setup just like the first one except on this one I engage the compressor on the buss, set to a 6:1 ratio with a medium attack and release.  The M7CL has an excellent feature called automatic delay compensation so even though the same channel is going through two signal paths with different processing times, they stay perfectly in sync so that when they are combined into the master L/R buss, they are still in phase with each other.

If you’ve never tried this concept before, I can’t suggest strongly enough that you do.  I always had the preconceived notion that a trick like this was only available to execute on larger desks but have been very pleased with the results I can achieve on our M7CLs and have started sharing the love with all of our engineers on this easy and effective mix technique.

Behind the scenes with Rascal Flatts

This post has been sitting in my drafts literally for months and for some reason I never finished it off to post it.  Mindy and I had a great opportunity last February to hang out with the audio crew on the road with Rascal Flatts when their tour came through Detroit.  Jon Jon Garber (Flatts FOH) was a gracious host for the day and the entire experience was a great case study in excellent live production.  Please enjoy my photos and commentary of that day…

Back in the saddle…

It’s been a quiet few months on the blog front as my family and I are safely on the other side of a huge transition.  The past few months have been both the most exciting and most faith testing I’ve ever experienced professionally or personally.  Leaving Kensington Community Church for the new adventure in Central Arkansas that I believe God called us to meant saying goodbye to family, countless friends, and my dream come true first church ministry job that I’ve written about here many times.  However, God has been tremendously faithful and the transition to my new position at New Life Church.tv has been blessed.  We’re loving life in Conway, AR, have been blessed with a perfect house in a great neighborhood, and are connecting with more and more new friends daily.

I’ve yet to write much about NLC.tv but I’ve been sent lots of questions about the church and my new role here.  NLC.tv is nine years old now and has campuses in Conway, Greater Little Rock, Heber Springs, Fort Smith, plus a new internet campus that launched this past winter.  A fifth physical campus is coming this fall with the exact location to be announced formally in the next few weeks.  The church officially averages around 7,000 people per weekend between all of the locations and is growing significantly every year.  In fact, it isn’t talked about around here very often but I think it is worth mentioning that NLC was recently ranked as the fastest growing church in the country by Outreach Magazine (you know, those impossible to verify, totally crazy survey things that magazines like to do).  All of this to say, it seems that in ways I’ve never personally experienced before, God’s hand is directly on this place and moving in supernatural ways.

My official title is Audio Director which means that I’m attempting to carrying the flag for the audio brand of NLC.tv.  That translates into leading the volunteer teams who mix all of our services, building best practices and procedures for our team, building bridges between audio and the other creative artists on the larger team, getting behind the console myself every once in a while, optimizing and maintaining the audio systems campus wide, and dreaming/implementing new & upgraded audio solutions as the church continues to expand and grow.  Wow.  Putting that all down on the screen looks pretty daunting!  It’s a big elephant to eat at the outset, but it seems already that each week we make big progress towards the path of audio bliss wrapped around the mission of NLC.tv.  My time at Kensington helped me to learn I was made for a challenge like this and I’m excited to use all of the gifts I’ve been given to help shape a ministry still in its formative years.

I’m part of an exceptional creative and worship team.  Being able to work with and learn from gifted leaders such as Neil Greathouse, Brandon Shatswell, and many many more makes me so thankful that God brought us here.  The talent pool I’ve experienced both on and off the stage is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, especially given the size of the teams necessary to pull off services between so many venues and the fact that teams are by far majority volunteer-based.  The artists on stage are tight musically, humble, and self-motivated.  For example, the drummers and bass players got together this week by their own initiative on a weeknight to work on parts and consistency between themselves so they could be a stronger contributor to the whole.  I’ve never seen buy-in to this degree and it is contagious to the rest of the teams.

I have lots to write about over the coming weeks as I dive into this journey.  I’ve already spent hours tuning PA’s so they are more transparent, cleaning up and organizing stages, stripping the cabling and starting over in order to properly label and make things more volunteer friendly, console repairs, implementing audio for video processing chains & audience mic’ing, etc etc.  I have committed to documenting the steps along the way for the same reason as why this blog was started originally over 3 years ago…communicating with my team.  Anyone else who happens to come across the site is welcome to follow along on what is sure to be an adventure for all of us…

Here we go!