Mixing at Free Chapel

Here’s another excellent room I’ve been mixing in recently…Free Chapel in Gainesville, GA.  My friend Dustin Whitt has done an excellent job tuning this PA and overall giving the room some love.  It’s hard to go wrong with Meyer MSL4′s, CQ2′s, and 650P’s.  I cut my teeth professionally almost 10 years ago on rigs just like this one so this is kind of like coming home.  Enjoy the photos from a Night of Worship there last night.

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Gwinnett Church

One of the perks of my new position with Moyers Group in Atlanta is the ability to mix freelance on the weekends for some really cool churches around the greater Atlanta area.  This past weekend I spent the day with Dustin Whitt at Gwinnett Church mixing monitors.  For those of you who are not familiar, Gwinnett is North Point’s newest campus, launched just a few weeks ago.  At this point they do not have a permanent facility, so they meet weekly at the Gwinnett Center, a really cool arena & convention center complex in the area.

As you’ll see from the photos below, this is portable church like I would expect you’ve never seen before.  Two 53′ semi’s full of equipment, at least 16 fly points for the lighting grid, a big ol’ Meyer PA (8 MICA’s per side, HP700′s, Venue Profile at FOH & Monitors) add up to the best portable church experience I’ve ever seen.  When you combine that with the quality of artists and communicators in the North Point family of churches, the result is incredible.

It is an honor to serve with this team.  Check out these photos for more about my day.  If you’re in town, you really should come check this place out.  Sunday evenings at 6p.

#DECADE The “Real” Photos

So I’ve shown you the cool official photos from our DECADE photographers and you’ve seen media samples from the service itself.  Today I’m going to share the snapshots I took with my phone throughout the two days.  Production fans will probably enjoy these most of all since they really show nuts and bolts of the process.  Enjoy!

#DECADE “Official” Media Samples

Now for the part you’ve been waiting for…

These are raw, but I decided I am ok with putting them out there so you can see what raw looks like.  Are there some mix things I would change…sure.  Is everything perfect…no.  But there was such a spirit to what happened and I believe that translates to these videos in a way that supersedes everything else.

For more cool content, go to Youtube and search for “NLC Decade”. There are a few videos out there that really capture what it felt like in the room and I’m really pleased with how things translate.

Enjoy a glimpse at DECADE!

#DECADE Audio Notes

So if you’ve been following the series, you saw a few posts ago that the PA was a very large d&B J-rig.  Let’s just stop right there for a second and enjoy those words hehehe.

In this post we’re going to talk about the drums and keys rigs for DECADE and some overall direction things we’ve learned the past few months at NLC.

We’ve gotten our drum sounds as far down the field as we’re able with what we own, but it is in the plan for this year to replace our kits and go for a more vintage, timeless sound.  For DECADE, I took that future direction for a spin by renting a Ludwig Classic Maple kit from SIR in Nashville.  16×20 kick, 13″ and 16″ toms, and two snares – one for each guy…a 6.5×14 Black Beauty and a 6.5×14 Supraphonic.  For cymbals, I spec’d Zildjian…  17″ K Custom Dark crash, 19″ K Dark thin crash, 22″ K Custom Dark ride, and 15″ A hats.  Overall a very classic sounding kit and it sounded AMAZING!  I think this kit (or one very similar) is now at the top of our list for purchase this year.  My philosophy is to go for classic, timeless sounds that will translate to lots of different styles of music and sound good over many years.

I received a few questions regarding the Sub-Kick you may have noticed in some pictures.  If you’ve never played with one before, personally I’ve really enjoyed using one – especially with a nice and small, tight kick drum.  You put the condensor mic inside just as usual – in my case a Sennheiser E901.  Then add a bit of channel delay to line it up with the Sub-Kick on the outside.  High pass the E901 so the Sub-Kick takes care of the thump from the kick and the E901 handles the attack and character of the drum.  The combination sounds really really good on a well-tuned kick drum.

For Keys, we’ve been experimenting with a more software based approach as of late with strong results.  We own Yamaha CP-300 stage pianos that are used every week but I’ve wanted to enhance the quality of the sounds for a long time.  We spent some focused time over the past few months listening to demo’s of newer stage pianos – ideally looking for something with really killer sampled piano tones that can also do organs and strings really well.   There are a few options out there that seem to do both – the Nord Stage 2 piano, the Yamaha CP1 being two of them.  The problem is that both of those sell for upwards of $4,000…outside my budget with all of the other pressing needs to address.

The solution for us is the Native Instruments Komplete 7 collection, along with Ableton Live.  For a few weeks prior to DECADE, we experimented with using MIDI to trigger sounds from laptops since our players were content with the feel of playing on our CP300′s but we just weren’t crazy about the tones.  Now with a smaller secondary keyboard on top and MIDI going from both into a laptop, there are amazing organs, strings, electric pianos, and auxiliary percussion at our fingertips.  Combine that with Ableton Live to generate click tracks for the band and you have a really powerful package.

In the samples that you heard yesterday (if you missed them, go up to the media tab at the top of this page and you’ll find them along with a few others) the piano downstage was the Native Instruments New York Concert Grand.  The keys position upstage is running Live to trigger clicks and some tracks, along with Native Instruments exclusively for all of the other sounds generated.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may remember my journey with Receptor and sampled piano libraries when we replaced an acoustic grand at Kensington with a piano shell from Slam Grand and sampled sounds a few years ago.  Now that was a little while ago so I disclaimer with that, but let me tell you how impressed I am with the grand piano samples in Komplete.  The ability to control three different lid positions, key noise, and pedal noise is amazing.  When you hold down the pedal, you hear the “dampers” let go of the strings, the voicing sounds great, and its low in resource requirements so it runs great on our Macbook Pros.

For the piano rig downstage, we just came out of the laptop into a stereo DI and went from there.  The upstage keys position was more complex.  We used a Digi003 interface to give us up to 8 line outputs.  Outs 1/2 and 3/4 were two stereo keys stems.  One stem was primarily keys sounds, the second a few loops and percussion sounds.  Outs 5/6 were some stereo ensemble tracks and Out 7 was click.

In the near future, I’m planning to roll out a Mac Mini on stage in our regular setup that will run Ableton Live and the Komplete bundle.  We’ll connect MIDI from our CP300 and from the secondary keyboard, then add a M-Audio Fast-track Pro interface so we can have two stereo discreet outputs and we’ve got our new keys rigs for our two main campuses.  Why the Mac Mini?  It will give us a dedicated machine that stays off the internet and is kept production ready for this singular purpose.  It is also clean, low noise, and has good reliability.  Finally, by keeping it connected to the network, our players can screen share into it for programming and control simply and easily.

#DECADE Production Documents

As you can imagine, it required a tremendous amount of detail to pull off an event like this.  I’ve received a bunch of requests to release the production documents and so here we go.  I think most of this will speak for itself so maybe it would be best to just open up the comments section to questions if there are any.

Production Binder (49 pages, includes room drawings, script, input lists, lighting notes…given to everyone on the crew)

Worship Information (the specific information for the worship team)

Crew Information (the specific information given to the crew approx 3 weeks before the event)

I’m sure there are better ways to do most of this, but I’m just showing you my way.  There were some lessons that came out of this, especially with the service documents themselves.

There are a ton of people on stage throughout the service.  A TON.  I went back and forth on how best to document this – using generic VOX1, VOX2, E/G 1, E/G 2 titles or using everyone’s names.  I eventually settled on names as I knew this would be best for all of our volunteers who would be operating.  However, this was not best for the Majestic Crew who didn’t know anyone by name.  Especially in audio world with so many mixes, it would have been easier for them had I created a version of specific documents that was more generic.

The production schedule was intimidating to create.  Because we were trying to keep our catering numbers as low as we could, we had to make sure as many people as possible had time in the schedule to go off site and eat.  We kept the on-site number to under 40 in most meals and this was a huge win for our budget.

The script was created in Numbers so it would translate easily to iPads, the building maps done in OmniGraffle, and Majestic drawings in AutoCAD, and most of the credentials lists done in Google Docs.  One note about that…we use Google Docs extensively at New Life Church and normally it is an awesome tool.  However, once we got on site at Verizon, internet connectivity was extremely spotty and inconsistent.  I’m REALLY glad that all of the important documents were created outside of Google Docs so we were able to maintain access.

Again, if you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments section.