Sugar Creek has been a volunteer based production ministry for a few years now.  One area that was new to volunteers was Audio, as it was always staffed by a staff member.  A lot of people often wonder how we can use volunteers like we do, especially when we implement new technology, like a digital console.  Today is an example of that answer. Our volunteers are eager to meet the challenge.  Pretty simple eh?
This morning one of our stronger A1s was up to mix.  Now, after Wednesday I had kind of had a few concerns because it seemed as if he’d get lost in the console, and loose focus on the mix.  Well this morning, it seemed to be less of a problem, as he was scootin’ around pretty good.  I wasn’t nearly as hands on as I thought I would be. Whew! This volunteer stepped up to the challenge, and not only met it, but succeeded my expectations.  This morning was probably one of the best sounding Sunday’s  I have heard at Sugar Creek in a really long time.  Looking forward to next week. Maybe after Wednesday I’ll be able to sleep in again on Sunday AM….

It is with great pleasure that I announce that the DiGiCo SURVIVED the first weekend at The Creek. I walked in at 6AM after waking up from a nightmare earlier that night, and powered up the sound system. To my relief, everything came on, and worked. Rehearsals started, and I got to fix a lot of the things that didn’t get fixed on Wednesday. Rhythm section got tighter, praise team got tighter, and it all kind of came together.

Our first service is our Traditional service, so the desk really didn’t get pushed real hard. Mostly piano, bass, a little acoustic, and some orchestra. One of my main problems all morning was the orchestra, or lack there of. I got ZERO rehearsal time with just the orchestra this week. Luckily, next week I can build off of the rhythm section and work on the orchestra some more on Wednesday, because they were fairly absent today, except the horn section. During the Mosaic service I learned something about our system, it’s way transparent now. A lot of the system tuning in the past has been to compensate for the aging of the consoles, and the colour (in honor of my UK DiGiCo friends) of the sound that they added. Instead of changing output caps, the system just got tweaked. We’re currently waiting on a DSP upgrade to BSS London’s before bringing our tuning guy out. But 1 request already I have is a little more gain out of the system so I don’t have to drive the console so hard. Luckily the limiters on the DiGiCo outputs are ROCK solid, and never let me clip the console, which is great thing because .001 dB over zero on a digital console is a nasty.

The second service rocked, now it was a little louder, or perceived louder than services in the past.I won’t even comment on our third service, other than this. Already, week 1, my A2 for the first two services, A1′d the third service. FIRST WEEK WITH THE CONSOLE AND ALREADY I HAVE VOLUNTEERS ON IT! YAY! Next weeks crew will really let me know how this transition is going to be. But I’m not worried. The third service is going through some musician transitions, and it’s been a difficult past couple of weeks as they hunt for a new drummer, and guitar player. It was still a tremendous confidence builder for the volunteer to be able to drive the desk – first week out, and it didn’t crash or blow up!

If anyone has any questions regarding the digital shift. Feel free to contact me.

The DigiCo is in. I’m up there at the top plugging in power and MADI lines, while Rick is cleaning up some of the wiring underneath.   But there it is! It’s been a fun week or so.  We found large amounts of water in the conduit running under our worship center, so we chose the safe road, and took all of our wiring to the air.  We brought in our rigger who walked it across  the iron from where we’ve put our stage racks to FOH.

 So far it has been seamless though rehearsal was crazy on  Wednesday. I’m getting to mix the maiden voyage, which is fun, but still stressful.  The cards are slightly stacked against us for reasons I won’t go into, but I had a tough time getting the right kind of rehearsal on Wednesday night.  Everyone just walked in, plugged in and started. Luckily there were somethings I had left over from Edge rehearsal the night before.  But I feel like I’ve got a good base to build on before Sunday AMs rehearsals which will last an hour before our services.  :Fingers crossed:

 A few challanges we’ve already overcome:

Wrong multi-pins

Our current system was built with expansion in mind.  There are 48 inputs on stage, and another 12 elsewhere through out the room.  The system was built in with a monitor split as well, untransformered, but a split none the less.  This was  exciting because all we needed was two Elco runs from this panel to our stage racks with break out cables to patch into the racks.  Well ProCo uses two standards on Elco connectors. Ours were built initially with the first standard, and they sent us the second. more updated. No fear. Our vendor for that aspect of the project hooked us up with some 16 channel sub-snakes to get us what we needed till the rebuilt Elcos arrive.

Bad Output Card

Kind of a bummer, but right out of the box our local (MiniRack) had a bad output card. I swapped it out with one from the stage racks, and all was well. Allan Nichols our rep at DiGiCo overnighted us a new one, and the bad one is back in route to DiGiCo.

Backordered Aviom Systems

We got an Aviom output card for the DiGiCo.  Well, our ordered got back orderd as we had to update all of our mixers to Aviom II mixers as they’ve changed some of the codecs in which they encode/decode the signals. Two 8 Channel  XLR-F to TRS-M snakes and relocating the input brain to the stage racks has remedied this problem.

 Our volunteers have warmed up to the console. I don’t expect to have to mix a whole lot past each rotations first Sunday.  I’ve got one volunteer who’s writing up a list of questions which is nice, because it’s helping me make sure I explain the things that are needed to be explained, and not just ramble on about the obvious. 

 I’ll be posting an update on Sunday after the first Sunday. I’m sure it’ll be a great one. 

I think it’s very common to find Aviom systems in churches, almost everywhere these days.  I know we use them in the two locations that have live music, and I’m hoping to expand there use in the LYF center soon by finally getting our guitarists to let me take there wedge away from them.  Though  I can’t really complain because all they ever ask for is the Worship Leaders vocal.

Anyway, I for the longest time have waisted inches of label maker tape trying to get the right spacing done for the labels.  It’s tough, and almost impossible to get right.  Aviom has a handy dandy resource located on there support library page.  It’s an excel spreadsheet that’s built for you to fill out and to attach to your personal Aviom mixers.  It’s taken some adjustments with the printer to get these to print correctly, but now taht they do I’m in business. To take it to the next level I’ve started printing them on an Avery product I stumbled across at Office Depot while buying more label tape :-/… I was able to save 11.99 on the label tape buy getting this!

So now I prnt on these, cut them out with a large paper cutter, and peel and stick them to the aviom mixer. They don’t leave a whole lot of residue behind when you peel them off, and so far seem to be holding up.

DiGiCo delivery is getting closer every day! It may show up tomorrow, in which case we push through next week to have it ready for the  following Sunday. If it shows up Monday, we uncrate it and play with it till next week….

Sugar Creek, for the last 8 or so years has had two Soundcraft Vienna II-40’s at FOH. While this was the right thing to do in its time, we have quickly moved beyond it’s capabilities. Sugar Creek has three services, each very distinctly from the other. There is a Traditions and Mosaic with the Orchestra, Mosaic band, and choir, then the Edge Service which is lead by Stephen Miller (LINK) and the Stephen Miller Band. The Edge Service shares the drum kit and thats it. There rehearsal is on Tuesday nights before all the other rehearsals, so usually anything you do then gets erased by the next crew. This makes for a crazy Sunday Morning as you have to line check and then take as long as Rick will let me get away with dialing stuff in. When I first came to The Creek I started making a separate set of channels for this service, which helped, but not totally.

We’ve also been having a lot of different outside events in our Worship Center which demand changes to the consoles, and what not, and these happen between Wednesday and Sunday. Thus, 8 months ago, my then boss Jeff Young sent me in search of the next thing for Sugar Creek. When Rick took over in August this became HIS priority, but I had already had my foot in so many doors. We quickly had demos scheduled, and were talking to those who had options available. I was oh-so in love with the PM1d which we had installed at The Met, but it’s got its limits. Sugar Creek really needed something versatile that would grow with the church, and where it was going. We wanted to easily be able to drop a second surface for Monitor World or Broadcast recording capabilities.

One of the first consoles we demo’d was Soundcraft’s new flag-ship console the Vi6. This is a great console, and since I’m sitting on a flight to Hawaii right now, I’ll write up a review sans pictures shortly. We also demo’d a DigiCo D5. My experience with DigiCo was null so I was excited when it arrived. Allan Nichols (AKA Rev. Al) has been nothing but super to work with. He came down an spent a day with us, going through the console, and getting us set up. I spent well over 50 hours in the course of the 4 days that we had the console going inside and out, starting from scratch several times with patching and what not. We demo’d the consoles in our LYF Center since its so easy to get things in and out of there, and it is the Student Building… They don’t mind me dropping new toys in there, specially when they look cool.

Now that our demos were done Rick had the almighty pleasure of dealing with the finance committee on this. Pastor had already made it a priority for us to get something done about the aging Viennas, so this was relatively easy. Well, Friday, Rick sent in the paperwork and purchase order for a DigiCo CS-D5. This is very exciting because it affords us so many opportunities to allow our volunteers to succeed. We’re doing a digital recording package that allow for virtual sound-checks which will really help get things write on the things we usually have limited rehearsal time with. We’re hoping to take delivery on March 28 so that we can begin the weeklong transition from analogue to digital. We’ve ordered ours with a center master section so that might take some extra time.

The Sunday after we take delivery, after the third service we’ll remove the slave vienna and put the Digico in its place. We’ll leave the master Vienna in place as a piece of mind tool to our Worship and Creative Arts team. I’ll mix the maiden voyage then we’ll start putting volunteers on it. I’ll be with them the whole way through, and until everyone is comfortable on it. I’ll be rather aggressive in getting them on the console. Best part is, there’s not a whole lot after the initial set up that will need tweaking. Hopefully we notice the same trend that I experienced at The Met, and thats a more consistent mix week to week, engineer to engineer.