Jim’s cranking away on the new DSP in the worship center. London BLU.

–John

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.

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.

So on the average Sunday, I arrive around 9am. I am the fortunate one who really doesn’t have an official service or task to knock out on Sunday AM. All my stuff takes place on Sunday and Wednesday nights. For reasons I won’t go into here, it’s not a tangible thing to invest in our volunteers in our Sunday morning services right now. Its a weird situation, that when I know how to approach without a whole lot of detail I’ll go into.

I make sure the LYF Center, our student building, is ready for the round-table/lecture style high school group. I just make sure whoever is presenting can get there laptop hooked up, make sure they know how to mute and unmute there body pack, and then I move on. I try to make it to our 9:30 service, and walk the room, make notes, and provide feed back to Rick to relay to the audio guys. We have a GREAT group of volunteers at Sugar Creek who take a lot of pride in their work. But they feel serving in the third service, our contemporary service, is too much for one Sunday.

We used to have two guys that rotated for the third service, but there jobs took them away too often. So I became the resident FOH engineer for that service. We’re starting to work some more volunteers in the mix, which is cool, because thats how should be, especially if your church believes in empowering those who wish to be a part of something.

Once our ‘Edge’ service is over with I get to crack-a-lackin for Sunday night. Our student ministry offers a Sunday night high school service, and a Wednesday night middle school service each week, which makes for a FULL week. I typically don’t get content till 2 hours before the service, so I try to get as much ready as I can, so that when the students who volunteer show up, I can work with them on being successful in the service. Around 9 o’clock, I walk into my apartment and do what a good friend of mine describes as a sheet dive.