I know this is late, but that's life.
So most of you know that we were using 2 analog consoles in our worship center. For our services and anything else during the week we used the Allen & Heath ML3000 48 channel. For Celebrate Recovery we used the Allen & Heath GL3300 48 channel. After music team rehearsal on Thursday nights, we put a shelf over the ML3K, put the GL300 on top, and then swapped the cables. The reason we did this was CR still uses wedges, whereas we use Avioms for the Sunday music teams.
Needless to say this was not the best situation. Throw in the Christmas productions, Children's Musical, and all the other misc events we do, and a digital console is looking very nice. So last year in October when I planned the 2009 budget, I put in money for a Yamaha M7. For our budget and our needs this console fit it perfectly. Mike Niemi and I went to a one day seminar put on by Yamaha and we were impressed.
Fast forward to this past spring of 2009. Soundcraft released a console in our price range as well as Digidesign (the makers of Pro Tools) and Allen & Heath (the manufacturer of old consoles). After doing lots of research on the specs of the boards and the reviews, I really liked the A&H iLive. It offered the most physical inputs and outputs and flexibility for the price.
There was an hour long hands-on demo that Mike, Tim Wentz, and myself went to this spring. We were very impressed. As user friendly and intuitive that we felt the M7 was, this one was even more so. Add in the complete flexibility options and the power behind it, this was a clear winner over the M7. The only other console that would be in the running was the SC48 from Digidesign. However, 2 big points put that out of the running for us. One, we don't do much with Pro Tools recording software. And I don't see us as a church using it for quite some time (unless the Lord calls Mike Niemi to Oklahoma). The second issue was that it is not as volunteer friendly as the iLive. It can be a bit confusing for someone who's not used to it.
We had hoped to have a demo in here during the summer, but supply was too short. Meanwhile, I started to line up buyers for the 2 consoles and the outboard equipment we wouldn't need anymore. I quickly found buyers for the 2 consoles (thank you Lord) and most of the other equipment.
The console finally arrived on Friday, August 31. All I had time to do was snap a couple pictures, plug it in to our system, play a couple songs from my ipod, talk in the mic, and then put it backstage. I had planned for it to come on a Friday, so we could swap out the consoles Sunday after the service. On a quick glance, everything seemed OK.
I then proceeded onto my regular Friday duties. Including putting the shelf over the ML3K and putting the GL3300 on top and swapping cables for the last time. Sunday, September 2nd, we had our last service with the analog console. After service, I unhooked all the cables, we put the ML3K backstage, put the iLive T112 surface on the counter, and the rack in the booth. I then went to lunch with my family and had a nice rest of the day off with them.
Monday after lunch I came in and started to remove all the old outboard equipment and put the stage rack in. We decided to put the stage rack in the booth for a couple reasons. One: we already have a snake installed running from the stage to the booth. Two: we have more local media players and recorders than the surface has connectors for. And three: the cables for the amp racks are already run to the booth. So for us it makes sense to have the rack in the booth.
I then connected the rack to the surface, turned everything on and started to program. I had intended to start working on all our settings beforehand using the software, but just ran out of time. After a little bit, I noticed that things weren't right. None of the 3 banks would switch layers and all the peak lights were lit on the layer buttons. I called A&H tech support and we tried a couple things. After a couple hours of troubleshooting, it was determined that the console needed to be sent in to be worked on. I was devastated. Fortunately, I had been on the phone throughout this whole process with our local A&H rep and support company. They're a 20 minute drive away. So I called them with the final prognosis, and we decided that I would drive to their place Tuesday morning. They had also finally received their T112 console and it worked fine. We would swap surfaces and they would work with A&H to get the other fixed. I called all my volunteers who had planned to be there Monday night for the 1st training session and told them to enjoy the night at home.
So Tuesday morning, we swapped consoles. I came back, hooked the "new" one up and everything worked perfectly. The layers switched and no peak lights. So away I went programming. We had a couple musicians coming in Tuesday night during training, so I had a lot to do. The console is easy to program, we just have a non-touring standard setup. Not only do we have a lot of local recorders (which are fed by matrices, which in turn are fed by a record aux), but I had wanted to customize the layers. I want anything we would use on a Sunday morning on the top layer, regardless of if it's an input, group, aux, main send, etc. So it just took a while to do that.
I got most everything ready for the 1st night of training. There was still some pre-setting of stuff I wanted to do on specific ins and outs, but it was generally ready. The first training went pretty well. I think I overwhelmed a couple of my volunteers, but sometimes you just need to jump in the cold water. We did have a couple musicians there that night, so it was a help to get levels on the piano, elec drums, snyth, and 1 guitar. More would have been helpful, but it was still good.
Wednesday I finished all the settings that I could put in the console and we had another training session that night. This one was short, since there is only so much you can do without a band (when the bass player is here, this is where his signal will show up...).
Thursday the MMO card finally came in. This is the card we use to feed our Avioms. No more A/D converters; it's all digital from the console to the Aviom mixers on stage. Will make the signal the musicians are hearing a lot better. Here's the cool thing though. I didn't know that the card comes with the 16 channel Aviom out, 16 channels of HearBus outputs, and 24 channels of ADAT out on optical. All of them are active at the same time and all are completely configurable separate from each other! So we can now send 24 channels to Mike's ADAT recorder digitally. We have 3 digital splitters in 1 card! This is very cool.
Thursday nights is our normal time for rehearsal of that Sunday's music team. I had kept the worship leader abreast of everything that had happened so she could be prepared (our worship pastor was still finishing his summer sabbatical and would be back the following week).
Rehearsal was OK. Not good, but just OK. It could have been worse, but I also did not get as much done as I had wanted to. I had wanted to use the software to adjust stuff while my volunteers were mixing. Although the software wasn't working (turns out it was a simple fix the following day). But we got through it.
On Friday I continued to tweak based on my notes from the rehearsal. I then started to set up a separate show for our Celebrate Recovery group which meets Friday nights. We need a separate show since their output patch is different (they use wedges instead of Avioms). Fortunately, Tim Wentz came and took care of some of this since I still had other "regular" stuff to do. CR went fine that night.
I had a great day off with my family on Saturday and came back refreshed Sunday morning. It felt great to not have to swap consoles Sunday morning. The band showed up, we did our quick run thru of songs, and the services went great. Doug came back that week and we had our 1st funeral with the new console that week.
In the weeks since I have kept dialing in settings. It is sounding fantastic! We have received several comments at how good it sounds. I can't wait until Christmas to really use the scene capability and the customization of the faders.
