Lincoln Arts Center/Cornerstone, Milwaukee, WI
Located in Milwaukee, Lincoln Center of the Arts is an inner city middle school with a heavy focus on music, theater, dance, and, of course, the arts. On the weekends, it’s now also home to Cornerstone, a growing church which, while wishing to remain portable, was seeking a place to accommodate its increasing attendance.
With the help of local audio,video, and lighting design and integration firm DP Design LLC (with whom the church has worked for some time), Cornerstone approached the school with the following proposition: the church would invest in the deployment of new AVL gear into Lincoln Center’s two-level, 1,500-seat auditorium. During the week, the school would have access to this equipment for its productions, concerts, assemblies, and events; on weekends, Cornerstone would use the same systems for its services. The arrangement was ideal: now the school, which was previously using technology that dated back to the 1990s, would be outfitted with the latest AVL production gear on the market. And, Cornerstone’s volunteers would no longer have to deal with the tedious set-up and teardown that makes up so much of portable church life.
Pro AV merger
David Price, owner and principal of DP Design, notes that his firm is largely focused on servicing houses of worship. He relays that he and his team encourage their portable church clients to form these kinds of relationships with schools. “It saves them time and headaches––they don’t have to set up [every weekend] if we install something permanently,” he says. “And then [the church] donates [the equipment] to the school and the school gets to use it. It’s something that we’ve done on a handful of occasions and it’s worked out really well. It’s good for the school and it’s good for the church.”
David Price, Owner and Principal, DP Design, Milwaukee, WI
“As this is a beautiful old school building, there are concrete floors and a hard plaster ceiling with all sorts of cavities to bounce sound off of." David Price, Owner and Principal, DP Design, Milwaukee, WI
At the heart of the new system is a Wavefront Precision Mini (WPM) loudspeaker system by Martin Audio. The system is comprised of eight WPMs per side, plus a pair of SXH218 subwoofers, ground-stacked in front of the stage, at stage left and stage right. Two Martin Audio iKON iK81 and one iK42 amplifiers power the loudspeakers. New microphones are by Sennheiser, as is the wireless in-ear monitoring.
In addition to deploying the audio system, DP Design called in a rigger to rebalance the battens on the auditorium’s counterweight system. The firm also integrated a number of LED lighting and moving head fixtures by Chauvet Professional, as well as a 7,000-lumen Panasonic PT-RZ770 laser projector and a 16-foot wide video screen. A new, software- based Vista by Chroma-Q system provides lighting control.
At the heart of the new system is a Wavefront Precision Mini (WPM) loudspeaker system by Martin Audio.
Price recounts that the biggest issue he and his team faced during this project was the auditorium’s acoustics. “As this is a beautiful old school building, there are concrete floors and a hard plaster ceiling with all sorts of cavities to bounce sound off of,” he explains, adding that the wooden seating also contributed to the acoustical challenges. “There wasn’t a single absorptive surface in the entire room; one of the things we instantly noticed when turning up the old horn-based PA was that if you cranked it up in an empty room, it was just a cavern of sound. That is one of the reasons why we went with Martin, because you have that directivity control so that you can really focus the energy where it needs to go.”
To render the system as user-friendly as possible, DP Design programmed the PA with a number of presets configured to accommodate the varied events that take place in Lincoln Center’s auditorium. “What’s cool about the Martin DSP is that it optimizes the coverage based on what you want,” Price says. “We developed a preset for when they’re just filling up the bottom floor, and there is more clarity because the sound is not bouncing off the upper seats.” There are also presets for events where there is mezzanine seating only, and of course, for a full house. “The ability for the PA to scale to the room is remarkable.”
Tools for learning
Aside from providing Lincoln Center with higher performance gear, Cornerstone’s equipment donation also serves to educate, Price notes. “Now they have a lighting console where these kids can actually learn skills that they can use in the future, possibly in their careers,” he says. “Here in Milwaukee we have [event production and systems integration company] Clearwing, and Summerfest, and a very active stagehands’ union. It’s very possible that these middle schoolers could go on to high school and start working in the community as stagehands, as lighting technicians, as audio technicians. This gets them some preliminary experience with some of the tools that they’d likely be using; getting a working knowledge of them, even at middle school, is fantastic.”
"It’s very possible that these middle schoolers could go on to high school and start working in the community as stagehands, as lighting technicians, as audio technicians." David Price, Owner and Principal, DP Design, Milwaukee, WI
In fact, DP Design is also contributing to this opportunity by offering up its lighting designer, Nick Snyder, to lead lighting design and training sessions for Lincoln Center of the Arts students. “This is not just so they can use the tools that the church paid for and provided. We are also helping to teach the kids really useful skills that they can use when they get older,” Price says. “If this is something they want to build a career in, they can.”
Learn more about Cornerstone here: www.cornerstonemilwaukee.com.
