1 of 2
2 of 2
The second of two SSL 500 consoles at Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas. This unit is used for monitor mix and runs Waves plugins with Waves MultiRack SoundGrid® and two Waves SoundGrid Extreme servers for DSP redundancy.
Green Acres Baptist Church, based in Tyler, Texas, has a worship center seating around 3,400 people, including a 300 seat choir loft and a 20-to-30-piece orchestra, band, and praise team. They also broadcast services on a local cable channel, a local network station and Vimeo video channel, all with in-house post-production.
The church has two SSL 500 consoles running FOH and monitors. Both consoles are now running Waves plugins with Waves MultiRack SoundGrid and two Waves SoundGrid Extreme servers for DSP redundancy.
The church's tech staff had been using Waves for years in studio mixing and was very happy with the results, so it was a logical step to integrate that into their live mixing. Now they can seamlessly mix in live and studio on the same tools. Additionally, they now have the Waves Tracks Live recorder and playback option, with 96 channels at 96 kHz, as a for tracking, virtual soundcheck and archive.
Mark Leonard, Director of Audio for Green Acres, is FOH and he edits and remixes services for broadcast. Leonard says he's thrilled with the results. “I have always been a heavy user of Waves plugins in the studio. With our high track count, I was constantly pushing the limit running just Native. Adding the Waves SoundGrid Extreme DSP servers has given me the extra headroom to work freely.”
Leonard says he can now store an entire rack of plugins and has the ability to do multiple effects on one insert, and then copy what he's doing in the studio. “Since we have a lot going on musically on Sunday mornings, there is relatively little rehearsal time. Waves allows me to nail down certain areas of the mix – the band and orchestra – and still have the ability to make on-the-fly changes for vocals, extra instruments, and whatever gets thrown at us.”
On his favorite Waves plugins, Leonard remarks, “My go-to plugins are the Waves C6 Multiband Compressor and Waves H-Comp Hybrid Compressor, and in the studio it is Waves Tune. I use lots more, but these are the three I use the most. I consider the C6 the fix-all plugin. I use the H-Comp for a quick parallel compression. With our high channel count, I really don't have room for using two channels on my console for this, so H-Comp does a great job for me. I have used Waves Tune in the studio for many years. It's really effective on tuning vocals recorded in a live environment. In the post-production environment, we use Nuendo with the Waves SoundGrid Extreme server for more plugin horsepower!”
Morris, a Nashville based AVL company, suggested Green Acres use external plugins on their FOH and Monitor consoles in the live environment. Philip Hagood, Director of Operations, Integration, at Morris says, “Overall, these two Waves products added massive value at a minimal cost. The client also requested Waves Extreme servers on the Nuage/Nuendo studio computer to give continued seamless operation, even when mixing down in post.”
In addition, each SSL Live mixing console (FOH and monitors) has redundant Waves Extreme servers with DiGiGrid MGO audio interfaces on the FX Loop (32 channels at 96 kHz) for live plugin processing.
Hagood continues, “Redundancy is an obvious choice when a system is mission critical. DiGiGrid MGOs were chosen, since they are continuous with the all-fiber infrastructure in this particular system. We used two more DiGiGrid MGOs on each console to provide virtual soundcheck recording and playback.”
With the entire system on the live consoles, they are utilizing six DiGiGrid MGO interfaces and four Waves Extreme servers. There is an additional dual Waves Extreme server rig on the Nuage rig in the post-production studio, allowing Waves SoundGrid support during the multitrack mixdown after worship services are completed.
Leonard concludes, “In the live environment, my setup with Waves MultiRack SoundGrid, Waves plugins and the SoundGrid servers gives me the freedom to really fine-tune the mix like I just couldn't possibly do before. The ability to simply translate things that I do in the studio to the PA is amazing!”
