Bay Community Church, with campuses in Daphne and Mobile, Ala., has grown remarkably in recent years in no small part due to two of its members who left the church to pursue careers in professional audio and production. After designing successful tours for high-profile acts and years of intense industry experience on the road, Kevin Lammons and Nic Taylor have returned to the church where they grew up playing music and taking their first steps with audio and lighting equipment. “It's no longer unusual for professional audio and lighting designers to leave touring to plying their skills in a worship setting,” says Lammons. The church benefits from their professional experience and they can do what they love while being closer to their families and the church.
Lammons and Taylor were just a few years apart growing up in Bay Community Church. “It's where we cut our teeth playing music and mixing sound,” says Lammons. Both attended Full Sail University in central Florida to learn their craft before heading out on the road. Lammons gained extensive experience supporting top name national touring acts including blockbuster country music group, Lonestar. Similarly, Taylor experienced success designing productions for industry leaders, in particular with powerful Christian music group, 4Him.
When the 15-year ministry of the award-winning group ended, Taylor saw an opportunity to go full-time at the church. Not long after that Lammons found his way back, as well. Lammons is now production director and front-of house-engineer at the church's Mobile campus, while Taylor is production director at the Daphne campus.
Lammons and Taylor say that lessons they have learned on the road translate directly to their work with Bay Community's goals. In addition to upgrading the technology, they are leading the church in designing powerful productions that are fresh and interesting. Primarily, that has to do with accepting—or at least not being afraid of—change. “Playing all the different venues around the country,” says Lammons, “has taught us to adapt to change—sometimes as it is happening. With our experience, we can change more quickly. It's part of touring; you learn to streamline the process and compensate when things break.” Taylor agrees and adds, “On the road, failure is not an option. That's true for us here, too. We want what reaches the audience to be the best it can be, no matter what the circumstances.”
Double Vision, Singular Sound
Perhaps the engineers’ most significant achievement so far has been the design of Bay Community Church’s satellite campus in Mobile, 35 miles from the main campus in Daphne. The church was servicing about 3,000 worshippers in five services each weekend and realized that many in the church community were commuting 45 minutes or more to attend services. They began looking at options for a satellite campus to provide the same unique ministry its congregants enjoyed. After two years of holding “mobile” church services in movie theaters and hotel ballrooms that grew steadily from 300-600 congregants, they found a home in an abandoned grocery store. After refurbishing the structure, they designed a permanent production environment for their satellite campus that mirrors the church’s main sanctuary.
The engineers’ experience told them that building shows and maintaining two campuses that had the same equipment and features would be most efficient for both their designs and for volunteers to work.
“With the rooms set up the same,” says Lammons, “we can build a show at one campus and it’s ready to roll at the other.” The mirrored design was also in line with the church’s objective to provide an identical worship experience for their members across the two campuses.
Working closely with systems integrator and long-time collaborator Larry Bounds of the ESB Group Inc. of Springville, Ala., the team explored options for designing a new production environment as well as upgrading an existing analog audio console at the main campus. They were hopeful that they could find a new console that would both meet their demand for audio quality and usability, as well as be affordable enough to install in both locations. Bounds arranged a demo of the Midas Pro3 series, which impressed the team, but it was beyond their budget. The Pro2 series, however, presented the ideal price point/feature combination and became available during the course of the design of the new campus. The church was able to purchase identical consoles for the Daphne and Mobile campuses.
Lammons says, “By keeping the consoles the same, the team can design a show at one location and save settings on a jump drive and have the same layout and channel groupings at the other. It saves a lot of time and gives us what we need at both locations. Plus, it removes the learning curve.”
Midas Pro2 consoles were installed along with company’s DL251 and DL252 remote stageboxes that provide a fixed-format, 48-in/16-out, all-analog remote connectivity with Midas mic preamps and dual-redundant power supplies. With the stageboxes, remote control of microphone amp functions is available from the console or via a PC running Midas software. The Midas Pro Series architecture also facilitated connectivity between the campuses. To broadcast the weekly message from the Daphne campus during services in Mobile, a Klark Teknik DN9650 network bridge card and Midas MADI interface were installed. Lammons is impressed with all the functionality of the Midas console, as well as its superior design and sound qualities. Moreover, he has been pleased with the transition to digital, so much so that he has been known to place an occasional call to Bounds at ESB after a service. “He calls,” says Bounds, “just to say how much he likes the sound or something about the system. That’s great to hear from a client.”
Addressing Challenges through Technology
With only about 18 feet of vertical space, converting an abandoned grocery store into a satellite church campus to seat 500-600 presented some unique challenges. “With less vertical space to work with, we needed to find a three-way speaker that was tour quality and to find ways to optimize space for lights,” Bounds says. Rather than tiers of trusses, theatrical box trusses were used to accommodate lighting fixtures on top and bottom, saving space, sight lines and helping to locate lighting fixtures optimally.
Having Bounds and his team involved early in the process made the work to convert the space easier and installations smoother, as well. “Having a say early in the process about things like power requirements, structural modifications, even changes to HVAC design, allowed us to place speakers where they needed to be as opposed to where they had to be,” Bounds says.
In addition to the Midas Pro2 console, the sound system at the new Mobile campus includes a main worship area PA system using Electro-Voice X-Line loudspeaker components configured as a point-source system, as the low ceiling height in the remodeled structure would not favor the use of line array speakers. Bay Community’s system design called for six Electro-Voice Xi-1123A/106F compact, three-way loudspeakers. These are 12-inch, short-throw, full-range speakers that feature a horn-loaded mid-bass section and are dipole configurable for vertical directivity control to 250 Hz. This system’s wide, 60-degree vertical angle provides more uniform coverage with the low ceiling at the Mobile campus.
The Xi-1123A/106F also features a ND6 three-inch, titanium, high-frequency compression driver with a neodymium motor. Four Electro-Voice dual 18-inch Xsub cabinets hold down the bottom from their positions flown and on the floor. ESB and the team made the decision to locate subs on the floor to give a “thump in the chest” along with subs in the air for better coverage. Electro-Voice CPS (Contractor Precision Series) amplifiers were chosen for their sound quality and reliability to power the system.
An Electro-Voice NetMax N8000 System Controller digital matrix system was installed to provide flexible routing, management and signal processing. “We looked at the N8000, in part, because of its complex-phase Finite Impluse Response (FIR) filters. By using EV matching components we were more assured that the components together would be the best they could be,” Bounds adds. To carry sound out of the sanctuary, 15 EVID C8.2 in-ceiling speakers were installed around the building.
For the musicians on stage, the design specified four Roland M-48 Live Personal Mixers with a Roland S-4000D splitter and power distributer. An S-4000S 40-channel digital snake connects the components, along with Radial Engineering interface hardware, including its Studio Guitar Interface that can send and receive signal through 350 feet of balanced cable.
Four Shure model PSM900 wireless in-ear monitoring systems keep performers in sync, and a combination of Sennheiser and Shure microphones capture the sound on stage, including Sennheiser models e604 and E906, as well as Shure models ULXP14D-J1 Dual Wireless units body packs and ULXP24D/58-J1 Dual Wireless units with SM58s. Keeping the productions on track backstage is a Telex MS-2002 intercom base unit with four BP-1002 single-channel beltpacks, HR-1 headsets and Westone in-ear monitors.
Lighting & Video Specifics
While both Lammons and Taylor are audio experts, lighting design has become Taylor’s forte at Bay Community. “Our plan for lighting both campuses includes planning for change,” says Taylor. With new sets built off premises to facilitate major set and lighting design changes about four times a year, building starts about a month out. A week is allowed for the changeover.
One lighting challenge Taylor faces is making the stages of each campus, which are different sizes, look the same. “We work with negative spacing techniques to form depth,” he says. For depth and color, six Elation Opti Tri Par 54W (18x3Watts Tri Color LED RGB) were installed at the new campus along with six Longman Colorme 011A Pixel LED units for wash lights and six Longman model F6 LED PAR stage lights (48x3Watts, RGBW 25 degree beam). Twelve Lightronics model FXR-ELPA36C, 575-watt, 36-degree ellipsoidal spotlights are double tiered on box trusses to optimize the vertical space available with four Martin Mac 250 Kryptons (90225640) and two Martin smartMACs (90231040) located over the performers and at the back and sides of the stage. The moving lights provide backlighting and moving effects. “The Martins set the tone for each service with the music,” Taylor adds. “They are the mood setters for us, as well as used to provide crowd and room lighting.”
Lammons and Taylor design their sound and lighting so that the campuses have the same look, sound and feel, using the music and lighting to pull the audience into the action. When the center-hung, 10,000-lumen Panasonic HD projector and screen (Da-Lite Professional, TNSD 247D CVHC, 121-inch x 216-inch) drops down for the sermon broadcast from the main campus, the congregation feels like the pastor is really there. “We get that comment a lot,” Taylor says.
The stage is flanked by left and right Panasonic 6,000-lumen projectors that light up Da-Lite 78-inch x 139-inch fixed screens. The projectors were reused from Bay Community’s portable set-up, but a new Panasonic AG-AC160PJ HD camera was selected for its native HD-SDI output to cover the action on stage. Black Magic’s UltraStudio 3D is used to record the services, and Black Magic boxes provide all video signal conversion where necessary.
The ESB Group completed the installation with Lowell rack products, including the LGR-4436-LRD (44U 36-inches deep gangable rack), standalone racks and power strips, for both Bay Community Church locations to safely and conveniently mount gear and manage cabling. West Penn cabling products were used for physical connectivity, and Global Truss America provided extensive trusses to implement the audio and lighting designs.
With their touring experience and can-do attitudes, Lammons and Taylor worked with Bounds, the systems integrator at ESB Group, to create a facility that provides the same vibrant worship experience found at Bay Community Church’s main campus. Taylor sums up the strength of the partnership: “Maybe it’s where we’re coming from, but we are always looking at new technology. That’s just part of what we do to make what we have the best that it can be.”
