Padre Serra Parish, in Camarillo, California, has a challenge that many contemporary churches face. How to produce professional sounding worship music with a staff of volunteers with a wide range of technical abilities? The church's technical leadership believes they've resolved this problem by installing a StageScape M20d visual mixing system by Line 6. StageScape M20d is a compact, touchscreen-driven live sound mixer designed to streamline and accelerate the process of getting a great mix.
This large Roman Catholic Church has a team of volunteers experienced in working with a traditional analog mixer, so moving to a brand new, high technology product might seem risky at first. Director of Liturgy & Music Dominic MacAller explains, “The thing that's really great about StageScape is that it's very intuitive to use. We don't have professional engineers on staff. Our volunteers are very good, but cover a wide range of technical ability and mixing experience. StageScape has a very well designed touchscreen interface that makes you want to play with it. It's easy to create a really good mix, and there aren't rows and rows of faders and knobs, which can be very intimidating.”
The M20d is compact size and streamlined, but is also touted as a powerful, full-featured digital mixing system that delivers professional results. “It's a big upgrade for us, both in terms of functionality and convenience,” says MacAller. “It has a full range of digital effects on board, including compressors, EQs, gates, delays, reverbs, and more, all of which you can adjust through the visual interface, or dig deeper and adjust the individual parameters. It's so much more powerful than anything we could do before, and much easier to use than having a big rack of outboard devices.”
MacAller is also impressed with the free iPad app remote. When connected via an optional USB Wi-Fi adapter, the full functionality of the StageScape mixer can be accessed via one or more iPad devices, allowing mix and effects changes to be made from anywhere in the room, such as adjusting a musician's monitor mix while standing on stage.
“The iPad app is a great example of what makes this system so smart and powerful,” says MacAller. “It looks and acts just like the StageScape user interface, and you can hear the changes instantly as you drag your finger across the screen. The first time we used it, the bass player wanted to adjust his sound, so my wife went up on stage with her iPad, showed him his channel, and he just dragged his finger around and customized his sound without any training at all. That was a great moment.”
For MacAller, who acts as musical director and plays piano, it was love at first sight. “I'm an iPad user, so the touchscreen interface feels very natural and intuitive to me. At one point, I was listening to the piano, solo'd out to the headphones, and decided to tweak the sound a little bit. Normally, getting a good acoustic piano sound from scratch is pretty hard, but it was really easy to warm it up and sweeten the sound a little bit. That was really fun.”
After the first week of services with it, other musicians and technical crew members and even parishioners noticed positive changes. “Even before we started applying effects and EQ, the whole system had improved clarity and definition,” says MacAller. “People commented that they could hear the individual instruments more clearly in the mix. It really sounded terrific. But what I really like about the StageScape is that it gives us really sophisticated technology, but makes everything easier instead of adding complexity. It's a perfect fit for us.”
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