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Maximizing your use of sub mixes and matrices can be challenging, but it can allow your churches to expand it's capability without expensive resources to significantly upgrade or add additional audio infrastructure.
Is your current console maxed out? Can it process multiple types of audio without requiring you to unnecessarily invest in a whole new infrastructure. Obviously we all want to maximize our console’s usefulness for our ministry, but our ministry looks different than it did a year or two ago.
Over the course of the pandemic, many churches started to live stream their Sunday services to continue ministry and deliver content that’s consumed in homes rather than auditoriums. Many of these transitions were facilitated by sending a main audio mix straight out of their consoles into broadcast feeds, with the engineer purely focused on putting together a broadcast mix. This worked fairly well from a capability perspective and generally left us to wrestle with the task of getting these mixes to sound good for the new method of consumption.
Many audio consoles are set up when they are first purchased, then the configurability is forgotten and left unvisited when ministry or facility needs change.
However, now that most churches are open they are seeing the need to support both a live mix for the those in attendance while also supporting a broadcast mix for their online audience. In some cases, there may even be a need to support overflow areas or outdoor venues due to social distancing. In a nutshell, one major question that arises is if we can support these all these extra audio feeds with our current audio consoles.
It’s been my experience that many organizations are not well versed in how to maximize the audio processing that their console is capable of. In some cases, they are not confident of how much capability they actually have to start with. More so than ever, this is a time to make sure that we have a solid understanding of what we already have to work with before we start major replacements or system upgrades.
Make sure you have a solid understanding of what you already have to work with before starting major changes or system upgrades.
One area where this topic manifests itself is with the ability of many digital consoles to be configured and how they allocate processing power. A number of consoles will allow you to balance the number and types of processing busses (i.e. groups, aux busses, matrix, fx, etc.) that it provides against the available resources. For example, if you are using the console for FOH, you may choose to allocate more groups and matrixes than if you were using your console for monitors where you would allocate a higher number of aux buses.
Many times, church mixing consoles are installed and setup when they are purchased, then the ability to reconfigure is forgotten and left unvisited when ministry or facility needs change. As an example, a local church was recently struggling to support the need for additional monitor feeds due to a lack of aux buses. They had forgotten, or were unaware that their console allowed for this type of configuration. In this case, once the oversight was identified, we were able to reconfigure the system to reduce the number of groups (not all were being used) and allocate additional aux buses, supporting the additional monitoring at zero cost.
Computers running videos and presentation software can be fed to a console via a digital protocol leaving more analog I/O for stage needs.
Another console feature that is often left unused are matrices. If you are unfamiliar with a matrix, it is essentially a grouping of busses that mix together other busses. A matrix allows for additional outputs that are each made up of a mix of busses. If you were to look at a matrix section of an analog console you would see that it looked just like a matrix of knobs, just like the name. Matrices are many times used to drive PA’s requiring different feeds for different areas of the room so that the PA can be tailored to the space. In these situations, you may have a different matrix output for area such as a balcony, lobby, wing sections, etc.
However, matrices can also be used to take a number of sub-mixes (ie worship band, video, and spoken word), mix them for completely different destinations and send them along their way, simultaneously providing support for things like the main room, overflow areas, outside venues, or even a broadcast feed. In these situations, it is possible to apply destination-specific processing to those matrices based upon need. For instance, the house mix can be fed to the house via its matrix output while the broadcast feed is sent out via its matrix output with broadcast-specific limiting applied to just that matrix. This allows the engineer fulfill multiple tasks simultaneously using the same console. While the mix aspect of this configuration can be more challenging, it can allow for churches to expand their capability without requiring financial resources to significantly upgrade or add additional audio infrastructure.
Another area of capability that may expand the usability of a console is non-analog I/O (inputs/outputs) and digital routing. Most digital consoles in use today support digital I/O through protocols such as Dante, AVB, and others. While many of us are familiar with using digital snakes to link our consoles to I/O boxes at the stage, many stop short of using digital protocols to connect computers and other audio sources. This is an important concept when using consoles that support more input channels than you have analog I/O for. As an example, computers running videos and presentation software can be fed to a console via a digital protocol leaving more analog I/O for stage needs. This is especially the case when supporting tracks are used for the band and played through software packages such as Ableton. Rather than using a computer interface to convert your supporting tracks to analog and then bringing them into the console, bring them in directly using a digital protocol and use those analog I/O ports for other purposes.
Parting Thoughts
One last thought regarding digital audio and patching; a number of consoles allow you to create digital ‘tie lines’ without the need to use an input processing strip or a bus. Doing this allows you to directly route any inbound audio signal to an output without having to use precious input or bus processing. In this way, you can use you console as an audio router without using other resources. My church does this very thing to route a dedicated broadcast mix, generated by a separate broadcast system, to the broadcast infrastructure via the FOH console without using any of the bus or input processing power of the FOH console. This trick saved us from having to make expensive and time-consuming changes to our cabling infrastructure when the pandemic hit.
More than ever, a good understanding our technical systems and their capabilities plays a pivotal role in shaping what our ministries are able to do in this ever-changing environment. We discussed a few ideas on where to look for maximizing your capability and you likely have others to consider if you look closely. Having this understanding can sometimes be the difference between saying yes or saying no to spending more money, and sometimes it’s the difference between making the right investment and making the wrong one.
Grab some coffee, grab your manuals and see what you can find. God is pretty good at showing ways for us to accomplish what we need to do with what He has provided. Take up the challenge.
