Church on the Move (CotM) has upgraded its 2,500-capacity sanctuary at its campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a Live L650 Plus mixing console from Solid State Logic. Two other locations within the family of churches – West and Broken Arrow – have also each been upgraded with an SSL Live L450 console.
CotM was founded in 1987, and has used on SSL’s digital live mixing platform since replacing its previous analogue FOH consoles at its Tulsa church in 2015. The church subsequently expanded its inventory of SSL Live consoles to include the West and Broken Arrow locations. It was the late Andrew Stone, CotM’s Production Director and a highly respected and influential figure in the house of worship audio business, who led the switch from analogue to digital consoles.Stone, who had long favoured analogue consoles, made the decision to install an SSL Live after evaluating several competing brands.
‘We had a demo console that came in, and Andrew told Fernando Guzman [SSL’s Live Product Specialist at that time], “This isn’t leaving, so let’s figure something out”,’ recalls CotM Production Director, Johnathan Basquez. ‘We’ve been fans ever since and have continued to purchase SSL Live consoles for our other churches.’
The three new consoles have delivered a noticeable improvement in processing power and speed of operation, reports Basquez, who started at the church as a production intern 14 years ago. By replacing an SSL L500 at FOH with the new L650 Plus the church no longer need to run outboard effects or plug-in servers, reducing the risk of an external equipment failure interrupting the production. ‘Everything, from effects to de-essers to dynamics, is now all in the consoles,’ he says. The L650 also handles monitors for the musicians and streaming.
The two new L450 consoles, which are used to mix FOH and monitors, have replaced an L200 at Broken Arrow and an L300 at West. As a result, the church’s mixers are seeing a significant increase in available DSP resources: ‘They were at 99 per cent DSP usage and when we swapped over to the new L450 consoles that went to 49 per cent. It gives the guys more dynamics to use and more features that they didn’t have available before. That has really helped our workflow,’ Basquez says. ‘We have invested in a console that sounds really great, so we might as well use it to its fullest potential.’
An L500 in the 1,500-capacity auditorium at the Oneighty Youth ministry on the Tulsa campus is also being upgraded to an L550 Plus after two identical L500s were initially installed principally to allow easy swapping of show files. The Oneighty Youth facility was used as a weekend overflow from the main auditorium and held its own separate services, as do the two churches. It additionally still hosts plays and other productions by the students attending the private Lincoln Christian Elementary and High Schools on the Tulsa campus.
The consoles at all four venues are connected to ML 32:32 Madi analogue stageboxes. ‘The Tulsa Auditorium is running four stageboxes while the other churches are running two. They’re all running Blacklight II Madi Concentrators,’ Basquez says. All the consoles also record locally.
The church employs full-time production managers, audio engineers by trade, to operate the consoles. It also has a pipeline in place to train volunteers as A2 assistant engineers for all four venues. ‘Students are learning how to run the SSL consoles,’ Basquez elaborates. ‘We also already have students who know how to run the consoles, so now it’s about showing them how to make it sound good. We have anybody from 14 years old and older running these consoles now.’
When he used to mix on the L200 at Broken Arrow, Basquez found it extremely useful that an A2 could assist him without getting in his way, thanks to the console’s inverted T-shaped layout – similar to the L650 – with a triple-wide fader bank across the lower level. ‘If I needed something changed, the A2 had easy access to a Fader Tile.’
The Live Remote Expander with the L500 in Tulsa, purchased to support the major productions at the Tulsa church at that time, was also useful when training A2s, he says: ‘It helped us to be able to say, “I need you to add this cue; I need you to rename this; I need you to make a mix change”. But now, with the T-shaped layout of the new console, if I need someone to change something there’s an open Fader Tile off to the left where they don’t have to reach in front of me.’
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