Green Acres Baptist Church, based in Tyler, Texas, has chosen tools from Waves Audio (booth 6643) including a variety of Waves plugins, Waves servers, the Waves Tracks Live multi-track recording solution, and more.
Mark Leonard, director of audio, notes, “Green Acres Southern Baptist Church 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, so obviously, there’s a lot going on. We have two SSL 500 consoles running front of house and monitors. Both consoles are running Waves plugins with Waves MultiRack SoundGrid and two Waves SoundGrid Extreme servers for DSP redundancy.
“We also broadcast our services on a local cable channel, a local network station and Vimeo video channel, and we post-produce everything. My job is front of house on Sunday sermons and all additional major events. During the week I edit and remix our services for broadcast. In the post-production environment, we use Nuendo with the Waves SoundGrid Extreme server for more plugin horsepower.”
Leonard adds, on using Waves plugins, “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. 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.
“The fact that I can now store an entire rack of plugins is great, and the ability to do multiple effects on one insert, and then copy what I do in the studio, is a complete game-changer. 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.”
Philip Hagood, director of operations, Integration, at Morris (Nashville-based audio and lighting providers), comments, “We wanted to provide Green Acres with the option of external plugins on their front of house and monitor consoles in the live environment. They had been using Waves for years in studio mixing and achieved awesome 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 simple and cost-effective way for tracking, virtual soundcheck and archive. 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 (front of house 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. 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, we 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 our worship services are completed.”
