12Stone, a multi-site church with eight locations spread across the counties of Gwinnett, Hall, and Barrow in Georgia, has been using a variety of Royer Labs microphones for more than 10 years, first for studio and live event production miking — and more recently — for streaming services production to better reach its congregation during the pandemic.
Founded by senior pastor Kevin Myers and serving the community for the past 33 years. 12Stone reaches more than 20,000 people through its digital ministry. Worship development pastor/music director Russell Allen and audio director Dennis Frazier oversee the various aspects of the church’s audio production and have acquired Royer microphones that include R-121s, R-10s, R-122s, and an SF-24 stereo ribbon model.
“We’ve had these mics for a good 10 years or so, but we really zoned into the R-121s and R-10s on the guitar cabs as recently as four years ago,” Allen says, adding that the church presents services that are contemporary in nature. The eight campuses have live band/vocal teams of up to 10 people, typically three to five front line vocalists and a five-person backline (drums, bass, keys, and two guitars). They typically program a three-song set list (same songs at each campus) per weekend.
“For live performance, the Royer R-121 and R-10 (depending upon the venue) have proven invaluable for miking guitar cabinets,” Allen states. “We use the R-121s at our broadcast location at our Central Campus in Lawrenceville, GA, during the live weekend service. We would use R-121s mostly in the studio for random projects before that and, once we discovered the magic and durability of the R-10, we started replacing the live mics at some of our remote campuses with R-10s. In the studio, we record guitars in full stereo. We typically have a single R-121 on each cab of 2 full stereo guitar setups. Hence, 4 mics—on 4 amps.”
The pandemic has changed the worship experience, with audio director Frazier elaboratingd on this aspect as it relates to 12Stone’s production: “Luckily for us, we had been dialing in our online sound and expression for ‘online church’ for some time before the pandemic. So, when COVID hit, we were mostly ready to handle the new challenge. We had so much success in the studio with the R-121s on our stereo guitar rigs that we decided to go completely stereo for our live broadcast using all R-121s as well.”
He adds, “Think about it, with COVID moving every church 100 percent online – now every person’s listening experience was immediately put under the microscope of a more ‘studio’ and ‘unforgiving’ environment. You must manufacture space, and reverb, and delay, and EQ to fill frequency space that otherwise gets lost in the room depending on the size and treatment of the space. We were so pleased with the real and raw sounds from our guitar world with the R-121s that it really helped shape our mix philosophy for our online expression. We’re a guitar forward modern rock worship culture and the R-121s help us capture the uniqueness of our sources in the purest and truest way.”
