Drive 2008 – Documentation
Well, now that Drive ’08 is over, here are the documents created to help us survive.
I’ve also included my show file for the Venue. I might break this down at some point, but I’m sort of burned right now so no promises there. However, if you’re looking through things and have questions, feel free to ask in the comments–there’s a lot of “weird” stuff I do that might not make a lot of sense just from looking through the show file.
Drive 2008 Input List
Drive 2008 Song Info
2008 Drive Conference D-Show Show
It was great meeting everyone who came out to the conference. Thanks for stopping by FOH, and coming to the rountable and Q&A session. If you still have questions you weren’t able to ask or thought of on the way home, please feel free to ask.
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Very interesting to look at your showfile, especially coming from a different console perspective!
Couple questions:
1. It seems that you recall safe most channel parameters but faders, plug-ins, mutes, etc? What’s your reasoning there?
2. What is the workflow like on the D-Show for show files? Do you have a separate file like the one you posted for each service you do? Maybe a default file you start with and then customize for each service?
3. What do you use the groups for vs. VCAs as you mix? Looks like you’re just doing some processing on the groups. Are they stereo or mono?
4. D-show question…it looks like when you have a stereo channel such as keys, you can assign that to one fader, along with a width control? Nice feature.
I think that’s all for now 🙂 Pretty bored running a rehearsal tonight for our arts school so had some time to explore the show file. Thanks for posting!
Hey Dave,
I found some video of the Conference online. Unfortinatly I could not make it down due to the death of our Sr. pastor. But what I saw online looked and I am sure sounded amazing!!! I am the Technical Director of a bigger church in a suburb of St. Paul Minnesota and we have recently started building a 2,000 seat worship center. I saw the three video screens… thats amazing! Could you give me some sort of contact with the video producer or switcher so I could possibly talk with them about how they acheived three screens, at some point each individually controlled. I also saw the Amp Boxes you built- Incredible! I totally agree with you about the tone of the amp! I think we are going to do the same things that you did with your amps! Thank you and God Bless!
Good questions, Tim.
1.) 99% of the time, I only want fader levels and mutes to get recalled. I don’t generally like things like dynamics or EQ’s or mic pre setting scoped. The reason being is I might adjust these a bit once we get into the show. For example, a vocalist might kick it up a notch when the audience comes in so I might bring his gain down a bit; if I snapshot that, my adjustment won’t stay when I recall the next snapshot. Same goes for a gate on the drums; I might tighten it up a bit if the drummer starts playing harder and I don’t want to lose that with the next snapshot.
Plugins typically only get snapshotted if they are FX as I will change my verbs and delays based on the tempo of the song.
Within the Drive conference, I did snapshot some of these parameters because I had some channels that were getting reassigned to different inputs for different sessions. I also had different programming within each session where my gain levels on the tracks were all over the place, so I snapshotted those, too.
I left the entire conference as one show file so that I could continue to refine the base band mix over the course of the conference if necessary.
2.) I maintain a separate show file for every service and event that takes place in the auditorium. I have a template I start from every week with a typical input setup and plugins loaded. Our drum kit doesn’t change so it’s ballparked because there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every week. I also have common frequencies set in channel EQ’s so that I can just grab the gain for the filter and only have to do a little bit of adjusting the frequency. Make sense?
3.) I have 8 stereo groups. One of them gets used for spoken word microphones. One of them gets used for playback inputs (pre-service music, videos, etc.). My louspeakers are fed via the Matrix’s and running these through groups allows me to adjust their levels going to the Matrix’s and all of my distributed audio feeds (control room, assisted listening, etc.). This also allows me to process my main LCR busses differently specifically for music purposes.
1 group gets used for parallel/upward compression on drums and 1 group gets used for parallel/upward compression vocals.
The last four groups are used for instrumentation to offset levels. Scovi taught me this so that I can run my input levels really hot and keep my faders in the sweet spot of their throw. I will also use the width control on the groups to set panning limits so that we can maintain acceptable coverage across the entire room.
I also do another thing with groups for gtrs that Scovi taught us at his AudioSeminar. Each gtr gets panned hard one way or the other and fed to an Aux Send. The Aux send gets returned to another channel which is panned the opposite direction. Both channels get bussed to the same gtr bus. When I push up the return channel, it centers the gtr in the image and punches it through the mix which is great for leads.
I use the VCAs to mix. I have my right hand on the instruments and left hand on the vocals.
4.) Yes you can. It is a great feature for processing the left and right identically–there is even a gain offset added. Plus this saves console real estate.
Feel free to keep the questions coming.
Thanks, Taylor. You can find a PDF on how the video screens were set up over at http://www.micahstevens.com. He’s our Production Director.
For the rest of you who weren’t there, they just posted video from all the session openers over at http://www.npccproduction.org. Check out the “Media” page to view them. The audio mix was done live by Dustin Whitt, Buckhead’s Audio Director, in our studio.
This is really interesting! The session videos look REALLY good. The three screen content is very wow.
Here’s a few more…
1. Your kick channels are out of phase with the rest of the kit. Why? I assume another Scovi trick…
2. I get the double bussing thing for vocals and drums. Interesting thought on doing the aux thing with guitars. I get a similar effect often times by just double micing the cab and panning to 9 and 3 or similar, but I’m going to have to try this. How hard of compression are you using on drums/vocals? I can’t see your plug-in settings. Also, I see the graphic EQ plug…do you EQ these groups a little differently from the main channel or is that plug just there if you want to EQ the group as a whole and remove those channels from going to L/C/R directly?
3. Looks like all of your video sources are submixed? Beta decks, DVD, etc. How is that setup? Is it set and forget on the video end or do they have to route you the correct playback source each time? My 6 playback sources all hit the console independently.
4. What did you think of the Sennheiser RF? Do you have any of the Neumann capsules currently? What do you use for your speaker RF channels?
Here are answers to Tim’s second round of questions:
1.) Actually I got that from Dave Rat. I started trying that a long time ago, but it’s something I need to go back and check if it really makes a difference now–I think it’s more if you’re using a drum fill on stage instead of IEMs.
2.) I’ll use two mics on a guitar amp, but they’re usually two different mics so panning them opposite doesn’t work in the same way as what I’m doing with the group.
Compression on the upwards compression groups: probably 3-4 dB on the drums. Vocals are probably pretty heavy, more than 5 less than 15 dB. 🙂 The upwards comp on the drums is part of the sound I get. The upwards comp on the vocals is a last resort to get them out on top because our PA isn’t powerful enough for what we’re trying to do. This doesn’t typically get a lot of use on a Sunday, but I needed it for Drive because we pushed things as far as they could go…
The graphic EQ plugin on the vox upward comp group is really just for dealing with any feedback that might result from raising the noise floor. It’s really just for speed in the heat of battle. 🙂
3.) All video sources are routed directly to us from the control room. I would love to one day have every source independently, but with only 56 inputs in our split, I just don’t have enough room. In the future we’ll be fed AES from Video World, and it might be feasible we just have direct lines from every source.
4.) I liked it. I’m not sure I noticed a big improvement over our exisiting 3000 series receiver. I do currently have a KMS105 capsule for a Series 5000 handheld that is currently my favorite vocal mic. Andy always speaks at North Point using a Sennheiser 5000 series bodypack–I believe it’s a 5012 bodypack.