For anyone who thinks a church sound department means a Mackie mixer with two knobs missing, four pockmarked SM58s, two Samson wireless mics and a 17- year-old volunteer, Lakewood Church in Houston may be something of a revelation.
Supporting the theory that everything's bigger in Texas, Lakewood is a 16,000 seat arena-sized facility whose list of gear, musicians and crew reads like an attempt at a Guinness Book entry: 11 piece band, 200- voice choir, four Nuendo rigs recording 135 tracks of audio, four Euphonix consoles and five full-time sound crew professionals, all under the supervision of one Reed Hall, director of audio and technical production. I caught up with Hall during his vacation, a cross-country road trip involving motorcycles, 18-wheel flatbed trucks and an eventual gig in Sacramento. He appeared to be having the time of his life. He painted a picture of an unusual church model, a close-knit group of hardworking people and a tremendous drive for excellence. Here's what he had to say.
Describe the basic stage setup: musicians, monitor placement, etc. Does it change much between services?
There's an 11 piece band: drums, percussion, two keyboard players, guitars and brass… we have some praise singers, and a 200- voice choir. There are 40 vocal mics–just the vocal mics. So we're upwards of 100 channels for a service.
For monitors, there are two open speakers that are flown above the choir loft. Those are the open monitors we use on a regular basis. The whole band is on PMs, utilizing the Aviom system, and then we have (Shure) 600 and 700 series PM packs for everybody onstage.
What speaker arrays do you use, and how are they flown?
It's VerTec line arrays. There's stereo imagery to about 80 percent of the auditorium, offset left and right. We have four "baby" VerTec arrays that fly behind the stage, because it's 360° seating in the arena.
Do you use subwoofers? Are they on all the time?
Yes, we're flying 16 VerTec and then there are four more cabinets built under the stage just for the bottom end. We run about 104- 105 dB, A-weighted. Almost concert level.
How many monitor mixes do you guys have to have to keep everybody happy?
We run a dual Aviom system. The rhythm section has one stereo feed, with stereo drums and all individual controls…and then the brass section, actually brass and strings, where they have themselves individually. But the rhythm section just has one knob for all the brass. The drums are submixed–all the submixes, about 20, take place in the console. The monitor console is a Euphonix Max Air. This is the first install in the world of a Max Air as a monitor console. They actually sent their software guy out, and he sat with our monitor guy for a weekend, and talked about how it should work and needed to work, so Euphonix went back and wrote the software for it. It's open-architecture software, so it lends itself to those kinds of modifications. We wanted one button push to get to anywhere, so to speak! It had to be fast. Anyway, with the different wedge mixes and PMs, we're probably running 35 different monitor mixes. Of these, 20 are for the band, the choir has their fills and some are built into the stage and flip up for a guest artist if they don't want to wear ears.
How many mics?
There are 20 choir mics and nine handheld mics. The biggest challenge is that the handhelds change people all the time. We also have ensemble vocal mics and three lead mics. We may have three different people leading.
Are the choir mics suspended?
They're actually ground-supported. We went back and forth in our design three times, going up and down…we had the mics in the catwalk system, but the air velocity was substantial coming out of the cooling system. They're AKG CP41 capsules, I believe. They're on a six foot fiber arm with a gooseneck, and the element is actually about six or eight inches long, about 3/8 of an inch in diameter.
In addition, we have 16 audience mics suspended, those are Neumann KM184s. Actually, Neumann was supposed to build our choir mics into the fiber supports, but they backed out of the project. Anyway, I have some that are tight to the audience and four that are pulled back to catch more of the ambiance of the room. Of course, that works against you with contemporary music; it tends to wash the band out. We re-time them too, since it's in an arena and there are time issues.
You probably have to deal with the usual choir noise problems: standing, sitting, coming or going can sound like a herd of cattle.
Yes. They're not on when they go up, and I mute them immediately when the song's over. Besides, there's some band wash that comes through the choir mics… they tend to "wash" the band sound away. With a real aggressive sounding band, choir mics tend to make it challenging to have the sound in your face, so I tend to ride them big-time. If there's an interlude of five seconds between when they sing, I'll drop it back five db to make sure the band is right in your face.
Are the services all the same?
Music style, they're all pretty much contemporary rock. There's one on Saturday, and three on Sunday. Three of them are pretty much the same, but one is done totally in Spanish. The vocals are different, and some of the arrangements…but everything's recallable on the console. We just call that service and go. We don't generally change energy level during the service. It's all pretty much rock band the whole time.
What problems do the singers and musicians typically complain of; for example, "I can't hear this guy or that guy," or "the drums are too loud"?
The band guys just totally dig the Aviom system and really, we don't get complaints from them any longer. The biggest problem I get from the choir with the open wedges is that Joel Osteen, our church pastor, will not wear a headset mic. Getting enough headroom out of him without creating feedback rolling his lav back into the choir field. He's wearing an omni element.
Ooh, that could be bad, couldn't it?
Yes. All these bells and whistles…Euphonix, VerTec and all that's really lovely, but the bottom line is if Joel doesn't sound good on a lav, I've failed. [Laughs.]
So feedback control can be a problem?
Well, yeah, it's always an issue. You always want more gain. Joel's lav mic, for extra DSP, is actually run through two channels of the Euphonix just to pick up extra EQ, and I use one of the compressors as a de-esser and one as a true compressor. All our Euphonix consoles are dual-core, so there's 154 channels of DSP on each channel–plenty of horsepower.
Usually a pastor will want a service to have a professional flow, but remain a worship service as opposed to a "show." Is this the case at Lakewood, and how does it affect the sound crew's job?
Well, Joel, the pastor, came out of TV–he produced the TV show when his dad was the pastor, and preached his first sermon the week his dad died. Because of his background with the TV program, he's very big on making it be a slick production, without–from a live standpoint– feeling like it is. You don't hear them talking about "Well, this week in the children's ministry we're going to do this…" We do preservice announcements via video. The service is about an hour and twenty minutes long, and it is jampacked with information, top to bottom. There's never a wasted second. You're not really aware of it, but it is a tight program.
Sounds like it can be a real pressure cooker.
You know the mix can really just not sound good at all and nobody will say anything, but by golly you miss a mic cue– you're gonna get a phone call when it happens, and I'll get a phone call the day after! Everybody is assigned a mic, and the beauty of the console is that I have it set so that no matter what page I'm on or where I go with the console software, the lead microphones– about eight of them–are always on, all the time, always in the same place.
What are the issues involved in presenting a mix for the television feed?
We do a live mix for TV that's broadcast on the internet. In addition, we record the service to multitrack. That's broadcast in Houston on a national network, the hour show with the music on it. We bring vocals up and recut all the background choir vocals with an ensemble group in the studio, and then we clean that all up. We probably spend about sixteen man-hours on the audio, just on the music. We record both services, so we can pull content from either of them. If a singer flubs a line on one song, I can replace it from the 8:30 service. Joel believes in cleaning the house up before you have people over.
You do this every week?
Yes. Makes it hard to get a vacation! [Laughs.]
The other big thing that we have that most people don't is we run multiple Nuendo rigs. The front of house has the same Nuendo rig as we do upstairs, and all the rigs are wired straight to the mic pres. So they get exactly what the mic pres hear. We had the Houston symphony this past Christmas. They came in and did a rehearsal in the afternoon and left, and later did a concert without even a warm-up with us. We tracked the mic pres during their rehearsal and then played back and mixed that through the front of house console, and we were able to create a mix from their rehearsal and do a live concert. We just swapped the pres on the console over to the Nuendo rigs, and it's just like they were playing live.
Tell me more about the Euphonix System 5 consoles. How have the features of this extremely high-end gear benefitted the church?
We have four. Three of them are System Fives, and one is a Max Air. I don't know if we could have pulled this off, especially in the beginning. Given the complexity of what we do here in sheer track and channel counts, posting the show we end up with a hundred and ten tracks or so. There's 112 mic pres in the arena. There's not too many consoles that can handle that. Also, having the recallability. What really makes our whole facility unique is the way the consoles are tied together, and the way the Nuendo systems work with the consoles. One of the reasons we chose Nuendo over Pro Tools is the cost savings, which is easily six figures.
Are you responsible for getting sound department needs through a church budget committee? How does this generally work out?
Well, not in a traditional way. If I can convince Joel of a need–when I first came here, I bought a used console through Audio Analysts. Long story short, I get it in, set it up and everybody's loving it, and then Joel comes up to me and says, "Why did you buy a used console?" I said well, it was half the price of a new one, and twice as much as they'd ever spent before.
It sounds like the church membership is very supportive of the sound department.
Oh, they are. Of the TV ministry as well; it really is a television church. Of course, there's the popularity of Joel. I'm making it sound like you can spend anything you want to, and that's not the case at all. But I came from a church where you'd pinch pennies, and the budget goes before a committee–here they say "don't ever sell yourself short. If you needed it you should have bought it new." I had to pick myself off the floor; I'd never heard that from a church.
