Church on the Move is a Tulsa, Okla.-based "mega-church" built around the Evangelical ministry of a charismatic transplanted Texan named Willie George. Besides attracting around 10,000 people a week to services at the church, George's organization is also involved in innumerable community outreach programs, a youth summer camp, a Christian school, all sorts of sponsored sports clubs and more.
It's a highly sophisticated operation from top to bottom, but at its heart are the four weekly services at their 2,700-seat main church, which require arena-level audio clarity and sophistication, full multi-camera video, a two-channel mix for Internet re-broadcasts of services and constant vigilance over the complex sound, lighting and video systems.
Musician/Sound Man
The driving force of Church on the Move's audio side is a genial Oklahoman named Andrew Stone, who has spent a lifetime in Christian music and audio circles. The son of an electrical engineer who was also a sound technician in his local church, Stone "thought I was God's gift to drumming, but evidently He didn't get the memo," he says with a self-effacing laugh, so after college in Tulsa he took some of the audio lessons he'd learned from his father and tried to make a go of it as both a musician and sound man.
For a while, Stone worked audio at a local arena attached to Oral Roberts University, but one night in the early 1990s, a popular touring Christian singer came through the arena and Stone overheard someone saying that their tour monitor mixer had just left. Stone sheepishly offered his services, only to learn that he would be required to run a brand-new Future Sonics in-ear monitoring package that night ("I'd never seen an in-ear system in my life," Stone says) and, "Oh yeah," he was told, "The tour leaves tomorrow."
Stone passed the in-ear test and did hit the road, initially mixing monitors, but then switched to front-of-house and, eventually, also took on event production management for a wide variety of artists, including Third Day, All American Rejects, Kitaro and Point of Grace.
Later, Stone moved to Nashville, where he found steady work as both a drummer and audio engineer. But in 2005, he moved back to Oklahoma, figuring if he was going to be on the road so much of the time, at least he and his wife could be closer to family.
Stepping Up
As fate would have it, the still-growing Church on the Move "wanted to step it up audio-wise," Stone says, and an old friend who worked there asked him to come in and help consult on an upgrade of their system.
"I spent about a month giving them ideas, and then they actually offered me a job. I was between tours, and I hadn't accepted a new one; it was just the right timing. It was a perfect fit."
Stone was hired for a job with multiple hats: he would serve as audio director for Church on the Move, handling the FOH mix for every service, and that eventually led to him handling production manager duties as well. "The joke around here is that nobody listens to Pastor George as much as me!" he laughs.
As far as gear was concerned, however, Stone also had the ear of those authorized to make purchases on the church's behalf.
"Their first question was, ‘Are you going to tell us we're going to have to replace everything?' ‘No, not everything,'" he chuckles. Only most things, as it turned out.
The church's old console "was plagued with problems and finally died during a service," so Stone scrambled, and by the next day had installed a Midas Heritage 3000 in its place.
Today, he has two 3000s linked together to handle all the inputs needed by the impressive-and-ever-changing house band, which plays everything from bombastic, U2-sounding Christian rock to more traditional material.
"I know every church everywhere is going digital," Stone comments, "and I've used everything under the sun; every digital platform. They're great. But the Midas sounds wonderful, and I'm not buried in layers and layers of computer technology; I feel like I'm still actually mixing."
Sonic Challenges
Stone mixes both house and monitors from his position near the center-back of the sonically challenging hall, which has a large stage and 180-degree seating in the audience. The next big change was to replace the existing SLS Audio speaker arrays, with their "fragile ribbon drivers that were very nice-sounding but a little ‘soft' for rock ‘n' roll," Stone says, with 38 JBL mid-size Vertec 4888 speakers in four arrays-right-left/right-left-on each side of the stage.
One Source Building Technologies, which is now known as Strategic Connections, helped Stone integrate their new and old gear, and Jim Brawley, who was in on the original design of both the Vertec and Showco Prism systems, came in and tuned the new setup for Stone and helped solve an issue with the placement of the system's subwoofers, some of which are flown in the air above the stage and others placed under the stage, coupled to the floor.
The whole system, which also includes a row of seven front-fill JBL AC28/95 speakers built into an unseen metal façade covered with blow-through fabric and mounted under the stage, is powered by 125,000 watts of Crown MA-5000s. "We went for coverage first and foremost," Stone says. "We're not trying to kill everyone with volume. We wanted every seat to have a great view and great audio. What we've got now is highly intelligible with great energy and punch."
Lapel Mic to Headset
Of course, Willie George's sermon is the key part of every service, and here, too, Stone had to make a change. The lapel mics the church had been using were weak and contrasted poorly with the amplified music, so Stone suggested switching to a headset mic. "‘He'll never do it,' they told me. ‘He's been using lapel mics for his entire career.' But [George] looked at me and said, ‘Is it going to sound better?' I said, ‘Absolutely!' He said, ‘Sure, whatever you think we need to do.' So we got a DPA 4088-F headset, with the condenser element, and it's been awesome. You cannot tell the difference between him standing there holding a microphone or him speaking into that DPA. When he speaks now, it's quite authoritative, which is what we want, because there's a message he's trying to communicate."
No Internet Re-Mix
Asked whether he does a mix specifically aimed at the Internet version of the weekend service that goes up at the beginning of each week, Stone replies, "No, we don't do a re-mix. We record directly to Final Cut, doing a stereo capture out of the console, adding audience mics to it, but it's all being done right there; there' no posting, I don't EQ it, I don't remix it, I don't multitrack it."
Instead, Stone has a stereo pair of Rode NT1 mics hanging over the audience in the center of the room, "delayed a little bit. Then I use a dbx 4800 processor to matrix in my microphones with the board mix, and that's what's hitting Final Cut when we record the video," which involves six cameras. "If we were to multitrack and mix everything, we'd have to delay everything a week. But we really want everything to be up [online] the next day. When we leave here Sunday after a weekend, I usually will pick which service is the best from a production standpoint-how did the cameras look, how was the performance onstage, how was the sermon? We'll pick the best one and we'll have it posted the next day."
For Stone, working at Church on the Move has been something a dream job – with its share of surprises. "I am now the guy I used to make fun of when I was touring. I've been the guy on the tour bus and on the planes laughing at the church guys – ‘Oh, those guys have such cushy jobs working in a church.' I'll tell you what – I was very humbled when I realized what a hard job it really is. Now I applaud those guys who are doing audio and production at these big churches, because I know they all really had to figure out a lot of things to make it sound good, as I have. And it's been the best job I've ever had, because I get to do what I love, but I also get to go home and sleep in my own bed every night."
