[We're pretty sure that Richard Rutherford is on vacation this month. He'll return with his insights in our October issue. We're pretty sure… –Ed.]
Talk about a mega church. While some church sound systems can get dicey when the size of the congregation reaches into the thousands, production company Band World of Toronto, Ontario, had an interesting challenge on their hands while rigging the site of this year's 58th Session of the General Conference for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church–the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, Mo. The venue, which serves as the home base of the St. Louis Rams, has a capacity of 70,000. Phil Hornung served as FOH engineer for the conference, which featured a fleet of L-ACOUSTICS speakers–36 V-DOSCs, 48 dV-DOSCs and 18 ARCS–to counteract the seven-second reverb inside the dome. "The biggest issue with the venue was just the sheer size of it, and it wasn't designed very well acoustically," he says. "So, our primary goal was to get the intelligibility up as high as possible and go with as many point sources as possible to keep the total SPL down."
Nine months of planning and six days of setup preceded the 10-day conference which, at its core, wasn't too different from the corporate events that Band World normally covers. "The biggest thing we had to deal with was the simplest thing, which was the business meeting that took place there," Hornung says. "Every day during business hours, they would have about 3,000 or 4,000 people just on the floor, and they would go on for about eight hours in a closed session and discuss policy and stuff like that. So we'd have audience mics addressing the stage and the stage addressing back to the audience."
But the setup also had to accommodate three hours of constant speakers and performances each night, as well as services on Sunday morning. "It was basically akin to an awards show, where you have one side of the stage performing and the other side of the stage changing over, and you're constantly flipping back and forth," he says. "We didn't have any artist information until we actually got there, so we just brought absolutely tons of microphones." The selection included nine Sennheiser MKH 40s, nine AKG C-3000s, four Sennheiser 441s and four Beyer M88s for the orchestra.
A 350-voice choir held court over two full seating sections in the lower bowl of the dome, but had to look and sound as center stage as anything else. "So what we did was hang–I think four trusses of lighting over the top of them, and then lift enough for the TV broadcast. They hung 22 shotgun mics down from that truss, AKG 737–miniature shotguns," Hornung says.
Not only that, but after nine months of planning, the specs changed with two weeks before Hornung and his compatriots were due to travel to St. Louis. "They called and told us we were going to have to add enough video screens and P.A. to do the show fully in the round. Up until then, we were only planning to do about 200 degrees of coverage," he says. "We already had the show half-prepped by the time we got that phone call. It put a bit of a wrench in the wheels."
Upon arriving at the Edward Jones Dome, other wrinkles popped up, including a missing broadcast console.
"We had brought a 28-channel Midas Venice for them to use in the broadcast booth for some sub-mixing. And when we got there, it was a 52-channel split that we were sending to the broadcast booth, and there was no console for it to patch into," Hornung says. "So they ended up having to use the Midas that we brought in and another small console. The broadcast engineer who worked for the building had his hands full dealing with that."
In addition, all the amps for the delay hangs had to be wired up into catwalks that were 160 feet above the dome floor. "The catwalk was only about a foot wider than the amp rack," he says. "So, getting around up there was kind of tricky."
Hornung may be prone to the occasional understatement, but he does also say that the conference went off with few hitches. "It was simultaneously a case of bringing much, much more equipment than we would normally send to a show and being much more complicated than most of the shows that we do," he says. "But I'd say that one of the key factors in the event was the local crew in St. Louis. They were absolutely amazing. I've done shows all over North America, dealt with practically every local around, but the best I was hoping for, they exceeded it by 200%."
Band World, owned by Bob Spencer, got this gig after serving as the AV company for the church's last conference five years ago in Toronto. Hornung says that they normally stick to concerts and festivals in the Toronto area, but the company is already on the fast track to signing the contract for the next major Seventh Day Adventist conference in 2010, which will take place in Atlanta.
Even though the Georgia Dome doesn't provide much of a challenge–after all, it seats only 71,250.
