Welcome back to this continued Worship Tech Tour series featuring The Belonging Co. Primarily, this post is going to mainly provide a cliff notes version of the video above that cuts through the commentary and gives you a no-nonsense specs list of The Belonging Co’s setup. So if you want a full account of The Belonging Co’s setup, watch the video above.
Does this inspire you to better your worship tech ministry at your own church? If so, we offer a variety of courses designed for improving your broadcast mix, live stream, or just your church sound in general. We also offer the full bread and butter, Worship Ministry School, where we provide one-on-one coaching and a massive online library of courses. Check us out.
Who is The Belonging Co.?
PRESENCE OVER PRESENTATION. INTIMACY OVER INDUSTRY. PEOPLE OVER POSITION. ENCOUNTER OVER ENTERTAINMENT.
JESUS OVER EVERYTHING.
That is The Belonging Co.’s mantra.
The church began with their lead pastors, Henry and Alex Seeley, opening up their home for worship in 2012 after taking a leap of faith and moving from their home of Melbourne, Australia to Nashville. Their hearts were drawn to those who didn’t have a church home because of the fluid schedule of so many whose lives revolved around a touring schedule. By the Lord’s grace, he drew a people together, and The Belonging Co. began.
Now, The Belonging Co. holds services at two campuses along with its online ministry, has a thriving worship ministry, and even offers college degree programs for students.
Audio Capture
Acoustic Treatment of the room
The first step to any audio system is capturing quality audio at the source. When The Belonging Co. built their new campus, they invested in acoustically treating the room. Anyone who walks into the auditorium will observe panels all around the room. That way the sound kept coming out of the speakers isn't bouncing around, creating all sorts of strange reflections, and feeding back into microphones on stage. Remember: acoustic treatment is very important when you're building a system from scratch and they put a lot of time and intention into this process with their integration company when they built this space.
Next, are the main instruments of audio capture, the mics.
The Specs
Drums
Kick Drum
Outside: Audix D6
Inside: Shure Beta 91
Snare Drum
2 SM57 Mics, one on top and one on bottom
Toms
Sennheiser 904S
Overhead Mics
AKG 414s
Guitars
Setup backstage, micd with Shure SM57s
Bass/Acoustic rigs are using direct boxes to the FOH
Keyboard
Focusrite Clarett audio interfaces
Vocals
Shure KSM9s with ULXD wireless systems
Crowd Mics
12 Mics!
Mixture of AKG 414s and SM81s, and Sennheiser 416 and 8060 shotgun mics
At front of house, they use optogates on their talkback mics in order to communicate to the band and others.
Audio Routing
When The Belonging Co. renovated their current building, they wanted to be able to capture audio from any room in the church and move that audio flawlessly wherever they needed. So, that’s just what they did. On the walls of these rooms, there are panels that have audio inputs that send the audio all the way back to the main server room, where there are SD racks (basically like stage boxes) that help to hand off audio to different consoles. So this server room, then, is basically the central hub for all things routing, with Optocore fiber networking to get audio to and from places.
On the stage in the auditorium, all the sub snakes onstage that go underground to that same server room and directly patch into the SD racks.
The Specs
Two SD racks that provides 112 channels
Orange box, using Dante to transfer the audio
Mixing Consoles and PA in Main Auditorium
If you’re ever able to a service in person, to no surprise, you will be blown away by the quality of sound that is coming out of the PA speakers they're using. So what are they using, and what are their mixers?
The broadcast room is beautiful, both aesthetically and functionally. This room is the hub where all the mixing for the livestreams happens. All that audio is sent to the mixing tools here through the same network, and volunteers use the instruments below get to work on producing what we hear online.
The Specs
Mixing is done all in ProTools
Using plugins gives a lot of flexibility since it’s a broadcast mix
Acoustic Treatment of room
Base Traps, isolation, diffusion
4 Avid S1 Mixers with iPads
Wrapping Up
Again, the goal of this post is to quickly provide points of info. For the full, thorough, and immersive experience of walking through all things Audio at The Belonging Co., definitely check out Churchfront’s Episode 2 of this Worship Tech Tour series. We hope this inspires you and your church as you build up your worship ministry!