USA - Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Mississippi is everything you’d expect from its name: theologically conventional and traditionally oriented. But while the church’s services tend towards the expected, there is a refreshingly current take underlying it. Their otherwise conventional worship style, complete with an instrumental mixture of traditional orchestra and modern band, has a state-of-the-art technical foundation.
That technical underpinning just became even more modern, thanks to the integration of an array of technology platforms from DiGiCo, KLANG, and Fourier Audio.
Installed by Franklin, Tennessee-based Integrated Production Solutions (IPS), the church now has a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles at front-of-house and broadcast; Fourier Audio transform.engine plugin interfaces, seamlessly integrating and enabling the use of any VST3 plugin within the audio workflow; and a KLANG:konductor paired with 16 KLANG:kontrollers to provide a comfortable yet completely new immersive in-ear monitoring experience onstage for its worship team vocalists and musicians.
In addition, the DiGiCo consoles are each fitted with the new Pulse upgrade, which takes their capacity from 128 channels to 156 and from 64 aux/sub-groups to 72.
Wade Russell, IPS executive director of integration, says he and Morrison Heights Baptist’s director of media and technical ministries, Eric Busby, have been working together for over a decade, helping the church walk the critical line between being at the leading edge of audio technology without going into the “bleeding-edge” zone, which brings with it a higher level of training and operational intensity.
“It’s one of those situations where you want to be on the cutting edge, where the customer is one of the first ones who has a new technology, and but not where they have to say, ‘Great! I hope it works,’” quips Russell. “That’s why this combination of systems was such a good fit for Morrison Heights – the technology is right at the edge and can do a lot, but it’s all centred around the DiGiCo consoles, which bring a high level of recognition and trust. You’re at the leading edge, but you also know it’s all going to work well together.”
Russell adds that the Pulse upgrade was timely, allowing the consoles to better accommodate the more elaborate event productions the church does at Christmas, Easter, and other times. The transition from an older IEM monitoring platform to KLANG matched that, allowing virtually everyone onstage to have complete control over their personal monitoring environment, delivering 16 immersive mixes and processing up to 128 input signals at up to 96kHz with an internal processing latency of less than 0.25ms.
“The KLANG:kontrollers fit their needs perfectly,” he says. “Eric was like, ‘I have all these hands-on mixers that my people have been used to and I can’t imagine going away from something that’s a tactile mixer to just an iPad. I need the physical knobs and controls.’ So I pointed the KLANG:kontroller out to him and it fit the bill perfectly.”
