Woodbury church switches to IEM with KLANG
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Much has changed facility-wise since then, including, most recently, Woodbury Lutheran’s adoption of a pair of KLANG:fabrik immersive in-ear monitor mixing systems for the church’s Valley Creek campus, which also serves as the home base for the congregation’s live broadcast operation.
Moving to a high-end immersive IEM system for monitoring was no small change as the campus’ existing wedge-based monitoring system had been in place and in use for more than a quarter of a century. Add to that the fact that the install took place only a week and a half before one of Woodbury’s biggest productions of the year, Easter weekend, leaving little time to train and acclimate musicians and technical staff.
Technical arts director Kendall Johnson, who has headed the production ministry at Valley Creek since 2016, acknowledges the timing challenge. "We installed KLANG on April 10th, during the busiest time of year for our church,” he recalls. “We had a huge Good Friday production about 10 days after the install date and needed to get our volunteers trained on and comfortable with the new system.”
Thankfully, he says, the transition was painless: “This was a huge improvement for our church! The KLANG system proved to not only be easy for our volunteers to use, but received excellent praise from them. People could not believe how well they could hear. They went from thinking that the immersive audio idea was a gimmick to being fully onboard within just a few songs."
“Moving from wedges to an in-ear-monitor system is all about setting up our teams to lead worship with confidence,” notes multi-site worship director Joel Wetzstein, who also notes that they took their time with the decision, including auditioning systems from a number of providers over a two-month demo process. The KLANG system differentiated itself pretty much immediately, he says.
Wetzstein, who directs the overall worship experience across all of Woodbury Lutheran’s three campuses, was initially nonplussed. “I may have been one who thought the idea sounded like a gimmick,” he admits, “but once I heard it and got more info, I was converted in less than one sentence, ‘The way we were designed to hear.’ KLANG's immersive audio processing platform unravels the competition's flat stereo world and makes in-ear-monitors come to life.”
(Jim Evans)
