Tallowood Baptist Church acquires SSL Live
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When the choir and the musicians returned to the church after the initial lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, they all wore masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and, not surprisingly, it sounded like it. “It was really hard to get intelligibility and clarity,” Tallowood’s director of technology, Miguel Ortiz, says. Then the church replaced the old desk with a new SSL Live L350. “The choir was still wearing masks when we switched the console - and it sounded as if they had taken their masks off. We were so shocked.”
The previous console was 12 years old, Ortiz reports, so obviously there was going to be some improvement in sound quality. “But I didn’t think it was going to be that dramatic,” he says. “It was so surprising.”
The 1,750-seat church hosts two different Sunday services with two different styles of music, Ortiz says. The first service is a traditional presentation with choir and orchestra and requires just a handful of microphones. “We mic the choir. And we have high-level musicians with high expectations who want it to sound just like it sounds coming out of their instruments. They still need to hear everything, so we have our podiums and extra mics and the piano mics being fed onto the stage.”
Tallowood is using Dante to transport the lines from the stagebox to the L350 console. Dante is also used to distribute the live stream, which is additionally sent to other public areas of the building, he says.
The second service is contemporary, with drums and guitars. “Currently we’re feeding a personal monitoring system onstage for the band from the L350 via MADI,” Ortiz says. “And we’re feeding three in-ear systems.”
Ortiz’s assistant, Allan Tiguila, handles most of the mixing duties at front-of-house. One challenge with the sound system using the old console was that he could never get the choir loud enough in the mix because of feedback and other issues, Tiguila says. “Once I was able to put the SSL bus compressor on them, man, that was a game-changer. I was really impressed with that. It was one of the first times that I thought the choir was a bit too loud! I’d never had that.”
Tiguila continues “For the second service, I’m using all the onboard stuff, mainly the de-esser, extra EQs and all the reverbs. Mainly what I use on Sunday is the plate ‘verbs and the standard vocal thickener that’s on there; that’s pretty nice.”
Tallowood acquired the L350 from local AVL equipment provider, integrator and rental house LD Systems, which had installed the current sound system years earlier when the church first moved to its purpose-built campus. According to Matt Rhodes, sales engineer, LD Systems, Ortiz and his sound team confirmed their purchase decision at LD’s shop, where they took the production sound department’s SSL Live L500 for a test drive. “They were most impressed with the sonic quality,” Rhodes says.
