Like all houses of worship, crafting a clear and consistent message for visitors and members is greatly aided by having the right production equipment on the stage and in the house. The Crossing, a 1,400-seat Christian church in Columbia, MO, recently turned to a simple-yet-substantial improvement by upgrading an existing KLANG:vokal immersive in-ear monitor mixing processor with KLANG’s new :vokal+ software, while also adding a second newer unit similarly featuring the latest software.
Paired with KLANG’s latest KOS 5.6 operating system, the :vokal+ channel boost upgrade has enabled the church’s audio team to immediately increase the input-channel count of its :vokals from 24 up to 64 for all of worship team’s binaural mixes. Onstage, the singers and musicians continue to each have hands-on hardware control of their own IEM mix parameters via the usual presence of a dozen KLANG:kontrollers, which were added earlier this year.
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“The flexibility that KLANG’s :vokal and :kontroller bring to in-ear monitoring for large-scale worship music applications is really fantastic, and that’s only gotten better with the new :vokal+ upgrade,” said Jeremy Bagwell, who manages business development for Oklahoma City-based Skylark Audio Video, the church’s longtime AV integration partner, which also recently installed a new DiGiCo Quantum5 console and Fourier Audio transform.engine processing platform at FOH.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about having the right production tools that can be flexible enough to be anything that an engineer needs for them to be at any given moment,” Bagwell continued. “The fact that KLANG’s platforms and DiGiCo’s consoles are easily upgradable and scalable—often without even requiring new hardware—make them incredibly versatile as a church’s needs change and technical demands increase. And all the while the workflow stays the same, so when the church brings in freelance operators, they’re already familiar with these systems, regardless of their version.”
While he’s a fan of all of the audio systems at The Crossing, Brad Jenkins, the church’s production director, says the newly upgraded KLANG:vokal+ processors, which are connected to the consoles via MADI and to the individual :kontrollers with Dante, have had a particularly beneficial effect. “We had previously made the transition from analog to digital with another brand for our in-ear monitoring, but there was definitely an audible decline in audio quality,” he recalled. “We lost some fidelity and spatial elements. With KLANG, we gained all that back—and then some. Our musicians and singers can hear each other better, which helps them to be more inspired. Having a good mix onstage translates into a better performance, and that itself translates into a clearer, more inspirational message.”
On a practical level, Jenkins says that the new KLANG software update, which increases the processor’s input-channel count to 64, will make a huge difference when the number of performers onstage increases for Christmas, Easter, and other special events, up from the typical 10 to 12 musicians and vocalists onstage most weekends. “With a lot of extra mics and other signals for holiday productions, we now have a way to bring them all into the team’s in-ear mixes,” he says. “We also purchased six more :kontrollers when we added our second :vokal+, so we’re now able to offer 18 hardware controllers and 24 binaural mixes to accommodate additional performers. It feels kind of like an unlimited channel count, really.”
Jenkins is also a fan of the new Fourier Audio transform.engine, which, as he put it, “lets me bring the studio onstage. We come from the studio world, so we like to be able to approach the worship sound in the same way that we approach recording music. We’re able to use the plugins that we love when we need them, and they sound great. We’re just slowly unlocking all that. We also have a college ministry of around 750 students that uses a full production crew, and they've been using it a ton and loving it.”
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“Skylark has been absolutely great in helping us navigate our growing production needs over the past eight years,” he added. “And with our new tools from Fourier, DiGiCo, and KLANG, our worship team is sharing their talents and sounding better than ever.”
