MIKE WARD: Hi. I’m Mike Ward and we’re at Suncrest Christian Church in St. John, Indiana, and we’re about to walk through the system design of the room.

A huge disadvantage being way up in the back upstairs is it sounds completely different upstairs than it does downstairs. So, during the course of a Sunday morning, I spend a lot of time going up and down the stairs hearing what it sounds like down here and making changes upstairs. So, personally I’d rather the console be in the middle of the room but instead it’s upstairs in the back, so it’s just another obstacle, another thing that makes my job fun.

This is the sound booth. This is where most of my work is done. This is our Soundcraft Spirit 8 40-channel console. We don’t use all 40 channels but we can if we need to.

I have a TC Electronic Finalizer Express that I use across the stereo bus as an insert. For a stereo bus compressor, this is a Sonic Maximizer 48 that I also use inserted across a stereo bus. This is pretty much all I use for outboard gear on the console. This is my only form of compression, so I’ll try and just compress the stereo bus, and this is our CD player. We play CDs pre-service and post-service.

This is our CD recorder. It’s an Alesis Masterlink ML-9600. It can record up to 96k, 24-bit but we just choose to do 16-bit, 44.1 because we’re just putting it on a CD anyways. It’s basically a hard drive recorder that also burns CDs. You can also do compression, normalization, and limiting in it. It has built-in DSP. It’s a great unit.

We record every service, the music and the sermon. The sermon we put on iTunes as a podcast and we also put it on a web site and we also have CDs for people to take home when they leave. So, yes we definitely record everything. It’s also a great practice tool for our musicians, for our leaders to see where people are at, where they need to improve including themselves. So, it’s a great tool for me. I get to listen to my board mixes and see if they sound any good.

We also use the computer to record to. We use Pro Tools and Adobe Audition depending on what we want to do. I have a Pro Tools 003 that I bring in and do multitracking on every once in a great while just for practice purposes. We do record most of the sermons on Adobe Audition just because it’s an easier program for everybody to learn, and it’s basically the only use of the computer although I’m currently trying to install video games on it. [LAUGHING] We play them on the big screen all the time.

The two on the side on there -- We actually have one behind the curtain that goes the whole length down but our bolts are burnt out at the moment.

I like sports games. I like Madden and I play a lot of Guitar Hero, so I’m a huge Guitar Hero fan although I feel

GRETCHEN HASSE: [INDISCERNIBLE]

MIKE WARD: Yeah, with the PA and everything although I feel really bad when I play Guitar Hero because I should be playing my guitar instead.

[SUNCREST CHRISTIAN CHURCH WORSHIP BAND PERFORMING]