The Gift of Christmas is a treasured tradition at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. The powerful 100-minute program is complete with a Living Nativity and features camels and kings, impactful music performances, and eye-popping virtual scenery. It’s become one of the highlights of the Christmas season, with thousands of guests attending every year to enjoy a visually stunning multimedia event complete with special effects, a nearly 1,000-member cast and choir, a 50-piece live orchestra, flying drummers and angels, and much more. With that many musicians and vocalists on stage together, managing the event’s monitoring would be a challenge. But it’s one that‘s being perfectly met with systems from KLANG and DiGiCo.
Prestonwood is a big church, and it moves cautiously into new technologies. Former Monitor Engineer Matt Pickens originally drove the KLANG adoption there two years ago, beginning with a single KLANG:konductor immersive IEM mixing processor and eight KLANG:kontrollers (one of which was a spare) distributed to the church’s core band. “Matt was on staff and he helped get the infrastructure for KLANG all dialed in so that when we did switch over, it was seamless,” says Mike Smith, Prestonwood’s Live Production Lead and Lead Audio Engineer, adding that the church has also been relying on DiGiCo Quantum7 FOH, monitor, and broadcast consoles for the past several years. “He had built The Gift Of Christmas’ infrastructure offline, so when we started working on that, the system was solidly up and running.”
As the KLANG systems proved their value, the church’s audio and music staff added additional :kontrollers, as well as two more :konductors. “Once they tried it, the musicians and engineers began really enjoying the clarity in the mix,” comments Systems Engineer Will Schaefer. A year later, the church was up to 35 KLANG:kontrollers, with 27 of them assigned to the orchestra in addition to the seven used by the band, the most recent batch sold by Spectrum Sound of Nashville. “For this year’s The Gift Of Christmas, we added :kontrollers to the string and brass sides of our orchestra, to get all of our instrumentalists off of the older Roland M-48s we had been using and onto the KLANG system.”
Integrating the KLANG systems progressively into the church’s audio operations allowed the staff to tailor it to their workflow. “If we were a little bit slow on the uptake, it’s just because, here at Prestonwood, the scale of everything that we do is so big,” says Music Director Jonathan Walker. “We wanted to make sure that we knew all the ins and outs of how we wanted channels routed. For instance, we don’t split out drums across multiple channels; we have a single stereo drums mix that’s really curated and that comes down a single channel. That first year of using KLANG really allowed us to see all the cool things that we could do. The band members are professional musicians, so they took to KLANG easily. But when we moved KLANG over to the orchestra, a lot of those players are volunteer weekend-only musicians, so we wanted to create something that was easy for them to understand and easy to migrate to from what they had been using – and not put so much in front of them that they were just overwhelmed. And that process was seamless.”
While The Gift of Christmas is a major production, the church is finding that KLANG systems can help in a lot of ways for weekend and other routine services. “It lets us try things for our Spanish service and other special events that we do,” says Schaefer. “We’re able to try our hand at things like, for instance, switching all the :kontrollers over from the main feed, or using different channels for music and dialog. So we were able to figure some new uses out before we pulled the trigger on doing them for a much larger service or event.” Smith jumps in to note: “Having a huge number of channels on the box really accommodates just about anything that we could ever need to split things out for musician and staff control.”…