Ten years ago, The Belonging Co were a handful of touring artists and musicians meeting in a basement to hold praise meeting in the Nashville area. Today, they draw thousands to locations in Nashville, Franklin and Columbia, and invite thousands more to join them online.
Preparing for their next phase of growth, the church – together with long-time design, sales and integration partner – has installed two Solid State Logic Live L650 mixing consoles at its main location just north of downtown Nashville, replacing a pair of older desks that had spent years on tour and were nearing the end of their useful life.
Lead pastors Henry and Alex Seeley, who relocated to Nashville from the couple’s native Australia in 2012, established the church to provide artists, musicians and crew gigging during weekends with a place to meet on Tuesday nights. Henry Seeley is also a musician, songwriter, producer (and Grammy Award-winning mix engineer) who, until several years ago, had an SSL 4000 G console in his home studio.
‘Right out of the box, the L650 is a great sounding desk,’ reports Caleb Rhew, assistant audio director and one of several FOH engineers at the church. ‘We leaned into processing pretty heavily with the previous consoles. But with the SSL L650, it was very clean right out of the gate, so, we’ve tried to see what we can do just by pushing up faders and running a channel EQ and a channel compressor. It’s cleaned up a lot of things and has allowed us to hear the source material a lot more accurately.’
The church’s recording needs are handled in Pro Tools and connected to a Dante network. ‘We bought two L650s and five SSL Network I/O SB 32.24 Dante Stageboxes, giving us a total of 72 inputs,’ says Production Director, Andy Rushing. ‘Pro Tools is running at 48kHz, the live sound system is at 96kHz, and we do the sample rate conversion in the SSL Stagebox. SSL Live has superb Dante integration. All routing is controlled directly from the console and stored in the console’s show file.
‘SSL’s Dante workflow has been a huge plus for us,’ he adds, ‘Even when the system is offline, Dante devices can be configured and patched using a console or via SSL’s Solsa offline editing software.’
The church holds four services on Sunday, with rebroadcasts of the Nashville location’s two earlier live-streamed services later in the day, and a fifth service on Tuesday evening. The improvement in sound quality brought by the new consoles is already noticeable on the broadcast. ‘The biggest difference that the SSL brings, and one of the first things that people notice, is the sound of the preamps,’ says Daniel Bender, broadcast video director.
The audio team were able to compare broadcast mixes made on the old FOH console and the L650. ‘There was a lot more fidelity with the SSL and just a bigger sound,’ Bender says. ‘It was the same mixer, Caleb, and the gains were matched. The only differences were the preamps and the console processing.’
Since SSL Live offers improved sound quality without the need for external plug-ins or outboard processing, Rhew and the church’s other FOH engineers can now focus on adding their own creative touches to the live music mix using Live’s onboard processing and plug-in options.
‘We’ve been leaning into the bus compressor quite a bit on our group and output buses. We’ve also been leaning into the Blitzer for more aggressive, dirty bass and smashed drums using parallel processing, which has been really cool. The Listen Mic Compressor has been neat, too. It’s been fascinating to see what that will do. We’ve been using it on drum overheads for a really pumping sound.’
The worship band’s singers and musicians all use IEMs and generally require less processing with the new console. ‘We try to make things as natural sounding in the monitors as we can. A lot of what we’re doing is just keeping things under control,’ Rhew says.
The Belonging Co recently released a sixth live album featuring its worship band and guests on the church’s TBCO Music record label.
’Henry won a Grammy in 2015 with an SSL console, so there is an affinity with the sound of SSL,’ says Diversified VP, Tim Corder, who has been working with the church for six years. ‘The thing that is unique about The Belonging Co is that they treat every weekend as though there could be a special musical moment, and if that special moment happens, they want to be able to capture it and turn it around and release it. They also have one of the best-sounding broadcast streams, and that has been a consistent priority for the life of the church. So SSL’s heritage of recording and quality sonics is what really drove our whole conversation regarding the choice of a new console.’
