The Belonging Anchors its Main Nashville-Based Church Location with Solid State Logic L650 Mixing Console

“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,” he says, having to add plug-ins and outboard gear to achieve the sound that they wanted through the sanctuary’s P.A. system. But with the SSL L650, “It was very clean right out of the gate. It was really nice to just push up the faders and go, ‘Oh, that sounds great,’ without having to add anything. 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 Avid Pro Tools and connected to a Dante network, says Andy Rushing, production director. The new SSL Live consoles support Dante natively, he says, unlike the previous desks. “We bought two L650s and five SSL Network I/O SB 32.24 Dante Stageboxes, giving us a total of 72 inputs. Pro Tools is running at 48 kHz, the live sound system is at 96 kHz, 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 showfile. SSL’s Dante workflow has been a huge plus for us,” Rushing comments, adding even when the system is offline, Dante devices can be configured and patched using a console or via SSL’s offline editing software, SOLSA.

The worship band’s singers and musicians all monitor on in-ears and generally require less processing with the new L650 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.

As for the worksurface features of the new SSL Live consoles, Rhew comments, “The L650 has certain things that I like, like the smaller screen off to the side, where you can pull up different types of processing. I have found myself using that more than I thought.” He has also found the two assignable faders on the Master Tile in the console’s upper section convenient: “I use one of those for my shout speaker for talkback.”

“Henry won a Grammy in 2015 with an SSL console, so there is an affinity with the sound of SSL,” says Tim Corder, vice president of Diversified, 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.”

The SSL Live L650s replaced a pair of older desks that had spent years on tour before The Belonging Co. acquired them and were nearing the end of their useful life. When considering their options, production director Rushing stated, “We said, ‘Why not let this be an opportunity to explore what our sound can be through an SSL desk?’ We've had a great experience, and we are all thrilled about what the future holds with SSL and the next steps that we can take.”