In just 10 years, The Belonging Co. has grown from a handful of touring artists and musicians meeting in a basement to thousands gathering at the church’s three Nashville area locations and many thousands more worshipping online. As The Belonging Co. readies for its next phase of growth, the church, working with longtime design, sales and integration company Diversified, recently installed a pair of Solid State Logic Live L650 mixing consoles at its main location just north of downtown Nashville.The Belonging Co. is deeply rooted in the music community and takes sound very seriously. Lead pastors Henry and Alex Seeley, who relocated to Nashville from the couple’s native Australia in 2012, started 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. The Belonging Co. recently released a sixth live album featuring its worship band and guests on the church’s TBCO Music record label.
L650: Very clean right out of the gate
“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.
Broadcasting live with SSL L650
The church holds four services across its locations in Nashville, Franklin and Columbia on Sunday, with rebroadcasts of the Nashville location’s two earlier live-streamed services later in the day, and a fifth service on Tuesday night. According to Daniel Bender, broadcast video director, the improvement in sound quality following the switchover to the SSL Live consoles was immediately noticeable on the broadcast. “The biggest difference that I think SSL brings, and one of the first things that people notice, is the sound of the preamps,” he says. The church’s audio team was able to compare broadcast mixes made on the old FOH console and the new 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 pre’s and the console processing. It was very impressive.”
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,” he reveals. “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 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.”
The sound of SSL
“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, Diversified[PB1] , 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.”
