Wichita Falls, TX (March 24, 2021)—CCM artist Kim Walker-Smith has been hitting the road to promote her latest live release, Wild Heart, with a series of “Worship Nights” mini-tours of large churches and Christian universities, all of which have been sold out to half-capacity per COVID protocols. Providing audio for the productions has been Wichita Falls-based Front Porch Productions.
For the tours, Front Porch Productions has been supplying a pair of DiGiCo SD12 96 FOH and monitor consoles sharing an SD-Rack equipped with 32-bit “Ultimate Stadius” mic pres on an Optocore fiber-optic loop, according to Front Porch co-owner Aaron Talley, who has also been serving as the monitor engineer for each of the four-show runs.
The front-of-house mix has been tackled by Daniel Ellis, who notes he’s been using DiGiCo fairly exclusively for a while now: “The SD12 is perfect for what we do with the number of inputs and busses it has, and its compact size helps us easily fit our touring package into one bus trailer. I’ve had a Waves server at front of house for Kim’s latest tours, but I’ve kept most of the processing on the console, which has sounded great. And Aaron and I have both been using DiGiGrid MGB MADI interfaces to get signals into REAPER for recording her shows.”
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“Macros on the SD12 are also amazing,” he adds. “I don’t have any special ones that haven’t already been talked about a hundred times, but they’ve been raved about because they are so helpful to have in your workflow. One of my favorites is the one that bypasses all Waves plugins. I’ll do that every now and then during soundcheck just to make sure I’m not going down a plugin rabbit-hole and making the mix worse!” he laughs. “Also, I really love using MIDI to trigger things. It’s such a simple pleasure to fire a snapshot that can play a specific song on my laptop and turn up a fader without touching it.”
At the other end of the fiber loop, Talley, who is manning the monitor SD12 96 console, reports that the tours’ relatively sparse input count of only 36 channels is complemented by an equally modest count of six stereo IEM mixes on stage: two for vocalists, plus keys, electric guitar, bass, and drums. “This has been the lowest number of mixes that I think we’ve ever had, and the console can obviously handle much more thrown at it, but I’ve been really happy with how it’s performed. I’ve only used the desk’s onboard processing on my end—EQ, compression, and reverb—and the sound quality has been top-tier. Daniel and I have also really enjoyed the Con Send and Receive function on our consoles; we use it all the time and it’s an absolute necessity for us.”
Kim Walker-Smith mini-tours • www.transparentproductions.com
Front Porch Productions • www.frontporchpro.com
DiGiCo • www.DiGiCo.biz
