Hillsongs Conference

Read about this years Hillsong Colour Conference

Report by Mark Payne

Recently I have undertaken lot of training with the Hillsong production team, especially in the area of acoustics and live sound design. I must say that the Hillsong Church in London probably have the highest production values of any organisation I have worked with and a volunteer engineering team that is second to none.

Having worked in the Wembley Conference centre for many events including New Wine (Men's and Women's Conferences) and spending time understanding the and values "mind set" of Hillsong, it became an obvious step to provide the sound design for their Colour Conference. It was immediately apparent to me that the in-house Turbo Sound Floodlight system was not going to be suitable. Hillsong wanted to boost the stage forward, effectively placing the main Floodlight rig behind the band. My previous experience of the in house system is that it is a system you have to "fight" with to extract a good sound anyway.

I was glad of the opportunity to design a system based around Hill song's own d&b Q1 and C7 systems. I supplemented considerably using SF hire stock d&b C7, Q7 and C6. The conference centre design positions the audience in a 180 degree full semi circle and you need a lot of dispersion (width) built into the system to get even coverage around to the sides. I flew in main L and R clusters of C7 tops in a 2 wide, 2 deep configuration. These main systems provided 70% of the coverage I needed and was supplemented with flown "wide side fills" of Q1 with Q7 under hang.

I computer modelled the space for SPL (sound pressure level) coverage within EASE simulation tools to obtain the correct array parameters for the C7 systems. The Q systems were calculated using d&b's own Qcalc tools. My target for SPL and coverage was to achieve 100dBA SPL with 10dB of amplifier headroom and no more than a 6dB SPL level drop from the front to the back of the venue. We had no time to be messing with system alignment on the day and I hate having to "guess" at this stuff anyway. I can report that we trimmed the system, hung it and it was perfect first time. I delivered a great sounding, evenly distributed system and then assisted the Hillsong engineers in until the sound checks done and dusted.

A combination of the wide screen backdrop and our new 10,000 lumen Christie Roadrunner LX100 projectors was first class. Hillsong run a Watchout system that co-ordinates 6 rack server PCs driving different graphics to 5 separate projectors. Matt McCarty designed and delivered this solution to Hillsong earlier in the year. Check back soon to read a full report on this state of the art system

Watch this space for announcements coming soon regarding a series of training seminars at SFL throughout 2005. I will report more fully on our training approach with Hillsong Church and use many of the lessons learnt here and at our training day at The Globe (Reading) back at the start of 2004.