SOUNDCRAFT is really the technological superiority of a hyper specialist in audio witch has only been manufacturing mixing consoles for more than 30 years with unparalleled know-how (not a brand that touches everything) The power of the Harman group allows to Soundcraft Engineers to develop audio technology without financial limits. The result is sonic excellence as with the unrivaled JBL VTX line array and the fabulous Crown I Tech amplifiers. The sound is incredibly high fidelity.
I love me some Lexicon. Interestingly enough I’m not using the lexicon on the console at the moment. Everything I’m using is from Waves (Hverb and abby road plates)
@@ConstellationAudioTutorials wow bro sounds amazing i would just turn up the bass guitar just a tad bit but wow bro! Any more videos coming? Im currently thinking about a vi2000 for a church. Its between the allen and heath dlive s5000 and the soundcraft vi2000. May i ask what reverbs would you suggest to use on the vi2000? Thanks!
@@soundfreak8892 we are struggling a bit with our bass tone. Since I made this I’ve made some improvements so it’s a tad better. Depends on the bassist. The AH stuff is great. We’re using all Waves processing thru super rack for the effects and individual channel processing. Either the s500 or vi2000 would be great consoles. Really just depends on all your channel/buss needs (as well as budget and physical surface needs)
@@soundfreak8892 it does. You need MADI to an MGB/MGO device to get it to SoundGrid. There isn’t a native soundgrid card but the MGO/MGB is a very common setup for some audio consoles.Up to 128x128 to soundgrid. We use a MADI optical card AND the built in MADI to feed 128 channels to soundgrid. 64 are direct outs for recording, the 2nd set of 64 are for super rack
Wow, I'm overwhelmed - came for educational purposes since our church is looking to upgrade our Audio-Production-Quality but suddenly found me worshiping and enjoying that beautiful sound paired with a talentet and committed band. Simply awsome, thanks lots for sharing - be blessed! So we're a church with 3 Locations (50-300 PAX per Sunday per Location) and 3 Startup-Locations in the south of Germany. Goal would be to establish the same board and periphery in adapted sizes at every of the 6 locations/campus. I think smaart can be a game changing step to a more consistent and balanced mix sunday after sunday. Since I sometimes find it hard to guess: how loud we actually are... Currently we're on two X32 with one for FOH sound & inEars the seccond is dedicated for livestream. I would love to hear your oppinion on what you'd reccomend: either Soundcraft Vi 2000-5000 w/ Soundcraft/UAD Realtime Rack ultimate or Waves LV1 (but somehow I'm not in favour of having no physical interface where i can mix by simply laying down my finger on a fader and watching whats going on on the stage, smaart, etc. while making adjustments to the volumes... Hope you get what I mean). In addition I'm very whelcoming to hear other suggestions by you! Thanks in advance and be blessed, Arne
Thank you for your kind words! The idea of having the same setups at all locations is great if you can afford it. I work with both the Vi line and the LV1 system. Both are fantastic. I find the Vi3000 (and the whole range) to be a bit more user friendly. LV1 can be temperamental at times. Though the FIT controller is great, nothing replaces the stability and ease of use of a physical console. I would suggest going with the Vi line if possible. You can integrate SuperRack via the MADI expansion card slot with an MGO. That is what I have used in this video for all band processing. If Waves isn't financially attainable in the beginning, the on-board console stuff is fantastic. Any of those platforms would easily out perform the x32, but that does come at a greater cost.
@@ConstellationAudioTutorials True, both options sound better and offer greater possibilities than a X32 :) Thanks for your reccomendation of the Vi - guess I'm gonna look out for some offers of used Vi's
@@arnebronk228 You're comparing apples to peanuts by even mentioning the M32 or X32 as a comparison to the Soundcraft. Just a simple comparison of the cost should be enough of a takeaway. The M32& & X32's are nowhere near the target market here. If someone has the budget & the ability to decipher the sound quality that needs to be fulfilled then the result is evident as in this production.
Wow! You've done a fantastic job on this project & I commend you. Excellent! You've got a well-disciplined group of musicians your working with as well so kudos to them. The only issue I couldn't grasp was the vocals sounding a bit warbly. I didn't know if that was by choice or the vocalist's style.
Are you talking about vibrato? The male voice on Living Hope is the only vibrato that isn't stylistically what we're going for normally. Other than that it's very much a style.
Great video! Sound is terrific. There are a few questions: How is your room acoustically treated? Are you playing at full volume in the sanctuary? I've noticed your inputs levels are getting up there, but the clarity is great. Our church is using an elderly Si2 console and I've never seen the inputs running as high as yours, but the volume out of our speaker mains is quite high. (I've been doing sound for quite some time, and am new to this church and their processes; since I wasn't around at the time the system was installed, I'm suspicious the console output and the main speakers output are mismatched for volume to the main sanctuary) Did your installer/integrator calibrate your main speakers with the console through the DSP? Keep up the great work!!
Thanks. Our room is well acoustically treated. It’s got around a 1.3 second reverb time if I remember right. Speech intelligibility is around a .73 (studios are about .9. Nothing is 1.0). It’s good, but it’s by no means perfect. We also try to minimize stage noise as much as possible (amps in iso boxes, cymbal shields, etc). I’ve personally spent a long time tuning the sound system over the years. It’s well balanced with a small extra amount of low end on the bottom. Our amps, DSP, and console are all well balanced to provide sufficient power and output. I run our console’s main fader at -5. Not strong reason there. We do typically try to have our inputs around 0 to +6 on these meters (which max at +18). We actually used to have an Si3 before this. I can’t remember how similar the metering is. My goal in setting gain is to “tickle the yellow”. Some channels (like kick) hit hotter sometimes. Vocals average around there but when they really dig in it gets louder. Aside from infrequent bursts of loudness, none of our inputs clip when using this method. Balancing a sound system where inputs are coming in at a health level, no internal summing distortion happens, and having proper power to the speakers is a bit of a dance. My preference is to generally run amps wide open in case I need the headroom, run the preamps properly (tickling the yellow), make sure none of my busses are clipping, and then adjust either console output or DSP input to compensate how loud I actually need it. I hope that kind of makes sense! I once helped a church with a basic Behringer crossover thing and their knobs got turned by a little kid years earlier so they just adapted by turning their console output down -30. They were clipping the crap out of the internal summing and the PA was super “hissy” because of the noise of the crossover. 🤦🏼♂️
@@ConstellationAudioTutorials Thank you very much for your thorough answer! I shall have to work within the limitations of what is there at my church. There is a combination of headphones via Avioms and large stage monitor speakers (anywhere from 1-3, depending on the service) and virtually no acoustic treatment on walls of drywall and stone. Ugh. When the subs are pushed a bit hard, it just kills most everything else in the sanctuary. The integration company didn't finish the job well because the church ran out of budget for their building program (this was long before I came there). Some people believe you can have a great service with poor sound acoustics. Pity. Because of the many COVID lockdowns, I haven't had the opportunity yet to spend a number of hours listening through favourite music and tracks in the sanctuary alone. The primary goal is to get a feel for the room with different styles of music and different volumes. Smaart will be virutally useless there at this time, I believe. Thanks again for your great presentation! It has inspired me to believe that a solution can be found! If anyone wants to help with a GoFundMe page for a nearly new Vi1, let me know. ;)
The S4 and S6 are completely different as they are not live sound consoles. The S6L is AVID's live audio console in the range of the Vi3000. There's a lot of different flavors of the S6L and some are close to the cost of the Vi3000. The rest are much more.
Are you currently recording off the desk? Perhaps via the internal Dante? There’s a few ways to implement virtual soundcheck. My personal favorite is to use the desk’s “second input” on each channel. I select the digital input from my recording software (Dante if you use that). If kick is Dante out #1, then you could use Dante In #1 for virtual soundcheck. Here are the caveats: 1. You need to setup your recording software to output 1-to-1. So input 14 goes out output 14, etc. 2. You need enough channels for everything you want to record and then virtual soundcheck. Dante does 64 channels which covers a lot, but not necessarily everything. So chose wisely if you’re maxing out your I/O. 3. The Vi3000 has a software switch to select between the internal MADI and the internal Dante. While it can output on both simultaneously, it can only return on one or the other. The switch is located in settings. 4. I set up a snapshot to flip between input 1 (analog) and input 2 (digital for virtual soundcheck) on the channels I use for virtual soundcheck. That makes it quick to go back and forth. 5. Always save your show on analog inputs. There’s a bug on the Vi3000 that they haven’t fixed and if you save it on a digital input and re-load the show it’ll zero out the gains. Learned that the hard way!!
Are you getting hung up on a step or need help getting started? I can try to help if you let me know the following: 1. What audio console do you have, 2. What DAW (recording software) do you have? 3. What audio interface do you want to use to record/playback audio (Dante, MADI, etc), 4.Are you using a Mac or PC?
1. You'll need the Dante Controller and Dante Virtual Soundcard programs installed and working on your Mac first. 2. Connect everything together with network cables (computer and soundboard can plug into a basic Netgear Prosafe GS108 if you don't need network access). 3. Launch Dante Controller and make sure Vi3000 is set to preferred master AND DON'T SKIP THIS: select "Enable Sync to External". This tells the Dante card to look at the Vi3000 as the master clock source for the Dante network. 4. On Vi3000 under Sync settings make sure INT is selected on the left, and Slave is selected on the right. The Dante card in the console is a "slave" to the master clock inside the console. The Dante card is technically "separate" from the console even though it's inside. 5. On the Mac with Logic, launch DVS and set the I/O to 64x64, latency to 10ms, and network interface to whatever connection you have to the network. NOTE: I strongly suggest if you don't have a physical network port on your Mac (most don't these days), you should use Apple's Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adaptor (if you have TB3) and then go into Apple's Thunderbolt 2 to ethernet adaptor. MOST other adaptors WILL NOT work with Dante. You've been warned. haha. 6. Hit Start in DVS 7. In Logic, start it up and set the audio interface to be Dante Virtual Soundcard, once that's done creating the recording file is a lot easier: 8. In Logic, create a new project, tell it to have 64 inputs and select "ascending inputs", and then tell it to output to Mono>1 with ascending Outputs. This will create a file that has 64 channels with 64 inputs and each channel will go out the corresponding output (1-64). I would save this as a template after you name your channels if you do the same thing week-to-week. 9. In Dante Controller, patch Vi3000 Outputs to your Mac's DVS, and then the Mac's DVS to Vi3000 Inputs. I suggest doing this one-to-one. This has digitally patched the 64 Dante outputs of the Vi3000 to the 64 inputs of Logic, and vice versa. 10. On the Vi3000, there's a switch that selects whether the console receives from the internal MADI or the internal Dante. It's the Dante/MADI switch under Settings. You'll want to make sure that's on Dante. 11. Now you need to route channels to Dante. Just about anything can be routed to Dante outputs (like the main LR for example), but for individual channels, I suggest doing it with the Direct Out feature. This is in the bottom (yellow) box section of each channel. MAKE SURE that the tap selector is set all the way to the left (pre processing) so that you're recording the channel raw. If you record the processing (or heaven forbid post-fader) then virtual soundcheck is useless. 12. Next you need to patch the returns from Logic to the channels. The Vi3000 has a handy feature in that all channels can have 2 inputs. I suggest having your normal "live" input be input 1, and input 2 be your virtual soundcheck input. By default the [F] button next to the [ISO] button flips between these 2 inputs. Go through all of your channels and patch Input 2 to whatever Dante channel you used the Direct Out to go to Logic. This way it's all 1-to-1. 13. Lastly, you can setup a snapshot to switch between Mic and Dante inputs. This snapshot effectively hits the [F] button on whatever channels you want. If you don't know how to do this, I suggest studying the Vi3000 manual and learning how to snapshots. Once you've recorded something, simply stop the recording, re-wind to where you want to play back, flip the input of the channel(s) you want to hear, and BOOM. Virtual Soundcheck. It's "simple" once you get it setup and tested. Especially if you figure out how to do the snapshot that flips the input on all of the channels. Hit me up if you need further explanation on anything.
I'm guessing that a lot of folks said something similar when they introduced electric guitars. ;) But in all seriousness, some bands use it as a crutch, some use it as a tool to expand what they're doing. I like to think we use it as the latter. Like all creative forms, it is subjective. :)
