Like many new churches, the River Community Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, lacks a permanent home for now. The 250 worshippers meet at a middle school auditorium every Sunday, setting up the sound gear for services and tearing it down each week. Tim Ake, a professional firefighter with the city, mans the mixing console and decided to buy a Yamaha IM8-32.
The church bought the console at Brooks Pro Sound, a local firm that services several area churches. “It's a wonderful mixer,” says owner Marvin Brooks. “It's clean. If you move a control on the console, like change the EQ, for instance, you can hear it. On lesser consoles, you turn the knob and don't hear that much difference.”
Ake supervises a group of three volunteers. “We saw features like the aux sends, for instance, which set the IM8 above all the others and it's got more capacity for down the road,” he says.
For now, the setup uses most of the IM8's inputs, but Ake bought the console with future expansion in mind. He says, “It's nice to have the extra channels we can dedicate to one singer or performer, especially when we're tearing down every week. This way we can keep the settings the same from week to week.”
He uses all eight sub groups that the IM8 provides and assigns all the singers their own group and, using the master mute feature, which shuts off all the inputs assigned to that bank, it really simplifies mixing, especially for the volunteers.
“After the singers are finished, we press one button and mute all the channels in the singers' bank,” says Ake. “It's an older school, so when people walk onstage you can hear each footstep. Since we mute the microphones until the performance actually begins, we eliminated that distraction.
Though Ake has no formal training as a sound technician, per se, he learned how to operate an audio console at the age of 16 at his former church, learning through hands-on experience, reading magazines and trawling the Internet for pertinent information.
“I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I am adept at using the equipment and understand how it operates,” he says. “We looked at everything that's out there and the IM8 was head and shoulders above the other stuff available and we feel like we got the best bang for our buck.”
