“It's kind of a Christmas present. It's like, oh my gosh, I don't even know what to do with all those buttons. It was amazing!” Chris Nelson is the tech director at Providence Community Church in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. He’s describing his first experience with MA Lighting’s GrandMA3 command wing XT Lighting Console.
The MA Lighting's command wing XT has received the Church Production Road Tested Certification.
As part of our Church Production Road Test User Experience, MA Lighting sent Nelson the command wing XT for a test drive. He wasted no time getting started. “My first impressions out of the box were of a compact console, not a large footprint, but a very well-designed product. I thought everything felt fantastic as far as the encoders and the faders felt very durable, very reliable,” he says. “Plugging into an existing rig, I think we plugged in a network cable into our ArtNet nodes and everything was up and running. It has multiple physical DMX outputs. It has time code in video output and tons of flexibility on the back of it,” he says.
Nelson describes his church as a “very lively experience” in a five to 600-person auditorium single-site campus. “We love to have lots of visuals with the lighting. On our video screen, we take a lot of liberty with interjecting creativity.” He says the command wing XT allowed for all the creativity they needed. “By far, I think one of the coolest things about the MA console that we got to use was the amount of customizable control, physical input buttons, faders, and encoders. I think there's 40 on the left half alone of the console, and then you hit a button, you're on the second page of another 40 plus tons of programming buttons that you can use.”
The compact unit has full-size features like real-time control of 4,096 parameters, GrandMA's built-in innovative software, 12 motorized faders, and 16 customizable X keys that are all silent. One might think it would be hard for volunteers to operate, but Nelson says the opposite; the added features make it easier. “I was able to set up a show file on the command wing XT and lay it out in a way that was very volunteer friendly where they just had the two screens up and then the layout on the physical console,” he explains. “I walked them through 10 minutes of how to use it, and they were able to run with it.”
Nelson concludes the GrandMA3 command wing XT is a great value and would offer many different churches lots of flexibility. “I think the cool thing about it is for some churches that are fairly advanced with their lighting rig, you're not going to run into a feature set issue. But I think even for churches that are emerging or maybe they know they want to build a lighting rig or they have a basic lighting rig, it can be configured very friendly for volunteers. So, in that sense, I think this is a product that could scale for people.”
To see Chris Nelson’s story, watch this video.
