Matt Woltjer presses a single button on a Stream Deck. Companion fires a MIDI program change. Waves SuperRack catches it and recalls a snapshot that puts Waves Tune in the key of C. Every vocal on the worship team is now pitched to the right key. SuperRack answers back down a second MIDI bus, and the Stream Deck lights up to show which key is armed.
Then he does it again from ProPresenter, with a macro, and the key changes to B without anyone touching the deck at all.
That is the first fifteen seconds of Matt’s walkthrough, embedded above. What follows is a tour of the rest of the rig: two Stream Decks, eight pages, ProPresenter, a Blackmagic ATEM switcher, two PTZ cameras, Lightkey, and an Allen & Heath SQ console, all driven from one instance of Bitfocus Companion.
But the part worth your fifteen minutes is not the rig. It is what Matt says at the end about how it got built.
What is actually on the surface
Matt, our Director of Integration, splits the work across two devices. The Stream Deck XL carries everything that is not audio: lighting cues, ProPresenter navigation, camera preview and program, the switcher, record and stream. The Stream Deck Plus handles the audio environment, with the key-change bank on its eight keys and knobs mapped to faders.
The XL’s home page is built on a single idea: everything a volunteer might need to touch on a Sunday morning, on one page. Hold any button on the top row for three seconds and you drop into the full page for that system, with the deeper controls a director would want. Press the page button and you are back on the operator page.
That structure is the whole design. The volunteer sees one page. The depth is there when someone needs it, and invisible when nobody does.
The key-change routing, in plain terms
This is the piece people will rewind. Each key button on the Plus sends a MIDI program change through Companion’s generic MIDI function. The trick is that you need two MIDI paths, not one, because sending and receiving on the same bus creates a loop.
Matt created two IAC Driver buses in Audio MIDI Setup on the Mac. Program changes go out to SuperRack on one bus. SuperRack sends its state back on the other, which is what tells Companion which button to light. On the SuperRack side, the snapshots are scoped so that the only thing changing is the Waves Tune plugin, on the channels that need it.
There is a chromatic button to bypass tuning entirely, a second bank for sharps and flats, and buttons that recall SQ scenes so the console follows along.
Two surfaces, one instance
A smaller detail that solves a real problem: running two Stream Decks off one Companion instance. Matt offsets the XL to the fourth column, so the Plus occupies the first three and the XL starts after it. Both surfaces live on the same page layout without colliding. The Plus is then restricted to the first two pages, because it has nothing on pages three through eight.
The last page is a sleep page. Leave the rig alone for five minutes and it goes to a set of logo screens. Press anything and it returns to where you were.
The part that matters
Matt built all of it in two days. Not two days off. Two days during which he was also reviewing job budgets, coordinating installs and scheduling crews. It happened in the gaps.
He is careful not to oversell how. He used Claude to do the repetitive programming: make all the page up and down buttons match, make lighting yellow and ProPresenter blue, build the other twelve key-change macros like this one. It got things wrong. He had to say things more than once. He had to know enough about what Companion could do to direct it at all.
What it removed was the busy work. As Matt puts it, building a layout like this is four hundred small repetitive decisions, and every one of them takes a click. There is no version of that which is fast.
The custom page icons are the tell. Bespoke artwork for a Stream Deck layout is the first thing that gets cut on a real project, because you have to get a Sunday ready. On this one it did not get cut. It got done in the gaps between two other conversations, and it is the reason the layout looks the way it does.
The bottleneck moved
Here is the line worth sitting with, and it is Matt’s, not ours:
The thing that made this a three week project in the past was never the knowledge. It was the labor. And the labor is just what got cheap.
How do I make a button do that? You could find the answer in a forum in ten minutes, and now you can just ask. What should my volunteers touch on a Sunday, and what should they never touch? Nobody can answer that for your room except you. It is not a technical question. It is a ministry question about who serves on your team and what they can carry.
Which means the barrier is no longer knowledge. It is taste, and knowing your people. You already have both.
What to do with this
You do not need eight pages. Five buttons that your team presses every single week is a real win, and you are the only person who knows which five.
Watch the walkthrough, then go build them. It can happen in the gaps of your week, the same way this did.
If you would rather have a system your volunteers can run start to finish without anyone building it in their spare time, that is what we do. See how we approach church AV networking and control, then apply at churchfront.com/apply and we will talk about your room.