Over 160 channels. A choir that keeps growing. An orchestra that keeps growing. And on most Sundays, a volunteer at the front of house console.
That's the reality at Brentwood Baptist Church outside Nashville, and it's why we wanted to spend a day with their production team. Joel Hilsden, the church's Technical Director, and Darby Gilmore, their Production Systems Engineer, walked us through how they make a mix this big work for the people who run it every week. The full tour is in the video above. Here are the decisions that stood out.
The room and the system they mix into
The sanctuary is a large fan-shaped room that was renovated in 2023, with new acoustic paneling on the back walls, a new lighting system and a new PA. The PA is a d&b audiotechnik KSL system: ten boxes per side, six center subs, a center fill below the subs, outside hangs, and delays under and over the balcony.
When we asked why d&b over the other options, Joel's answer was simple: the church wanted a true stereo hang, and at that price point d&b was the preferred fit.
Front of house is a Lawo mc²36 MkII, a console designed for broadcast that is the smallest in Lawo's line. The church runs more than 160 channels through it.
1. Start from a mix, not from zero
Here's the part every church with volunteers will recognise. Three out of every four Sundays, a volunteer is mixing, and nobody hears the orchestra until the moment it plays live.
So Brentwood leans heavily on virtual soundcheck. The team builds the mix from recorded multitracks ahead of time, so when the orchestra starts the 9:30 prelude, a volunteer can bring the fader to unity and trust that what comes out is close. As Joel put it, with that many channels you have to start from something that's already mixed. Nobody can build it from zero on a Sunday morning.
2. Give volunteers a few big handles
A good starting point only helps if the console is easy to drive. With more channels than fader banks, the team lays the console out in flip layers: rhythm, drums, strings, woodwinds, brass, then choir, with spare inputs for whoever shows up with a ukulele.
The real tool is VCAs. Joel's tip for mixing a large orchestra and choir was "VCAs, big time." One VCA rides a whole section; a choir group lets a volunteer EQ or move the whole choir at once; all nine close-miked violins can be grabbed and treated as one. A volunteer works a few big handles instead of a hundred small ones.
3. Get it right at the source
The cleaner each microphone is, the less your volunteer has to fix.
Joel prefers the sound of section-miked orchestra, and for orchestra-only concerts that's what they do. But when the rhythm section and stage volume come in, section mics turn into "a tambourine mic," and the stage is too crowded to move the strings away from the noise. So on Sundays they close-mic: a kit of DPA 4099s on the violins, viola and cellos, a pair of DPAs in the piano, Shure SM81s on the woodwinds, and twelve Audix MicroBooms over the choir, four per section.
The detail that makes the DPAs work is placement. Keep them away from the F-hole, which Joel calls a feedback trap. Point them toward where the bridge meets the wood, about an inch off. That keeps the warmth and the bow sound without the harshness.
They also do as much processing as possible at the channel rather than the group. Heavy compression on a group pulls the whole section down when one mic pokes out. The string group gets mostly EQ and a high-threshold compressor that only catches a bad mic placement or a fader pushed by accident, so one mistake can't ruin the mix.
4. Ride the service
Brentwood runs three services, with choir and orchestra at the 9:30 and the 11. At the 8 a.m., without them, effects can sit higher. Once the choir mics open and the monitor wash comes back through the PA, the room gets bigger on its own, and that effects fader has to come down.
5. Take care of the stage
A great mix in the room doesn't matter much if the choir and orchestra can't hear themselves.
The choir monitors run from a second Lawo at stage left. The choir hears no foldback of their own mics: they get piano for pitch (compressed hard so the transients don't spill into the room), lead vocal, and a strong part singer when there is one, through d&b monitors rigged above the stage facing the loft.
That monitor console is the same Lawo mc²36 as front of house, with its processing core built into the surface, so it drops in anywhere. Backstage, Darby showed us a KLANG:konductor making 3D in-ear mixes, with the orchestra submixed so no musician has to manage every orchestra mic. The orchestra gets four mixes (strings, winds, brass and percussion) on Sennheiser in-ears, the vocals run on Shure PSM 1000, and the wireless is Shure Axient Digital. Getting the orchestra into in-ears took time. What changed minds, Darby said, was realizing it was the only way they'd hear the click.
Takeaways for your church
None of this depends on having 160 channels. It works at 16.
- Start with a mix, not from zero.
- Give your volunteers a few simple handles.
- Get it right at the source: mic choice and placement.
- Make sure your musicians can hear themselves.
As Joel said, it's one thing to build a mix the way you like it. It's another to build a strategy for a team of volunteers. That strategy is what lets them serve with confidence every week.
If you're planning a new sound system, or want the one you have to be easier for your team to run, we'd love to help.