I’ve planted two churches and hired multiple venues. That’s twenty years of having to loading and in loading church equipment into vans or trailers. In our first plant, when we were launching with 50 people, we had a PA guy who got us to buy kit that will last! So we got a multicore, mixing desk, amplifiers, speakers and monitors. It cost a fortune and needed a trailer and an hour to set up. When you are planting that hour is better spent meeting visitors and welcoming them rather than playing with wires. Of course the kit which was way more powerful than we needed didn’t last long enough for us to grow to the size that needed that much kit!
In our second plant we got a Yamaha Stagepas 300 system which came with everything you needed and tucked inside the speakers. It took 10mins to put up and was plenty good enough for us to grow to 75-100people. We only needed to add to it when we got a few more instruments. That kind of setup is awesome for small churches in hired venues – you could have a couple of mics, a keyboard and guitar. The image on the left is the latest model Stagepas 400 which is slightly more powerful in a package with all you will need. It’s available on Amazon.com* and Amazon.co.uk* and Amazon.com.au
As we got bigger we needed a mixer for more channels as our band got bigger. This required us to get a multicore, which was big, heavy and expensive.
The dream kit!
We’ve just invested in a Behringer X Air XR18 Tablet-Controlled Digital Mixer and it is awesome! The big mixer flight case and heavy multicore have gone, replaced by a small flight case containing the digital mixer, a router and our wireless microphone receivers. The sound guys now mix from an Android tablet. The mixer costs £389 ($589). The unit has 16 balanced XLR/Jack inputs, 2 more jack inputs. It has 6 aux outputs – so you could do different monitor mixes and 2 main outputs. The app available for iOS and Android is simple to do the basics and has plenty of advanced settings for the experts. We love it already!
Along with the mixer we bought a 4U flight case to mount it and the wireless receivers. All in we paid around £490 and in terms of storage space and time saved it is well worth it. Less trailingcables around for people to trip over too.
The Behringer XR18 is available on..
Amazon.co.uk* Amazon.com* Amazon.com.au
