Running Waves on M7CL
About 6 months ago I was faced with the challenge of taking our sound to “The Next Level.” A typical weekend at our church consists of around 1000 people split up between 4 services. We have a full band as well as multiple singers leading worship.
The FOH board that we currently have is a Yamaha M7CL 48ch with a Allen & Heath 40ch analog board for monitor world. Our mains are a center cluster of EAW’s 3 ways and our subs are EAW’s dual 15’s on the floor.
I felt like our sound was at a level where equipment wise its as good as its going to get without replacing speakers or the M7CL. So we went with the route of adding Waves MultiRack.
We purchased 2 Dante cards for the board. A Mac Mini (i5 2.5 Ghz CPU with 4 gigs of ram) and Waves MultiRack with a couple of plugins. Once set up it did truly take our sound to the next level.
It also gave us the ability to do virtual sound checks and live multitrack recording. We run Tracks Live on a Mac Pro which we feed back to the board for virtual sound checks.
We are currently running 7-8 racks with 1-2 plugins on each Rack. Right now our racks are as follows.
- Kick Drum (API 550)
- Snare (API 550 and CLA-76)
- Drums Smash (All Kick and Toms are ran through this rack, Kramer PIE Compressor)
- Bass Guitar (C6, and CLA-76)
- Acoustic Guitar (C6, and Tru-Verb)
- Lead Vocal (C6, and CLA-76)
- Backup Vocals (C6, and CLA-76)
Its crazy how much these plugins have made a difference in our sound clarity and making the sound sound more full.
We do have a 3-5 year plan of replacing the M7CL with a new board and moving the M7CL to monitors but for now Waves has made a huge improvement to our sound and really not spending a ton to get there.
