The Belonging Co. Has New Belongings: SSL Live Consoles

Nashville, TN (September 18, 2024)—Nashville is known for its music and sound communities but it’s also a place that takes worshiping seriously. Perhaps that has something to do with the explosive growth of The Belonging Co., which over the last decades has grown from a handful of touring artists and musicians meeting in a basement to thousands gathering at the church’s three Nashville area locations.

Given the importance of audio in any house of worship—but especially in Nashville—the church recently worked with integration company Diversified to install a pair of Solid State Logic Live L650 mixing consoles at its main location just north of downtown Nashville.

That the church went with SSL desks may have been easily foretold. Lead pastors Henry and Alex Seeley, who relocated to Nashville from the couple’s native Australia in 2012, started the church; as it happens, Henry is a Grammy Award-winning mix engineer who, until several years ago, had an SSL 4000 G console in his home studio.

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Caleb Rhew, assistant audio director and one of several FOH engineers at the church, noted that with the SSL L650, “It was very clean right out of the gate. It was really nice to just push up the faders and go, ‘Oh, that sounds great,’ without having to add anything. So, we’ve tried to see what we can do just by pushing up faders and running a channel EQ and a channel compressor. It’s cleaned up a lot of things and has allowed us to hear the source material a lot more accurately.”

Andy Rushing, production director, added, “We bought two L650s and five SSL Network I/O SB 32.24 Dante Stageboxes, giving us a total of 72 inputs. Pro Tools is running at 48 kHz, the live sound system is at 96 kHz, and we do the sample rate conversion in the SSL Stagebox. SSL Live has superb Dante integration. All routing is controlled directly from the console and stored in the console’s showfile. SSL’s Dante workflow has been a huge plus for us.”

The church’s audio team was able to compare broadcast mixes made on the old FOH console and the new L650. “There was a lot more fidelity with the SSL and just a bigger sound,” said Daniel Bender, broadcast video director. “It was the same mixer, Caleb, and the gains were matched. The only differences were the pre’s and the console processing. It was very impressive.”

“Henry won a Grammy in 2015 with an SSL console, so there is an affinity with the sound of SSL,” said Tim Corder, vice president, Diversified, who has been working with the church for six years. “The thing that is unique about The Belonging Co. is that they treat every weekend as though there could be a special musical moment, and if that special moment happens, they want to be able to capture it and turn it around and release it. They also have one of the best-sounding broadcast streams, and that has been a consistent priority for the life of the church. So SSL’s heritage of recording and quality sonics is what really drove our whole conversation regarding the choice of a new console.”